In February, the telehealth company , including clinicians who worked directly with students and families, leaving about 500 employees. 

The company lost one of its biggest customers, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, last year. It shortened its contract with the Chicago Public Schools because of “challenges securing funding,” a spokeswoman said. And several districts across the country have also either ended their business with Hazel or have contracts that expire later this year. 

they are “restructuring” the company to put it in a better position as it pursues more stable sources of funding, like billing Medicaid and private insurance, now that the federal relief funds some districts used have expired. Company spokeswoman Emilie Fetterley said no additional layoffs are expected “at this time” and that many states and districts plan to renew their contracts. 

But according to internal memos, by a news outlet covering mental health, CEO Iyah Romm said the company was losing “too much money” to meet its goals. Since the expiration of the Los Angeles contract, the company has even, at times, absorbed the cost of services, Fetterley said. 

Some say the company faces a difficult road ahead.

There is a “massive need” to address student mental health and behavior issues, said Adam Newman, co-founder of Tyton Partners, a consulting firm focused on the education sector. Until the relief funds ran out, “there were enough dollars in the system for schools and districts to find ways to underwrite these types of programs. But the risk has always been: What’s the durable funding model?”

In Missouri, the Ferguson-Florissant district, outside St. Louis, ended its business with Hazel last year.

“They were great to work with,” said spokeswoman Onye Hollomon. Hazel served about 2,000 students in the district, which used COVID relief funds to pay for the program. “Once that phased out, we had to make that cut.”

Los Angeles spent more than $28 million in one year to make Hazel available to the county’s 80 districts, according to GovSpend, a data company tracking payments to government agencies. It funded its deal with the company by tapping a $389 million . Between March 2022 and May 2024, 804 schools in the county referred 9,337 students for services, according to data Hazel provided to the county. Of those, 4,162 students received at least one visit, with students participating in an average of six visits. Fetterley said once a student is referred to Hazel, parents don’t always follow through with a visit or may seek help elsewhere.

In addition to taking a loss on services for some students since last year, Hazel has relied on billing insurance, including Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, and contracts with individual districts. Leaders are currently negotiating contracts with districts for next school year. 

Hazel is also one of eight providers approved for a new program that allows 700 districts throughout California to be reimbursed for services by Medi-Cal or private insurers. It participates in a similar in Iowa, and in Nevada, the Clark County School District uses Medicaid funds to pay for Hazel services, but that ends in June. A spokesperson said the board has not yet decided whether to renew it.

‘Made their mark’

Telehealth programs, delivered through schools, were expanding long before the pandemic. They offer families convenient access to a remote doctor or therapist while preventing students from missing school for appointments that often turn into full-day absences. Hazel Health, founded in 2015 by health care executive Josh Golomb, was part of that growth. 

“Telehealth providers have made their mark in school-based health care,” said Nirmita Panchal, a senior policy manager at KFF, a nonprofit focusing on health policy. “They eliminate transportation barriers, where students may not be able to physically get to a provider.”

During the pandemic, when learning and work suddenly went virtual, telehealth programs for schools . of school-based health centers showed that during the 2020-21 school year, more than 80% of respondents offered telehealth services, up from 19% in 2016-17. 

The financial landscape has since changed. A lot of districts are now cutting budgets to close deficits. GovSpend, which doesn’t capture all district spending, shows a decline in payments to , a similar company, since 2023, while , another virtual mental health provider, saw a more stable influx of funds from 2024 to 2025. 

Among providers, however, Hazel Health stands out. The company, which serves 6,000 schools in 21 states, initially focused on primary health care, with physicians prescribing over-the-counter medications for routine symptoms like stomach pain or headaches. In 2021, the company broadened its model to provide mental health services and respond to “rising unmet student needs and limited access to care,” Fetterley said. 

In Florida’s Duval County schools, Brittany Beimourtusting reached out to Hazel last school year when she was going through a divorce. Her middle child, she said, was having trouble adjusting.

“It was a single-parent household all of a sudden, and I thought, ‘How am I supposed to get him to get help because I think he could use therapy,’ ” she said. The provider, she said, met with him about five times and helped him open up about what he was feeling. “It was definitely worth it.”

But when Superintendent Christopher Bernier looked for ways to save the district some money last year, a $1.4 million payment to Hazel was on the list.

‘A connected system’ 

Four years ago, the startup’s future looked bright.

It attracted over $50 million from investors, including Fiore Ventures, founded by Walton family heiress Carrie Walton Penner. As recently as last year, Hazel was still eyeing growth. It made two acquisitions, including , which offers family therapy, to further expand mental health services. 

“Together, we are building a connected system that supports children from their classrooms to their kitchen tables,” wrote Andrew Post, then ±áČčłú±đ±ô’s president, in October. But he has since resigned, writing this month that it was time to turn to the “next chapter” in his career.

±áČčłú±đ±ô’s was supposed to run through the end of 2027. Now it will end on June 30. Still, district officials said the layoffs have had no impact on the services students receive. In a pilot program that began in March 2025, the district made mental health services available to 84 high schools. As of January, 420 students had taken advantage of the program, the district said.

In December, Destiny Singleton, the honorary student member of the Chicago Board of Education, told members that students don’t always feel comfortable talking to school counselors about personal issues because those staff members are often focused on academic performance and preparing for college. That’s why talking to an outsider can be helpful. But she added that students at the district’s larger high schools are often unaware that Hazel is even an option.

Some Chicago parents, however, are wary of Hazel and say families don’t always know what they’ve agreed to when they consent to allowing their child to meet with a Hazel provider. In to Chicago district leaders last year, student privacy advocates said they were concerned about whether Hazel properly secures students’ private information. 

The company’s acquisition of Little Otter, , raises red flags because Rebecca Egger, its CEO, formerly worked for Palantir, a federal contractor known for using AI to assist the Department of Homeland Security in its . 

In a response to Chicago officials, Romm, the CEO, wrote that Hazel does not “sell, share, or use student data for any commercial purpose,” and that it “does not have any relationship with Palantir, commercial or strategic.”

Fetterley, the company spokeswoman, also said Hazel is in the early stages of rolling out chatbots to “simplify administrative tasks like scheduling for parents and clinicians,” but that AI will never be a “substitute for our human providers.”

Even so, some districts see a much higher demand for in-person rather than virtual clinicians. In Broward County, Florida, where Hazel provides medical services, but not mental health support, 179 students completed a telehealth visit between August and December last year, according to district data. Over that same time period, more than 134,000 students visited a school clinic.

“Parents want nurses,” Cynthia Dominique, chair of the District Advisory Council and a parent in the district, told the school board in March. As a nurse practitioner, she questioned how a provider working remotely can diagnose and treat most common symptoms, like congestion or a sore throat.

“I can’t ask the registrar from the front desk, ‘Can you look in the kid’s mouth and tell me what you see?’ ” she told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “They don’t know what they’re looking for.”

For district leaders, however, ±áČčłú±đ±ô’s ability to keep kids from missing school provided an effective selling point.

During a 2023 meeting, Duval County School Board Member Darryl Willie said the program had saved the district 4,000 “classroom hours” during the 2021-22 school year.

“We’re talking about making sure we’re focused on reading, writing and math,” he said. “The only way we can do that is if students are in school, in classrooms, sitting in seats.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Fifteen-year-old Josiah Owens is considering owning a gun one day because he wants protection. He doesn’t want to suffer the same fate as his best friend, whom he says survived a shooting a couple of years ago.

Owens, a sophomore at Disney II Magnet High School on the Northwest Side, was one of 23 Chicago teens ages 13 to 17 who took part in a recent weeklong program to learn about the risks of gun ownership and how to share those statistics with peers through a flashy social media campaign. He joined after a nudge from his mother, who wanted him to “build connections” with other Chicago kids.

The program, which took place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. each week day of spring break, was led by nonprofit Project Unloaded in partnership with nonprofit After School Matters, which paid the teen participants $150.

Since 2023, the organization has run a six-week summer program where teens get more time to research gun violence statistics and create catchy social media videos. But the spring break program was a first for Project Unloaded, according to Nina Vinik, founder and president of Project Unloaded.

Project Unloaded focuses on social media creation because that’s where “young people today are going to find information,” Vinik said.

“All of our programs combine firearm risk education for young people with social media skill building, so we’re effectively teaching young people how to use social media as a way to make positive change in their communities,” she said.

Last year, 18.6% of the victims of fatal and non-fatal shootings in Chicago were 19 years old or younger, almost one percentage point higher than the year before but a drop from about 20% in 2023, according to .

A 2022 survey of 989 Chicago parents found that , ranging from hearing gunshots to being shot. One-fifth of those children experienced mental health symptoms as a result.

Last week during Chicago Public Schools’ spring break, Owens and his peers showed up to the After School Matters offices in the Kilbourn Park neighborhood and learned some gun ownership statistics: People with a gun at home are twice as likely to be killed, according to According to people who owned a gun were four times more likely to be shot during an assault compared with those who didn’t have a gun on them.

The teens then learned how to create effective social media campaigns that direct people to a website with more information on studies related to gun ownership. They spent a day with staff from iO improv theater to “come out of their shells,” said Olivia Brown, associate director of youth engagement at Project Unloaded who led the spring break program. They also watched videos from other content creators to learn that a good video has a hook, a main message, and then a call to action, Brown said.

“They were like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of like writing a persuasive essay,’” Brown said, who agreed with them. “It’s like, you got to get your reader, aka your viewer, on your side.”

The teens practiced shooting videos with their phones. Then, Project Unloaded’s digital strategist helped them create their final videos with his equipment.

On the Friday of spring break, the last day of their program, the teens presented their videos in groups of three or four. They walked up to the front of the room, some appearing shy, facing their peers and invited guests who included content creators.

