As the new “hybrid” board of education meets, it will be the fourth board under which Pedro Martinez has served, under one and the same contract, as CEO of Chicago Public Schools. The Lori Lightfoot board that gave him the present contract is gone, the second board resigned rather than fire him and face a lawsuit, the third replacement board did try to fire him, but he obtained a temporary restraining order to keep him in place. Now a fourth board has to decide whether to keep up the legal fight or surrender.
There is no “law,” or “statute,” or public policy that keeps Martinez in place — it’s only one more of those private contracts that allow private parties to act above the law, or the wishes of elected officials. The current contract started out tamely enough in 2021, but then Martinez and the old board amended it in December 2022, a bit over two months before the first round of the mayoral election. Lightfoot, the incumbent, lost, but it no longer mattered. The new amended contract made it virtually impossible to fire him, except if the board can find cause by a trial-type proceeding, which would paralyze CPS and for which the appeals could go on for years. Otherwise, without cause he can continue as CEO for six months even after being fired.
This is in a clause not authorized by the school code and is in effect a license to disrupt the education of the children by political guerrilla warfare. It also gives him leverage to ask for even more than the 20 weeks of severance, just to end the standoff.
There is no authority for this contract under the school code. If anything, it is an attempt to contract out of the school code and allow Martinez to have greater power than the board. Some say the first board should never have given him this contract. Well, Martinez should not have bargained for it. Nor should he be trying to enforce it, against the second, third and fourth boards that followed.
I wish to make clear that I am a union-side lawyer and occasionally represent the Chicago Teachers Union. I am in favor of contracts, and against employment at will, for the employees I represent. But on two occasions, I have sued to challenge the Chicago parking meters deal because the principle is the same in that it hamstrung future mayors — private parties should not use private contracts to insulate themselves from representative government, now or in the future. This principle should apply whether you love Martinez or hate him, or love CTU or hate the union.
Simply put, private parties have no right to take advantage of the government, and when no one is watching enter contracts that usurp powers that belong to the public. Martinez is not an ordinary civil servant, or a tenured teacher, or a janitor who happens to be in a union. He is a policymaker subject to elected officials, and like any policymaker, he is an employee at will, to be fired at any time for any reason by officers who ran for office with different policies and different values.
The contract that Martinez bargained for and now seeks to litigate is intended to change the form of government, set out in the school code, where the CEO is just an employee at will. If there were a need to find cause to fire Martinez, his attempt to enforce this unlawful contract ought to be cause enough.
Let’s pay him his severance, but this use of an illegal contract should be seen for what it is — an attempt by Martinez and others to show that under the current mayor, Brandon Johnson, our city is ungovernable. It is the duty of the new board to take back its power under state law to run our public schools.
Tom Geoghegan is a lawyer at Despres, Schwartz and Geoghegan in Chicago and author of the book “The History of Democracy Has Yet to Be Written.”
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