Their videos, which lasted less than 30 seconds, will be added to an ongoing advertising campaign created by last summer’s cohort of teens, called

One group presented a video showcasing a fictional “Totally Safe News” network, where one of the participants played a correspondent who initially says owning a gun offers safety. Then, the screen bleeps out, and the correspondent fixes the newscast to say owning a gun doubles the risk of homicide.

“Facts don’t care about opinions,” the correspondent says.

Owens’ group made a video where the camera toggles between the teens playing a video game while they discuss the statistics associated with owning a gun.

In another group’s video, one of the teens says he owns a gun, and his peer walks up and puts a clown wig on him. The audience in the room laughed.

Vinik emphasized that they don’t “tell any young person what to do or what to think or what not to do,” rather, they want to arm them with information “to make the best decision that they can for themselves.”

The program did appear to change some of the teens’ minds: Project Unloaded representatives said they saw a 30% drop among the participants who are interested in owning a gun. One of them is Makayla Mason, 16, who’s a junior at Lane Tech High School, who said she considered buying a gun when she gets older.

“I wouldn’t even want to get one anymore,” she said.

Owens, who wants to be a boxer when he gets older, said the social media skills he learned could be useful in helping to promote himself one day.

As for gun ownership? The program didn’t change his mind: He’s still considering buying a gun one day.

“Now I just know the risks of it, which is good,” he said.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

If you’ve been following the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, you’ve likely heard of Democrats’ calls for greater officer accountability, including banning face masks and mandating body cameras and publicly displayed IDs. For my latest story, I dig into a lesser-known demand: barring federal immigration agents from Head Start, child care and pre-K classrooms.

That was once standard practice but since President Donald Trump rescinded a rule last year shielding so-called sensitive locations from enforcement actions, those who provide education and care to the youngest learners report harrowing encounters with immigration officers. I’m a staff reporter covering for Mark this week and I spoke to several of those folks in Illinois, which was hit with the administration’s Operation Midway Blitz last fall.

In the news

The latest in ongoing FBI investigation into L.A. schools’ failed AI chatbot deal: A January 2023 meeting invite obtained by Âé¶čŸ«Æ· suggests senior staff were consulting with AllHere principals at district headquarters five months before the contract was approved. It also calls into question statements by schools chief Alberto Carvalho that he had no involvement in selecting the company represented by his close friend. | 

• Carvalho issued his first statement after an FBI raid on his home and office. The high-profile school leader, who’s been placed on paid leave, denied any wrongdoing. | 
  
• Sources say grand jury subpoenas have been issued seeking records from the Miami-Dade County Public Schools’s inspector general and a fundraising foundation overseen by Carvalho while he was the Miami superintendent. | 

Kids’ internet safety bill moves to House vote. Despite Democrats’ complaints of a “giant loophole” for Big Tech, a bill requiring online platforms to implement safeguards for minors has advanced to a full House vote. It would provide “easy-to-use parental tools” and limit addictive design features.Ìę|Ìę

A former Lakewood, Colorado, school security supervisor will serve 18 years to life in prison for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old student on and off school grounds over the course of two years. “His job was to ensure the safety of students,” said a deputy district attorney. “Instead 
 [he] manipulated a sixteen-year-old into sexual acts.” | 

As federal civil rights complaints languish, parents of disabled students look to states. Colorado lawmakers unanimously approved a bill that would expand the state education department’s ability to hear complaints tied to students’ disability accommodations. They’re part of a growing number of legislators nationwide who want their states to step in amid federal staffing cuts and mounting unresolved civil rights cases. | 

• Go deeper: For Decades, the Feds Were the Last, Best Hope for Special Ed Kids. What Happens Now?Ìę|Ìę

Virginia has passed a bill barring schools from teaching Jan. 6 as a “peaceful protest.” Instead, it would be presented as “an unprecedented, violent attack on U.S. democratic institutions, infrastructure, and representatives for the purpose of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.”  | 

Private school choice but not for everyone. Texas has excluded about two dozen Islamic schools from its new $1 billion voucher program for allegedly being linked to terrorist groups, a decision that has led to a lawsuit and claims of anti-Muslim discrimination.| 

A $7 million tech effort meant to make HawaiÊ»i schools safer by equipping teachers and principals with panic buttons and mobile apps never got off the ground. Two years after launching, only one school in the state has panic buttons — and it’s not using them.| 

ICYMI @The74

Emotional Support

Jebby, my handsome cockapoo, is very excited to hang up his jacket — and his booties — and sniff the spring air. 

For those of us who work in schools, this isn’t a surprise. It is simply the data catching up to what we see every day: Our children are struggling, and too many are not getting the support they need.

Across the country, young people are facing unprecedented levels of . This is true for children of every background. But as with nearly every social challenge in America, in low-income communities of color like the one my school serves on Chicago’s South Side. Families here are more likely to face housing instability, food insecurity, community violence and untreated trauma — and they are less likely to have easy access to high-quality mental health care.

When behavioral health needs go unmet, the consequences ripple far beyond the child. We see it when students can’t concentrate, regulate their emotions or trust adults. We see it in . We see it in teachers stretched to their limits and families overwhelmed by crises that could have been prevented with earlier support. Mental health is not separate from learning; it is a prerequisite for it. As I tell my team, children cannot learn if they are not safe, warm, dry, fed and well.

The recent report also makes something else clear: Families are being asked to carry more and more of the financial burden. Out-of-pocket spending on children’s behavioral health care is growing at more than twice the rate of other health care costs, increasing by an average of 6.4% each year. Families with a child receiving behavioral health care are far more likely to experience severe financial strain. In practice, this means that getting help for a child increasingly depends on whether a family can afford it.

That is how a two-tier mental health system takes root. Families with money can access private therapy and specialists. Families without it are left to wait, to ration care or to reach the system only when their child is in crisis. While the study does not break down spending by race or income, it’s clear that in a country where wealth and healthcare access are deeply unequal, rising behavioral health costs will hit Black and low-income families the hardest.

That is why schools like mine have become something they were never designed to be: frontline providers of mental health care.

At , a kindergarten through eighth grade public school on Chicago’s South Side, 28% of our students receive school-based mental health services. We partner with organizations like , offer virtual coaching through and employ multiple, full-time social workers because our students need these supports to succeed.

These services are not extras; they are as essential as textbooks and teachers. But providing them requires tradeoffs, and too often schools are forced to choose between academic programming and mental health care.

School-based services work because they eliminate the barriers that keep so many families from accessing help. There is no need to take time off work, find transportation or navigate an unfamiliar health system. Students receive support in a place they already know and trust. Problems are identified earlier, before they escalate into emergencies that lead to hospitalizations, school removals or long-term harm. In communities where mental health providers are scarce or unaffordable, schools have become the most reliable point of access.

But this role is not sustainable without public investment. Schools should not be propping up a broken healthcare system with education dollars.

If our leaders are serious about equity, they must fully fund school-based behavioral health services, especially in high-need communities. That means investing in counselors, social workers, psychologists and strong partnerships with community providers. It means creating stable, ongoing funding streams rather than short-term grants that disappear just as programs take root. And it means ensuring that Medicaid and other insurers reimburse schools directly for the care they provide, so schools are not forced to subsidize health care out of classroom budgets.

The data make clear that children’s behavioral health care has become a central part of what it takes for young people to thrive. As long as access to that care depends on a family’s income or ZIP code, the gap between those who get help and those who do not will continue to grow. Schools like Great Lakes Academy are doing everything we can to fill that gap. With the right public investment, schools can ensure that every child — no matter their race or family income — has the support they need to learn, heal, and succeed.

The election of a progressive mayor who has said he wants to end mayoral control of New York City schools might seem like a bellwether.

The next largest school systems, Los Angeles and Miami-Dade County, have been run by elected boards for years. Chicago is transitioning to a fully elected board after decades under mayoral control.

But don’t .

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani hasn’t laid out clear plans, and his references to “co-governance” could mean a lot of things, including an ongoing role for the mayor.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, another progressive, supported a when she ran in 2021, but once she was in office.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teachers union organizer, has in support of union priorities.

And in Indianapolis, some community groups are in an increasingly fractured school system.

Many large cities have repeatedly overhauled their school governance of the previous model. Now a new set of existential threats — declining enrollment, looming school closures and layoffs, persistent academic challenges, and threats from the Trump administration — are reviving conversations about who can claim to exercise legitimate power over schools.

Who gets to make decisions on behalf of students and families feels particularly high stakes in this moment.

Yet there is little evidence that voters consistently prioritize student outcomes at the ballot box, whether they’re voting for mayors or school board members. Nor is there strong evidence that any particular system consistently delivers better results for students, better financial management, or more responsive leadership.

“It’s like getting dirty and changing clothes and expecting to smell good without taking a bath,” said Jonathan Collins, a professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “That’s what you’re doing when you change your governance structure.”

School closures put focus on who makes decisions

Education reform policies such as expanding school choice, closing low-performing schools, and welcoming charter schools have been supported by both mayors and elected school boards, sometimes under threat of state takeover. Those changes have reshaped communities in complicated ways.

New schools proliferated, and students got more opportunities. At the same time, the connections between neighborhoods and schools have frayed, competition for students and funding is fiercer, and multiple entities are now responsible for school oversight. These new realities are testing old ways of running schools.

In Indianapolis, the mayor already authorizes charter schools independently from Indianapolis Public Schools, which is run by an elected board. than district-run schools. Legislation from earlier this year that would have failed, but a state-created advisory group, chaired by Mayor Joe Hogsett, is charged with figuring out how city schools should share buildings and transportation services.

The Indianapolis Local Education Alliance is also considering proposals that would in school governance, including appointing most or all of the board.

Historically, groups associated with education reform have . Yet the Mind Trust, an influential pro-charter nonprofit that supported an appointed board in the past, hasn’t taken a position yet. Several potential Indianapolis mayoral candidates for 2027 are charter skeptics and supporters of an elected board.

Cleveland, where , is grappling with similar challenges.

As in Indianapolis, a large share of the district’s school-age children attend charter or private schools after decades under the , and enrollment in district schools has plummeted. Supporters of mayoral control sometimes , but Mayor Justin Bibb’s is causing some community members to demand a greater voice.

reported an exchange at a recent community meeting between Bibb and teacher Sarah Hodge.

“Are you gonna go with us on the plan to make sure that the voters are re-enfranchised to vote for their school board?” Hodge said. Bibb responded that voters can seek a new system if they wish, but he has full confidence in his appointed board and in schools CEO Warren Morgan.

The ability to push ahead with a school closure plan is one of the benefits of mayoral control, said Aaron Churchill, Ohio research director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right think tank. He contrasted Cleveland with Columbus, where the elected school board has moved more slowly in response to many of the same pressures.

“They’re controversial, they’re hard to do, and it does take leadership,” Churchill said. And there is still a democratic check on the process. People vote for the mayor, he said, and most people know who their mayor is — unlike their school board members.

Hodge has a very different view. “It’s not bold to upset the entire city,” she said in an interview.

She believes an elected school board would listen to parents and ultimately come up with a better plan for what she agrees are necessary closures.

Hodge is working with a small group of other teachers and activists to . But Ohio’s Republican trifecta state government is unlikely to go along willingly.

Hodge and other Cleveland activists have watched conservative groups like Moms for Liberty exert their influence on school boards. She wonders why people in Cleveland have fewer rights.

“If the people of Cleveland want to make an idiotic decision, that’s our right,” she said. “Since when do legislatures get to tell people, ‘You don’t get to vote. You’re too terrible to make decisions for yourself?’”

Voters often don’t care much about test scores

If mayoral control of schools is undemocratic, elected school boards raise their own questions about representation.

Most school board members are elected by small numbers of voters who don’t have children themselves and who aren’t . Once in office, they , surveys show.

Vladimir Kogan, a political science professor at Ohio State University, said that’s because voters don’t give them any incentive to do so.

Voters in school board elections might care about home values, taxes, jobs, or “symbolic virtue signaling that they are [on] team red and team blue,” Kogan said, before they care about how well schools are serving students.

School board elections are one of the few places parents can pull on the levers of power, said Keri Rodrigues, a Boston parent and president of the National Parents Union, an advocacy group. But they can turn out to be “democracy in name only.”

It doesn’t have to be that way, said Scott Levy, author of “Why School Boards Matter.” Many school board members would benefit from more training, including on how to understand academic data and budgets.

“If you look at education reform efforts, you can find every permutation except investing in school boards,” he said.

But if school boards don’t spend enough time on schooling, it’s not clear that mayors who do reap big benefits.

Kogan points to former District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty. Public opinion polls at the time showed under his controversial appointed chancellor, Michelle Rhee. But he : that accompanied the overhaul of D.C. schools.

“Reformers have a wrong theory of change about mayoral control,” Kogan said. “The idea is that mayors are more visible, and it’s easier to hold them accountable. That assumes that voters care about academics.”

Progressive mayors want a role in schools

Fights over who gets to control schools often reflect racial and political divisions. Predominantly white business interests, Black- and Latino-led community groups, and teachers unions wrestle for influence. Republican legislatures try to control Democrat-led cities.

Mayoral control spread in the 1990s and 2000s as white flight and shrinking tax bases undermined school systems. Mayors, the thinking went, could elevate the importance of education, marshal resources, and insulate governance from the influence of teachers unions.

Some of these political assumptions have eroded as voters choose more left-leaning mayors.

In last year’s — held amid a that — the mayor’s union-backed allies picked up only four of the 10 elected seats. But with 11 appointees on the 21-member board until 2027, Johnson still controls the school board.

During recent union contract negotiations, to hire more staff and cover a larger share of pension costs, which district leaders feared would be financially unsustainable. The , not the board, to .

Wu, Boston’s progressive mayor, became a firm believer in mayoral control once she was in office. During a , a caller reminded Wu that the idea of an elected school board “got more votes than you.”

Wu pointed to frequent superintendent turnover and the recent threat of state takeover to argue against the idea.

“We need to have a focus on stabilizing and getting our school facilities up to date and mental health supports and some of the academic changes that we’re making,” Wu said.

Voters haven’t penalized Wu — she .

New York parents, community groups want more say

Mayoral control in New York City is up for renewal in 2026. If Mamdani goes to Albany and advocates for less authority, he’ll be the first New York mayor to do so.

When Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman, successfully lobbied for mayoral control in 2002, people were concerned not just about student achievement but basic safety. Some of the city’s local community boards, which ran 32 regional school districts, were corrupt or dysfunctional.

Bloomberg gained the sole ability to appoint the chancellor and the majority of the city’s school board. He adopted a that included charter school expansion and greater school accountability. Test scores and other metrics improved. New York City represented a “victory lap for mayoral control,” said Collins, the Columbia professor.

But Bloomberg also introduced Lucy Calkins’ now-discredited . Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, who was elected on a public safety platform, — but the rollout . Now Mamdani, who ran on affordability, may give schools and teachers more autonomy.

“That whiplash is a real problem,” said Jonathan Greenberg, a Queens parent and member of the Education Council Consortium, a coalition of parent leaders. “So much of the really deep-seated changes we think need to happen take more than two years or more than four years.”

Mayoral control , with the school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy, expanding and exerting more independence.

Finding the right balance for an exceptionally large and complex school system may not be easy. The coalition is proposing a short extension of mayoral control — but with the mayor no longer appointing the majority of school panel members.

Greenberg hopes that policy experts can help the city design a system that allows for community control and a healthy central system that can do things at scale.

Low voter turnout in both mayoral and school board elections should be treated like a crisis, Collins said. A better system would allow for more meaningful participation, and not just at the ballot box.

Unless more people are engaged, Collins said, “there’s going to be a small fraction of people who decide who serves, and the people who are serving are going to be disconnected from the true needs of the folks who are sending their kids to school.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

In late August, Philadelphia Public Schools and its teachers union narrowly avoided a strike with an agreement that included 3% annual raises. But weeks later, the district had to seek permission to borrow up to $1.5 billion to help cover the cost of the contract and other expenses.

Districts in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Baltimore County had to renegotiate teacher contracts this summer after budget shortfalls left them without enough funding for promised raises. And Chicago Public Schools approved raises in a four-year union contract in April while staring down a $734 million deficit, before closing the gap as the school year began.  

Debt has grown steadily for U.S. public schools, from $415 billion in 2013 to more than $586 billion in 2023, according to the latest available. Philadelphia and Chicago were among the nation’s reporting debts exceeding revenues in 2023.

In March, the Philadelphia district adopted a $4.6 billion budget that reflects a slated to reach $466 million in 2027 and $774 million in 2030. Its three-year contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which represents 14,000 educators, counselors and paraprofessionals, depended on from the state. But more than two months after the deadline for passing a budget, state lawmakers are at an , delaying funding to pay for the contract and other operating expenses. Michael Herbstman, Philadelphia’s chief financial officer, said the $1.5 billion in borrowing will help the cash flow problem.

“The one caveat on that is this does cost us a significant amount,” he said. “The state budget impasse is adding about $15 million to what we will incur in interest costs to borrow — that’s where it hits our budget.”

Experts say declining enrollment, coupled with the expiration of federal pandemic relief funds, have taken a toll on school budgets across the nation. The Philadelphia school district lost from the 2014-15 school year to 2024-25.

Chicago Public Schools is in the same boat. The third-largest school district had more than in 2000. This year’s reported sits at 316,224. The was delayed this year by efforts to close the $734 million deficit, which included a $175 million payment the city expects for a pension fund reimbursement. For months, district officials and school board members debated whether to address the gap by paying the city or taking out a short-term loan.

During that time, the district considered delaying raises included in a $1.5 billion Chicago Teachers Union contract that was approved in April —  until union President Stacy Davis Gates threatened legal action.

“Contracts are not optional documents,” Davis Gates in a letter to the school board. “They are covenants that provide security to the district’s employees, promises to the district’s students and labor peace for the city as a whole.”

Chicago Public Schools approved a $10.25 billion budget in August that included a and other refinancing to close the budget gap. The district decided against a short-term loan and will move forward with the only if it receives extra revenue.

The district told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· that it balanced the budget to ensure it could “fully meet its obligations related to wages, staffing and programming, as outlined in its labor agreements.”

In Baltimore County, the school district had to go back to the bargaining table with its teachers union this summer after it ran out of money for raises. 

In 2023, the district had approved annual pay boosts for 9,000 members of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County , according to reporting from . Educators received a 3% raise the first year, but when federal COVID relief funds decreased and the the district’s request for more money, officials rescinded the 5% bump that had been scheduled for July 1.

In May, teachers rallied before and after school, demanding “promises made should be promises kept.” The district offered a 1.5% raise but the union rejected it, leading to an impasse before the two parties in July on 3.05%. Part of the increase took effect in September, while the rest will start in January.

“We know the impact of high-quality educators on student success,” the union said in a June 6 . “When we fight for what we’ve been promised, we do so to keep our veteran educators, to keep our early and mid-career educators, and to continue to compete for new educators to come here.”

In Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools from its board of supervisors in January to cover raises that were promised in a union contract, but it received less than half of the amount.

The Fairfax Education Unions’ collective bargaining agreement approved in January was its first in nearly 50 years. It included a for its 27,500 members starting July 1. The county budget shortfall prompted the district to for this school year. Future pay increases will be subject to local government funding.

“The board of supervisors’ refusal to address existing issues and triangulating political interests enables persistent underfunding of [Fairfax County],” the union said in a . “[The board] ignored our input and decided teachers, bus drivers, custodians and educational staff deserve remarkably lower compensation than all other public employees.”

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers declined to comment for this story. Unions in Chicago, Fairfax County and Baltimore County did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Trump administration says it will withhold some federal funding from Chicago Public Schools over an initiative to improve outcomes for Black students and guidelines allowing transgender students to play sports and use facilities based on the gender with which they identify.

Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary of civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education, saying his office has found CPS violated anti-discrimination laws and will lose grant dollars through the Magnet School Assistance Program. The district, with a budget of roughly $10.2 billion, has a five-year, $15 million Magnet Schools Assistance Program grant it received last year.

The feds are demanding that the district abolish and issue a statement saying it will require students to compete in sports or use locker rooms and bathroom facilities based on their biological sex at birth, among other demands.

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However, Illinois law conflicts on both fronts, putting CPS in a difficult position. The state that outlines compliance with the Illinois Human Rights Law, including that schools must allow transgender students access to facilities that correspond to their gender identity. Separately, an Illinois law passed in 2024 and plan for serving Black students.

Chicago Public Schools said Wednesday in an emailed statement that it “does not comment on ongoing investigations.” Previously, its leaders have said that the Black Students Success Plan is a priority to address longstanding academic and discipline disparities that Black students face. They have in defiance of the Trump administration’s crackdown on race-based initiatives.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said earlier this year that if it takes federal funding away from CPS because of the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. His office also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In response to earlier this year, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into the Black Student Success Plan, which sets goals to double the number of male Black teachers, reduce Black student suspensions, and teach Black history in more classrooms. Trainor said in his department’s interpretation, the initiative runs afoul of a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year banning the consideration of race in college admissions by offering added support to Black students and teachers exclusively.

“This is textbook racial discrimination, and no justification proffered by CPS can overcome the patent illegality of its racially exclusionary plan,” he wrote.

The OCR also of CPS, the Illinois State Board of Education, and suburban Deerfield Public School District 109 to look into their policies on transgender students using facilities and participating in school sports. Trainor said Chicago’s Guidelines Regarding the Support of Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students violate Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education.

District officials told Chalkbeat recently that the members of a new school board Black Student Achievement Committee tasked with overseeing the plan’s rollout will be unveiled later this month.

Stacy Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, issued a statement decrying the federal move to withhold funds from CPS and saying the district will stay the course.

“We will not back down,” she said in the statement. “We will not apologize. Our duty is to our students, and no amount of political bullying will shake our commitment to them.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

As an in longstanding partnership with public schools and the of a nonprofit organization focused specifically on attendance, we’re hearing questions from educators, district leaders, families and policymakers about whether the old standards for attendance are still reasonable. Do students still need to go to school every day? Is it fair to ask educators to work on improving attendance when so many barriers exist outside of school? 

Given what we know from research and from schools across the country, backing away from a strong focus on chronic absence places children’s well-being in jeopardy, because attendance matters as much now as ever.

Early evidence from a UChicago Consortium on School Research study that is underway shows that the relationships among attendance and grades, test scores and test gains remain as strong as before COVID-19. This suggests that, despite all the extra supports that have been put into schools since the pandemic, chronic absence is a key factor in poor performance on exams across the country. This is for every age and demographic group.

These findings affirm decades of research showing that school attendance matters for students’ academic success, holistic development and well-being. Children in pre-K-2 who were chronically absent for several years by grade 3. Attendance also is important in the elementary and middle grades for students’ eventual , ability to pass their classes and graduate. And it’s not just the absent students who are affected; the content and pace of the classroom and even how adults and resources across the school are deployed can be detrimental to those who do show up.

Beyond academics, school is a key space for young people’s development — building social connections and skills with peers and adults, exploring their interests through classes and extracurriculars, and accessing resources, whether directly in school or through referrals from teachers. Students who are absent frequently miss out. 

Attendance rises when schools focus on fostering students’ development. Those with strong — where young people feel safe and supported and teachers collaborate with one another and with families — have higher attendance rates than other schools. No wonder boosting students’ is seen as a to chronic absence. When students and see their school as a place of community, stability, safety and support, they are more likely to come consistently, even when there are challenges. Teachers and school staff get a clearer sense of what families need, and how to help. They are more likely to seek assistance when they need it and work with to find solutions that work for them. In turn, school leaders and staff get a clearer sense of what families need, and how to help.

Addressing chronic absence can feel like an overwhelming, or even an impossible, problem because it is affected by many aspects of a young person’s life. Yet, we’ve seen schools make substantial progress when they focus on key data and supports. Chicago moved ninth grade attendance rates from 80% to 91% from 2008 to 2018 after showed absenteeism in the first year of high school was the driving factor behind low graduation rates. The district provided schools with real-time data on ninth graders’ attendance and grades, and principals and teachers were held accountable for a metric they could actually move, while being helped with by organizations like the Network for College Success. 

Nathaniel Green Middle School in Providence reduced its chronic absence rate from in three years after Principal Jackson Reilly organized students into cohorts taught by teams of teachers so they could build in time for relationships among students, teachers, and students and their teachers. This created a sense of community that brought back joy into the classroom. They then used data on who was missing 10% or more of school to identify which students needed extra outreach and support.

At Compass Berclair Charter School in Memphis, absenteeism dropped from 28% to 2% between 2021-22 and 2023-24. Principal Camie Cowan used morning meetings with all students and monthly family check-ins to strengthen relationships. Like Nathaniel Green, it also used chronic absence data to identify and offer assistance to students still struggling with attendance barriers.   

Kansas City Kansas Public Schools have reduced chronic absence districtwide from over 50%  in 2021-22 to less than 35%, and leaders anticipate further reductions in the coming school year. The district has moved away from taking a punitive approach to absences; a key component of its success has been a focus on relationship building. Every school has a team that reviews data as well as develops and implements a year-long plan of action that emphasizes universal strategies (morning meetings or restorative circles) along with targeted supports (positive phone calls and mentoring).

These examples demonstrate that schools can have a big impact on students’ attendance rates. The key is building relationships with young people and their families — asking students and families what motivates them to show up even when it isn’t easy. Are the barriers an unsafe path to school or a lack of access to health care? Is the student struggling academically or being bullied? Schools can use these answers to partner with students and families to find solutions. 

What educators in schools do matters — a lot. Progress is not just possible for improving attendance rates in schools; it’s critical. Children’s current and future well-being depend on it.  

But even as the department is weakened, some of its work has been sustained by other actors. One of its key functions — helping educators learn about and implement promising improvement strategies — has long been supported and even led by a network of local education organizations.  

When they work together, these organizations — everything from local parent-teacher associations and community-based programs to major philanthropies and research-practice partnerships — turn out to be remarkably good at sharing information about effective K-12 practices, helping school and district leaders craft improvement plans, and rallying support behind these efforts.

And these local organizations don’t just influence what happens to schools locally. As I’ve discovered in , many of these organizations have built connections with each other and with school districts over many years. Working under the radar, these organizations have often created an invisible infrastructure to support change and improvement nationally. 

In studying the history of high school dropout prevention systems, I’ve seen how changes emerged from researchers who studied graduation patterns, school coaches who worked with schools to reduce dropout rates, philanthropic managers who funded these initiatives, and community members who advocated for these changes. What then can be learned from this web of local organizations?

First, local organizations learn a lot from each other. In the early 2000s, organizations in Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City learned that the problem of dropping out can be predicted by students’ ninth grade performance. Researchers from the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University didn’t just publish their results; they spoke to varied audiences from local high school teachers to policymakers at the nation’s capital. They worked with other researchers who have since studied these “early warning indicators” and with other nonprofits that incorporated these indicators in their work with schools. As local researchers, nonprofits, and schools collaborated, changes slowly emerged on how to address the problem of students dropping out. 

Second, local organizations adapt innovations in and foster trust with schools. In the 2010s, when nonprofits were introducing systems to support students’ high school graduation, they did not just transpose a set of recommendations from one school to another. Rather, many of these education nonprofits spent years working with teachers and gaining the trust of schools and districts, constantly adapting strategies to the needs of their partners. Schools appreciated getting their own data, coming up with tailored solutions, and working alongside their outside-school partners. In the process, seemingly “foreign” changes and initiatives become strangely familiar. 

Third, local organizations provide stability and focus in a field so often changing. When school boards change and new superintendents come in, they tend to bring in new initiatives. That can make it harder to maintain existing programs. Their partner organizations can help with focus and stability. For instance, organizations like the UChicago Consortium on School Research and coaches from the university’s Network for College Success have been focused squarely on keeping ninth graders “on track” to graduate. This focus has paid off with high school graduation rates increasingly dramatically in places like Chicago, which experienced a jump from 50% in the early 2000s to 85% graduation in 2024. That success wouldn’t have been possible without the sustained efforts of local research, data, and coaching organizations working with schools over a 20-year period. 

To be clear, local organizations cannot replace the U.S. Education Department. Our nation needs a federal agency to establish financial aid policies, distribute Title I funds, collect national data, support testing innovations, and promote K-12 programs. But it’s important to recognize that the U.S. boasts a strong infrastructure of networked local organizations, and this network has an important role to play in K-12 improvement.

Some caveats are in order. One is that the most affluent schools and districts could develop the strongest relationships to these organizations, which will only exacerbate existing inequalities. It’s not unusual to see a wealthy suburban district, with its well-connected PTA members, attract a number of research partners, while a rural district on the other side of the state struggles to attract any interest at all from researchers, philanthropists, or community groups.

Another is the risk of creating a shadow bureaucracy that challenges existing education leaders. Nonprofits and philanthropists can sometimes push their own initiatives without any community input or with few guardrails for accountability. At the very least, partner organizations should create a steering committee — composed of district officials, union leaders, teachers, parents, students, community members, and other diverse voices — to help foster democratic deliberation about their school improvement plans. But some organizations neglect to seek out such input. 

On balance, though, these organizations have the potential to support positive changes in a decentralized education system. Given today’s political headwinds, it is easy to feel pessimistic about the future. But as the Department of Education faces possible closure, educators should acknowledge and find ways to support local nonprofits, philanthropic foundations, and researchers that shape not just our local schools but also our national education landscape. 

UChicago Consortium on School Research and Âé¶čŸ«Æ· both receive financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York and The Joyce Foundation.

Illinois education officials are considering lowering the scores students need to get to be classified as proficient in a subject on a state standardized test.

They say the current benchmarks are too high and the results often don’t accurately reflect whether high school students are college and career ready.

“Our system unfairly mislabels students as ‘not proficient’ when other data — such as success in advanced coursework and enrollment in college — tell a very different story,” state schools chief Tony Sanders to school leaders this week.

The Illinois State Board of Education agreed Wednesday to move ahead with a process to change the state’s testing system, though the exact details still are being worked out. That process will include creating new “cut scores,” or the lowest score needed for a student to be sorted into broad categories of achievement on state assessments.

If approved in August, the new cut scores would be applied to the tests taken by students this spring and reported publicly in October. The changes are likely to send the public a very different message about how students are doing on reading and math tests.

Proposed changes to the state’s testing system come at a time when schools in Illinois and around the country are still dealing with the academic fallout of the COVID pandemic. Other states, including Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Alaska, and New York, have made similar changes to their testing systems, according to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Third to eighth graders in Illinois last year — even exceeding proficiency levels pre-pandemic — but math scores still lagged behind past years, according to the state’s 2024 report card. .

State officials acknowledged Wednesday that it would be difficult to compare proficiency rates on the October 2025 report card to previous years if the benchmarks are lowered. The move would likely result in more students across the state being considered proficient on state standardized exams. For instance, if a test has 1,000 possible points a student can score and last year a student needed to score 700 or above to be considered proficient and they scored 680, but the following year the cut score moved to 650 that student would be considered proficient.

Sanders argued, however, that changes to the state’s testing system are long overdue.

In his message to school leaders this week, he said the state’s current benchmarks are some of the highest in the nation. He pointed to a by the National Center for Education Statistics that looked at how state accountability systems match up to NAEP, a national exam given periodically to a representative sample of American students in fourth and eighth grade. Illinois was among the states whose cut scores aligned with higher levels of performance on the national exam.

Sanders said in an interview with Chalkbeat that the cut scores for the college entrance exam have been higher than what the College Board, an organization that created and administers the SAT and Advanced Placement courses and exams, recommended as “college ready” on the SAT test in previous years — and that “it just does not make sense.”

“When we look at how actual students are performing, we have so many examples of kids who have graduated, gone on to college, and persisted and been successful in college, yet, if they made decisions in their life based on the data that we gave them, they would never have gone to college,” said Sanders.

Given that Illinois switched the high school test to the ACT, Sanders said the state board wants to ensure scores on the October 2025 report card accurately reflect where students are.

In changing the state’s testing system, state officials said they are aiming for greater “coherence” between assessments. Currently, there are different for the Illinois Assessment of Readiness, an exam taken by students in third to eighth grade in reading and math, the Illinois Science Assessment, taken by students in fifth, eighth, and 11th grades, and the high school college entrance exam, taken by students in 11th grade.

State officials also noted in from Wednesday’s board meeting that the state’s , or what students are expected to learn, would not change.

Jennifer Kirmes, director of policy at Advance Illinois, a nonprofit statewide advocacy organization, said that she believes there was a real call for change from school leaders, especially those teaching high school students, because some students were excelling in advanced classes but were classified as not proficient on state standardized tests.

“But in fact, those students have lots of other indicators that they are, in fact, college and career ready, which is ultimately what we’re trying to measure at the high school level,” said Kirmes. “They might have taken and passed several AP courses and exams, they might have dual credit.”

Kirmes said getting proficiency levels right matters because schools are judged based on the results of standardized exams. In Illinois, schools as Exemplary, Commendable, Targeted, Comprehensive, and Intensive. Based on what a school is labeled can determine what resources and support they will receive from the state. Federal law provide summative designations to schools based on students’ test scores since the early 2000s. Sanders also told Chalkbeat that the state is working on changing the school accountability system for 2026.

Educators, testing experts, and advocates have mixed feelings about changing the state’s assessment standards. Some worry the new changes will not have any significant effect on teaching and students’ learning.

Monique Redeaux-Smith, from the Illinois Federation of Teachers, one of the state’s largest teacher unions, said the union is not opposed to changing the cut scores, but they are concerned about the weight placed on state standardized assessments. The tests don’t provide enough information for teachers about where students might need a helping hand, she said.

“What teachers do in the classroom is more valuable because they’re actually seeing students explain. They’re actually seeing students show their work. They’re actually able to see where students might be getting stuck in their understanding,” said Redeaux-Smith.

Paul Zavitkovsky, instructor and leadership coach at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said he doesn’t think the changes will affect student learning if teachers are not given good information from the tests.

“Until we start reporting information from whatever kind of testing we do in a way that teachers, school level people look at and go, 
 ‘This is much more useful in terms of helping me better understand what I am and am not doing well,’” said Zavitkovsky.

In response to the criticism, Sanders said in an interview with Chalkbeat that state assessments are meant to generate the state report card and show how Illinois is performing. But he agrees that state assessments “will likely never be a useful tool to teachers to be able to improve their teaching.”

The Illinois State Board of Education is hosting listening tours around the state for school leaders, educators, parents, students, and others interested in changes to the state assessments. The next one will take place at the Chicago World Language Academy.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.ÌęSign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

Ìę

Correction appended May 19, 2025

The buildings have sat empty for 12 years.

Several are architecturally significant with striking details and character taking up multiple city blocks. But many are in rough shape, with copper stripped from the pipes, broken windows, and graffiti covering walls. One had to be torn down after an extra-alarm fire last year.

Now, Chicago Public Schools aims to sell the former schools, , with the hopes of seeing them repurposed and the possibility of bringing in around $8.2 million and avoiding spending more on future upkeep.

“Our goal is not to sell them for the highest dollar amount, really. It’s to find the most responsible, compatible use,” said Stephen Stults, director of real estate for CPS. “What we get paid, of course, helps with our budget challenges. But they’ve been sitting there long enough, and we need to do everything we can to try to get them repurposed.”

The solicitation for bids, which are due May 30, . Each property includes a minimum bid and all properties have schools on them with the exception of one on the Near West Side.

That property, the , has a minimum bid of $1.3 million and sits about five blocks from the United Center in an area poised for , called the , a nod to the sports stadium’s address.

The city demolished the school building last fall in late May. Prior to the fire, CPS put the building on the market and received just one bid for $1, which was “below what the district was willing to accept.” Demolition cost the district $1.25 million.

All of the properties have deed restrictions that do not allow them to be used as a K-12 charter or school or for the sale of liquor or tobacco products.

Stults said CPS spends between $100,000 and $150,000 to maintain and secure each vacant school per year. That’s at least $2 million annually for the past 12 years — or $24 million. The ongoing expense comes as CPS is currently in order to close a $529 million deficit for the coming school year.

Even though many vacant schools are not in great condition, Stults said the “bones of the buildings” are good. Demolition may be expensive, but so is rebuilding a core structure. After the deadline, he said the district will consider all bids and select the two “highest and most responsible” to present to the school board, as required by state law. Stults anticipates bringing some building sales to the board before the end of the calendar year.

If there is no demand for certain vacant schools, he added, the district plans to reach out to sister agencies, such as the Chicago Park District, to see if they’re interested in the properties.

Vacant schools are a visible reminder of the 2013 closures, which disproportionally impacted Black children from low-income families and led to further population loss. Many community groups and neighbors near these properties have called for reinvestment in these public assets for many years.

Efforts to sell and repurpose old CPS schools a mixed bag

Following the , then-mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennet appointed a committee to develop guidelines for school repurposing and community development. Their laid out potential uses for each vacant school and recommended a process for repurposing.

CPS put and sold two dozen properties in subsequent years for a collective $38 million. Some have been redeveloped into or . One was torn down to and another was .

More recently, the former after a more than $40 million renovation supported by city, state, and philanthropic money. The former Overton Elementary in Grand Boulevard on the south side with weekend market events and a community garden.

Ghian Foreman, a managing partner with the Washington Park Development Group, which has , said they will begin renovations to convert the building into offices later this year as soon as the city grants the permits.

“It’s harder than you think it is,” Foreman said. “This has been a really long process of learning. You have to really be committed, and you have to ensure that you have the resources to see it all the way through.”

Many vacant schools shuttered a decade ago have garnered interest from buyers and community proposals. But actual redevelopment has stalled for myriad reasons.

Some schools up for sale now had buyers previously, but the sales never went through. For example, the for the old Henson Elementary in 2018, but the local aldermen at the time held it in a City Council committee. The building remains vacant. The school board in for the old Morgan Elementary in Chatham from the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 241. But the project never came to fruition.

Some schools have been sold and are off the district’s books, but remain vacant and undeveloped.

One notable example is the old Von Humboldt school, which still sits vacant after being for $3.1 million to the nonprofit IFF. The group planned to convert the old school in gentrifying Humboldt Park to a mixed-use building with affordable apartments and market-rate townhomes built on part of the parking lot. But IFF eventually sold the property to Newark, New Jersey-based RBH Group, which promised to convert it to a “Teachers Village” with subsidized housing for teachers, similar to projects it’s done in Atlanta, Newark, New Jersey, and Hartford, Connecticut.

Ald. Daniel La Spata, 1st Ward, put , but it eventually in 2020. The city in 2022 and last fall, the Chicago Housing Authority . Today, sits waiting for activity.

Local elected officials influence vacant school sales

What to do with school real estate is another area of .

By state law, the City of Chicago or the Public Building Commission hold the title “in trust for the use of schools.” The sale of old schools must be approved by the City Council in order for the deed to be transferred to a new owner. It also must be approved by two-thirds of the Chicago Board of Education, which now means 14 members must vote yes.

In the bid materials, interested buyers are encouraged to contact the local aldermen and local school board representatives for the properties they’re interested in purchasing.

Ald. Jeanette Taylor, who represents the 20th Ward on the south side, plans to hold meetings later this month to get feedback on repurposing the schools in her ward. Taylor is the City Council’s chair of the Committee on Education and Child Development and also participated in a roughly a decade ago.

School board member Che “Rhymefest” Smith, who was elected to represent District 10 on the south side, said he hasn’t heard from any prospective buyers yet. He doesn’t want to prescribe any uses for the vacant buildings in his district but just hopes that investors would tune in to what communities in these neighborhoods want and need. He also thinks any money the district makes from the sales should be poured into schools in those neighborhoods.

“I would like to see any revenue benefit local schools rather than disappearing into the district bureaucracy,” he said.

When asked if she’d been contacted by anybody hoping to buy vacant schools, Therese Boyle, the elected school board representative for District 9 on the south side, said: “Not a soul.”

But she said what to do with these vacant properties is a critically important question for communities, especially given the district’s looming deficit.

“We need every penny for the operation of the schools that are open,” Boyle said.

Boyle, a retired school psychologist, worked inside the old Wentworth school building now up for sale when it was closed in 2013. She remembered how difficult it was for students and staff to move to a new building and said it’s awful to have an old school sitting empty in a neighborhood.

Michilla Blaise, who was appointed to the school board by Mayor Brandon Johnson to represent District 5 on the west side, said she’s been talking with district, city, and county officials about what to do with the old vacant schools. She said it’s important to do something because right now, they’re just reminders of neighborhood disinvestment for the people who live around them.

Foreman, the community developer that owns the old Overton school, echoed that sentiment. For the 10 years he’s owned the old school, he’s allowed the community to use the gym to play basketball and workout. He had to stop that in the past year to prepare for construction and said there have been break-ins recently, but not from people looking to steal things.

“They were young people who wanted to come and play in the gym,” he said.

Even though financing Overton’s redevelopment has been a big challenge, Foreman questioned the argument often made by city officials that it’s too costly to repurpose these properties or make them available to the community while trying to sell them or even demolish them for use as a park.

“What’s more expensive?” he asked. “What we pay the police in overtime or opening up a gym for the kids to play basketball?”

This was originally published by . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.ÌęSign up for their newsletters at .

Correction: The headline on an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the number of school properties are that being put up for sale. Chicago plans to sell 20 properties.Ìę

The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights that the district’s Black Student Success Plan violates federal law because it discriminates against students on the basis of race.Ìę

The , released in February, outlines strategies over the next five years to improve Black student’s daily learning experiences and life outcomes. 

Stacy Davis Gates, Chicago Teachers Union president, said in a Tuesday that the plan was developed to address the “man-made educational achievement gap” for Black students caused by inequitable policies such as redlining.

“We expect CPS to stand up against this baseless investigation — and we call on our city and state leaders to take real action to protect our students and schools,” Davis Gates said.

An Illinois law signed in 2023 required the Chicago Board of Education to create a and develop a plan to “bring about academic parity between Black children and their peers.” 

The plan was based on the , which include providing comprehensive resources for Black students’ academic and social-emotional needs and partnering with historically Black colleges and universities to create a teacher pipeline. 

The plan’s main goals include doubling the number of Black male educators, reducing out-of-school suspensions and expulsions for Black students by 40% and increasing Black history and culture in classrooms.

The investigation into the plan is based on a by conservative Virginia-based advocate Defending Education, which targeted a similar program last year in the Los Angeles Unified School District called the Black Student Achievement Plan. A district spokesperson said Thursday that Los Angeles Unified resolved the complaint by opening the plan’s services to all students.

The Education Department said in a press release Tuesday that the Chicago plan violates federal law by focusing “on remedial measures only for Black students, despite acknowledging that Chicago students of all races struggle academically.” It’s the latest move by the Trump administration to eliminate school diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Craig Trainor, the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a that the administration won’t allow federal funds to be used “in this pernicious and unlawful manner.”

The department previously said government funds were at risk for states and school districts that didn’t to end DEI programs. Last month, federal judges blocked the department from withholding federal funds because of DEI.

A Chicago Public Schools spokesperson said Thursday that the district will not comment on pending or ongoing investigations.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez is one step closer to becoming the top education official in Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted during a public meeting on Tuesday to recommend Martinez to be the next commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Nine of 11 members of the Massachusetts board voted for Martinez. The other two abstained. Both said earlier in the meeting that they supported candidate Lily Laux, the former deputy commissioner of school programs at the Texas Education Agency.

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The board will now send its recommendation to the Massachusetts Secretary of Education Patrick Tutwiler, who must give final approval and is also currently serving as the department’s interim commissioner. However, Tutwiler, who also sits on the board, said he supports Martinez and voted yes for him.

Martinez, without cause in December, was for the Massachusetts job and one of 42 people who had applied. If he takes the job, he will be responsible for overseeing and providing state support for Massachusetts’ roughly 400 school districts. He would also become the first Latino to have the job, according to a press release from Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

“This is someone who has had progressive experience in increasingly larger and more complex organizations with significantly increased, let’s say, political situations that they have to balance,” said Matt Hills, the board’s vice chair, during the meeting. “But at the end of the day, this is someone who has been able to lead large organizations to get pretty significantly positive results in key education priorities that we have.”

Several board members said they were impressed by Martinez’s leadership experience — with some generally noting controversy he’s faced — as well as his interest in students from low-income households and those learning English as a new language. Another noted she was impressed that he was able to raise teacher salaries in Chicago, which most recently came after with the Chicago Teachers Union.

Martinez’s firing was fueled in part by a tense disagreement with Mayor Brandon Johnson and

Board member Martin West said he was concerned about Martinez’s lack of state experience relative to Laux, but he found through Martinez’s interview that district leadership is “in some ways more similar to the state role in terms of the levers available for driving change.”

Board member Ericka Fisher said she felt Martinez was the sort of candidate who “can stay standing and continue fighting the good fight” in the face of the education climate both in Massachusetts and under the Trump administration.

The board’s decision comes after it interviewed Martinez and two other finalists at an hourslong public meeting last week. Martinez attended that meeting in person and spoke about a variety of topics, including serving English learners, students with disabilities and efforts to expose students to early college programs.

In a statement, Martinez said he is “honored” to be selected for the job and that Chicago and CPS will “always hold a special place in my heart.”

“I am committed to finishing the school year strong here and will leave CPS in mid-June with a deep sense of pride and optimism for its future, knowing the district is in strong hands and moving in the right direction,” Martinez said.

Once the education secretary finalizes the board’s recommendation, Martinez plans to accept the job after negotiating terms of his contract, according to a source close to the CEO.

The Massachusetts board chair previously said she hoped to have a commissioner in place by July 1, according to Jackie Reis, a spokesperson for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Per his CPS contract, a firing without cause allows Martinez to stay at the district through June.

Before CPS, Martinez was the superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District and held various education roles in Nevada.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat.ÌęChalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Members of the Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates voted to approve a tentative contract Wednesday, the first time the union has negotiated an agreement without a strike vote in more than 15 years.

The deal will be sent for ratification next week to 30,000 union educators. If the rank-and-file members approve the contract, final vote from the Chicago Board of Education will still be needed.

In-person paper ballot voting will take place April 10 and 11, with results expected to be announced April 14.

“This document gives our educators, our paraprofessionals, our clinicians, an opportunity to be co-producers of a better school day in Chicago, a better staff day in Chicago,” Union President Stacy Davis Gates said at a press conference Tuesday. “That is for the impact of our students.”

The grants teachers a 4% retroactive raise for the current school year and4% to 5% salary increases for each of the next three years. Other provisions smaller class sizes for all grade levels, hundreds of more positions like librarians and social workers, increased teacher preparation time and raises for veteran educators.

Elementary school teachers would get 70 minutes of daily preparation time, up from an hour. Veteran teachers with more than 14 years of experience , adding up to a $30 million price tag.

If the agreement is approved, Chicago teachers will be , with an average $110,000 salary by the end of the contract. The base pay for new teachers would start at $64,470 for the 2024-25 school year and increase to $72,520 by 2027-28.

The deal is less expensive than the union’s original list of demands, such as minimum 9% annual raises, but the current version will cost up to $1.5 billion over the life of the four-year contract. While the district has said it can cover the first year, questions remain about how it will afford payments in future years amid a half-billion-dollar budget deficit.

Last year, district CEO Pedro Martinez and Mayor Brandon Johnson clashed over how to pay for the upcoming agreement as federal COVID aid was about to expire. The conflict led to the October resignation of the entire school board, which had been appointed by Johnson, and the firing of Martinez in December.

Davis Gates said Tuesday that district leaders confirmed they can afford the contract. She said the city council and the mayor’s office believe that should go to the district to help fund the deal.

“We think that we have a good coalition of partners that will help us win the necessary funding. This has really been an interesting negotiation where we don’t have people screaming that they cannot pay for it,” Davis Gates said.

When asked how the district plans to pay for the deal, Johnson told , “We’ll do it. Just like I came in and I had a half-billion-dollar deficit in my first budget, had a $1 billion deficit in the second budget. We rectified that. We are leading in this moment.”

Teachers and parents at Tuesday’s press conference pointed to contract changes beyond the pay hike as major wins. 

The agreement would double the number of libraries, librarians and bilingual support staff in the district. It would create 215 more special education case manager positions and increase the number of social workers and nurses.

Emmy Ayala, a Chicago Public Schools parent, said her child’s elementary school has a library but no librarian. 

“Because of the agreement, this will allow more children to develop a love for reading, a love for learning, and [there will be] a third space in their communities to learn and engage and be safe again,” she said.

Union officials said academic freedom, including teaching Black history, would also be protected for the first time. 

“This tentative agreement makes sure that not only do we provide an education to students that is culturally relevant, but that we also embrace their language, their culture, their identities and everything about them,” said Diane Castro, a preschool teacher and bargaining team member. “We will not reduce them.”

Chicago Public Schools unveiled a five-year plan Thursday to improve the outcomes of the district’s Black students — at a time of unprecedented backlash against efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in education.

The release of the , during Black History Month, is part of CPS’s broader five-year strategic plan and aims to address long-standing disparities in graduation, discipline, and other metrics faced by its Black students, who make up roughly a third of the student body.

The district set out to create the Black Student Success Plan in the fall of 2023, but its quiet posting on Thursday comes as both conservative advocacy groups and the Trump administration are taking aim at race-based initiatives in school districts and on college campuses.

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Late last week, the U.S. Department of Education’s top acting civil rights official that they could lose federal funding if they don’t scrap all diversity initiatives, even those that use criteria other than race to meet their goals. He cited the 2023 Supreme Court Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that banned the use of race as a college admissions factor.

CPS — in a progressive city in a Democratic state — has largely been insulated from standoffs over diversity and inclusion in recent years, when districts in other parts of the country have come under intense scrutiny over how they teach race and how they take it into account in hiring, selective program admissions, and other decisions. Increasingly, though, deep blue cities like Chicago are finding themselves in the crosshairs.

Last year, a Virginia-based advocacy group aimed at boosting outcomes for its Black students, which CPS said inspired its own plan. At the urging of the Biden administration, Los Angeles made changes to downplay the role of race, causing an outcry from some of its initiative’s supporters.

Chicago’s plan vows to increase the number of Black teachers, slash suspensions and other discipline for Black students, and embrace more culturally responsive curriculums and professional development to “combat anti-Blackness” — goals some of which could run afoul of the Department of Education’s interpretation of the Students for Fair Admissions decision.

Still, some district and community leaders in Chicago say CPS’s plan might be better-positioned to withstand challenges than Los Angeles’ initiative — and they said the district must forge ahead with the effort even as it braces for pushback.

“Now is not the time for anticipatory obedience and preemptive acquiescence,” said Elizabeth Todd-Breland, a University of Illinois Chicago professor of African American history and a former Chicago school board member who served on a working group that helped craft the plan. “This is not the time to shrink but to live out our values.”

The new plan says Illinois law mandates this work and cites a state statute that requires the Chicago Board of Education to have a . That committee has not yet been formed.

CPS declined Chalkbeat’s interview request and did not answer questions before publication. The district is hosting a celebration at Chicago State University at 3 p.m. Friday to mark the plan’s release.

Chicago set out to create Black Student Success Plan years ago

CPS convened a working group made up of 60 district employees, parents, students, and community members that started meeting in December of 2023 to begin creating .

The following spring, it with residents across the city — what the plan’s supporters describe as one of the district’s most extensive and genuine efforts to get community input.

The working group in May that included stepping up efforts to recruit and retain Black educators, promote restorative justice practices, ensure culturally responsive curriculums that teach Black history, and offer more mental health and other support for Black students through partnerships with community-based organizations.

The district adopted many of these recommendations in its plan. It sets some concrete five-year goals, including doubling the number of male Black teachers, increasing the number of classrooms where Black history is taught, and decreasing how many Black students get out-of-school suspensions by 40%.

“The Black Student Success Plan is much more than simply a document,” the plan said. “It represents a firm commitment by the district, a roadmap, and a call to action for Chicago’s educational ecosystem to ensure equitable educational experiences and outcomes for Black students across our district.”

The effort built on equity work to help “students furthest from opportunity” that started five years ago under former CEO Janice Jackson, said Dominique McKoy, the executive director of the University of Chicago’s To & Through Project. In CPS, by a range of metrics, those students have historically been Black children.

McKoy, whose work focuses on college access, points out that the district has made major strides in increasing the number of students who go to college. But more students than ever drop out before earning a college degree — an issue that has disproportionately affected Black CPS graduates.

“There’s evidence and data that we haven’t been meeting the needs of Black students,” he said. “This plan is about responding to the data. Being clear about that is one of the best ways to insulate and defend that process.”

But McKoy acknowledges that now is a challenging time to kick off the district’s plan.

“Undoubtedly there will be critics who will think it’s racial preference to help students who need help and will attack the district for doing so,” said Pedro Noguera, the dean of the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

Last year’s challenge against a $120 million Los Angeles program aimed at addressing disparities for Black students offers a case study, Noguera notes. Parents Defending Education, which opposes school district diversity and inclusion programs, filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The group has also challenged programs to recruit more Black male teachers and form affinity student groups based on race in other districts.

Ultimately, Los Angeles overhauled the program to steer additional staffing and other resources to entire schools serving high-needs students, rather than more narrowly to Black students. The that to some critics, those changes watered down the program, which was beginning to show some early results. But Noguera says he feels the program is still helping Black students.

However, it is clear that the Trump administration plans to go much further in interpreting the Students for Fair Admissions decision and seeking to root out DEI initiatives. In Friday, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department, said efforts to diversify the teaching force or the student bodies of selective enrollment programs could trigger investigations and the loss of federal funding. About 20% of CPS’s operating revenue comes from the federal government.

“The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions,” Trainor wrote. “The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.”

‘Get the help to the kids who need it’

Chicago, like Los Angeles, might consider a focus on schools — chosen based on metrics such as graduation rates, test scores and others — where the plan would help Black students and their peers, Noguera said. Maybe it doesn’t even have to refer to Black students in its name, he said.

“The main thing is to get the help to the kids who need it,” he said. But, he added, “In this environment, who knows what’s challenge-proof.”

He said what helped in Los Angeles was deep community engagement that lent that district’s initiative credibility and good will; the changes that the district made in response to the legal challenge did not erode those.

Darlene O’Banner, a CPS great-grandmother who served on the working group, said CPS got the community engagement piece right. She thinks the plan will offer a detailed roadmap for improving Black students’ achievement and experience.

“I am not going to think of the unknowns and what’s going on in the world,” O’Banner said. “We’re just going to hope for the best. We can’t put the plan on hold for four years.”

The working group issued its recommendation in early fall and stopped meeting following the September resignation of all school board members, who stepped down amid pressure from the mayor’s office to fire CPS CEO Pedro Martinez over budget disagreements.

Valerie Leonard, a longtime community advocate who also served on the working group, said during the community meetings for the Black Student Success Plan last year, there was no discussion of possible legal pushback to the plan.

“Illinois is a liberal state,” she said. “It never really occurred to us a year ago that this plan would be in danger.”

But more recently, as she heard Trump assail DEI initiatives, Leonard said she wondered if the plan would survive.

Leonard pushed Illinois lawmakers last year to mandate the Board of Education appoint as part of that cleared the way for an elected school board in Chicago. The district’s plan invokes that committee though it hasn’t been formed yet. The board formed a more generic student success committee earlier this month.

“We believe that the problem with Black children in public schools is so dire that it needs to be elevated to its own committee,” she said. “When our children get lumped into something that’s for all, they inevitably fall between the cracks.”

McKoy at the University of Chicago said he feels “cautious optimism” and hopes the city and state rally around CPS as it pushes to improve outcomes for Black students.

“The plan itself isn’t going to do the work,” he said.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Chicago Public Schools launched new school profiles on its website — a milestone in to change how it portrays the quality of its campuses.

The new school accountability dashboards replace the district’s controversial number ratings for schools, which CPS put on hold and . Those ratings had drawn the ire of educators and some community members, who said they unfairly stigmatized campuses that serve students with high needs. The old level ratings had also factored into high-stakes decisions about school closures and staff overhauls.

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Some parents who’ve provided feedback on the shift said families welcome having a one-stop repository of information on school performance again. But they said they’d like to see simpler, more accessible language in information about the metrics the district included to put the numbers into context. And they noted that a busy parent must click repeatedly to get to each metric — only to find out in many cases that these numbers aren’t available yet.

Bogdana Chkoumbova, the district’s chief education officer, said the new system aimed to strike a balance.

“We didn’t want this to be just another state report card; we are embracing the complexity of the data,” she said. “If it looked like a one-pager in red and green, that just brings in the trauma.”

The new profiles went up in mid-December, the day after the window to apply to the district’s selective and magnet programs closed. Chkoumbova said the timing was not intentional. After all, families could find most of the information available on the dashboards so far on schools’ Illinois Report Card profiles.

For now, the profiles include only a portion of the data they’ll eventually feature — mostly traditional metrics such as test scores, chronic absenteeism, and graduation rates. Later this year, the district is gearing up to add long-anticipated information that gets at students’ experience and well-being — metrics that in some cases officials are still weighing how to best capture.

Still, CPS leaders say the launch of the new dashboards is an important start. They can be a handy tool as the members of a new, partly elected school board learn about the district and its schools. District officials plan to show off the profiles at the board’s monthly meeting on Thursday.

“We are transitioning to a completely new way of how we view student success and the district’s role in supporting schools,” said Chkoumbova.

The dashboards are by scrolling to the bottom and looking up a school.

The new profiles are five years in the making

Chicago first set out to overhaul how it measures and publicly communicates about school quality in 2019. At that time, school board members called on district officials to do away with the School Quality Rating System, or SQRP, policy, which many considered too focused on metrics that are affected by poverty levels and other demographics of the student body. The district formally in 2023.

With input from academics, parents, and others, the district tried to design a more holistic approach, bringing in a wider array of metrics, including some that got at the experience students have on campus — and at whether the district is providing schools the resources they need to improve that experience.

After years of largely behind-the-scenes work, the new dashboards went live quietly in December, giving principals and other educators a chance to weigh in.

Claiborne Wade, the father of four CPS students, served on a district committee that provided input on the new accountability system. He said he is a big believer in the district’s efforts to take a more holistic look at school performance.

“It’s more than test scores and attendance rates and graduation rates,” he said. “Those are important, but so is making sure we have funds for extracurricular activities and parents have a seat at the table.”

Last week, Wade presented the new dashboards to a group of 10 parents actively involved at DePriest Elementary on the West Side, where he works as a family coordinator as part of the Sustainable Community Schools program. Some liked that the new dashboards offer information about each metric and how to interpret it. But many felt these explanations were too heavy on education jargon and terms such as “alternate assessments.”

Jaqueline Vargas, the mother of two CPS students and two district graduates, said the site asks parents to do too much navigating — especially given that many metrics are not landing on the dashboard until later this year.

“You have to click a lot, but when you finally get there, the information isn’t there,” said Vargas, who also served on the district’s Transparency Committee.

She said she would love to see more information on parent leadership groups and parent engagement more generally, photos of principals, and readily accessible listings of the specialized programs and support services a campus offers. One of her CPS graduates was really interested in cooking while in high school, but the family had no idea that even though their neighborhood high school did not offer a culinary program, two nearby campuses did.

Hal Woods, chief of policy with the parent advocacy group Kids First Chicago, said the dashboards are clearly a work in progress. The layout can be more user-friendly. The metrics available so far are largely what SQRP offered, though the recently released dashboards do include some new information, such as whether a school has quality curriculums.

Parents are eager to see the full set of metrics later this year, Woods said — including those that show how schools are providing social and emotional support to students, a task that recent research has shown greatly affects outcomes such as high school graduation.

The district aims to better measure the student experience

Like districts across the country, CPS is still grappling with how to measure the student experience on campus more fully, said Elaine Allensworth of the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research. For the past two years, the district has given students a survey called Cultivate, which was developed by Allenworth’s team at the university. But she says the survey was designed to give teachers information about students’ experiences in their classrooms — not as an accountability tool for families and others.

“There’s a concern that if the survey becomes public, teachers would feel under pressure to make their schools look good and won’t feel as comfortable using it for their own development,” she said.

The district also explored how to best present another key piece of the student experience: extracurricular activities. The district could likely do more than simply listing the activities a school offers, Allensworth said. The new dashboards show the portion of students who participate in any activities. But are these activities high-quality? Are outside partners chipping in?

Chkoumbova said the district will continue to work on improving the platform. In late February, it will include new data on the growth toward math and reading proficiency on state tests that students make — a metric that Ellensworth said is much more telling about how well a school is doing than the portion of students who meet state standards on these tests.

Chkoumbova feels CPS is on the right track.

“We are trailblazers,” she said. “There are very few systems that have taken such an innovative and different approach.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Those numbers include sick days and other personal leave, but they don’t professional development days, parental leave, long-term disability or other family and medical leave.

That statistic might be shocking, but it’s not just Chicago. Other large Illinois districts including Elgin, Rockford and Springfield had similarly large percentages of teachers missing large chunks of the school year. Across the state, 34% of teachers missed 10 or more days.

Illinois is one of the few states that track data like this, but there’s reason to think teacher attendance is a problem nationwide. According to the from the Institute for Education Sciences, 72% of districts reported that teacher absences were higher in 2022 than they were pre-pandemic. The latest results from June 2024 suggest those numbers may have come down a bit, but they are far from returning to normal.

Worker absences are across all industries, so how worried should we be in education specifically? One difference is that teaching is more like a service job in the sense that, when the kids are there, the school needs someone to cover the classroom. In education, an absence means someone has to pick up the slack, so when a teacher is out, it has real, immediate costs.

The most visible are financial. In 2023, public and private schools across the country employed a combined . Schools have responded to pandemic-era staffing shortages by raising the hourly wage for subs — paying on average in 2023, up 35% from 2018. Given those rates, and depending on how many days and hours each sub worked, schools could have paid nearly $17 billion in substitute teacher costs in 2023.

That may actually be an undercount, because in recent years districts have been unable to find subs to plug all their gaps. That leads to a different type of cost, of teachers having to cover for their peers. When educators are assigned extra tasks, like , or told to cover in another teacher’s classroom, that contributes to a bad cycle of increased workload and stress, which to even more teacher absences.

Ultimately, students bear yet another type of cost when their teachers are absent. As might be expected, research has that one-off substitute teachers are not nearly as effective as regular full-time teachers. Lower-achieving students are both more likely to be assigned to subs and when their regular teacher is absent.

What’s driving the increase in teacher absences? And what can districts do to turn it around?

The first thing to note is that it’s probably not any one thing. Looking at the Illinois district , I found only very small correlations between teacher attendance and the rate at which they stayed with their district employer, the evaluations they received or the district’s overall staffing levels.

The teacher absences also don’t appear to be driven by the spread of COVID or other illnesses. One might expect those to affect students and teachers in similar ways, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Across Illinois schools, there was very little connection between the rate at which students and teachers were missing school.

But the strategies that districts are deploying to address student absences could also be extended to teachers. For example, a 2018 District Administration article building awareness of teacher absenteeism rates, offering prizes or awards for individuals or teams with strong attendance records and building a cadre of reliable on-site subs who can step in.

As Tim Daly has suggested on his Substack , teacher absenteeism may be one symptom of a multifaceted problem in which schools have lost their sense of purpose. Student achievement is down, stories of are rampant and teachers are being when grading students even when the kids aren’t attending school or haven’t mastered the content.

Moreover, principals and district leaders may have been hesitant to crack down too hard on teacher absences for fear they would lose employees. That may have made sense in 2022, say, when the labor market was particularly tight. But those fears should lessen somewhat as it’s to hire. 

Another way to interpret the elevated absenteeism rates is that they are simply an indicator of a more stressed, less engaged teacher workforce. In that sense, the numbers could be considered a of employee dissatisfaction, and more states and districts should be tracking their stats and exploring ways to reduce absences in their schools.

A Cook County Circuit Court judge ruled Tuesday that the Chicago Board of Education may not block schools chief Pedro Martinez from doing his job and may not attend teachers contract negotiations without his approval.

Judge Joel Chupack granted Martinez’s request for a temporary restraining order in a Christmas Eve ruling from the bench, marking another dramatic turn in the power struggle between the CEO and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hand-picked board members.

The board on Friday, meaning he will stay on the job for another six months and collect more than $130,000 in severance pay. As part of that vote, the board said it would modify Martinez’s powers without specifying how.

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But on Tuesday, the judge ruled that the Board of Education members are barred from “obstructing” Martinez’s “performance of his job duties.” They also cannot attend the district’s high-stakes contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union — as three did on Monday — without first getting permission from Martinez, the ruling said.

Board members also cannot attempt to manage any of Martinez’s staffers, the ruling said.

Another court date has been set for Jan. 9.

“Pedro Martinez is still the CEO, and there’s no question about that,” said Bill Quinlan, Martinez’s attorney. “They don’t have the right to restrict his duties and limit his statutory obligations.”

Jeremy Glenn, an outside attorney representing the Chicago Board of Education, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday’s ruling.

At least three school board members took the unusual step of without an invitation from the CEO or the mayor. Martinez’s lawyer demanding board members cease and desist from attending, describing it as “unlawful interference” with Martinez’s authority.

After Tuesday’s ruling, Martinez told reporters that the current board — picked by a mayor who is a close ally of the teachers union — could “force a contract down our throats,” and that CPS’s negotiating team considered resigning en masse when board members showed up to Monday’s negotiations and attempted to interfere, For his part, board President Sean Harden said he and others attended simply to support CPS’s team.

During a press conference Tuesday afternoon, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates acknowledged that no one but Martinez is in charge — and that he should be ready to take the blame if the recent progress stalls in .

“People get to say that this contract is being bargained with the Chicago Teachers Union and Pedro Martinez, so we look forward to finally seeing him on Thursday,” Davis Gates said.

Martinez has not attended negotiations. Typically, school district CEOs and superintendents leave contracting negotiations for district bargaining team members with rare exceptions, such as when a deal is nearly at hand.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.  Sign up for their newsletters at . 

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hand-picked school board voted Friday to fire Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez, taking a step their predecessors had resisted and capping a months-long campaign by the mayor and teachers union to oust the schools chief.

The board voted unanimously to fire Martinez without cause, which under the terms of his contract means he will stay on the job for six more months — through the end of the current school year — and then receive severance pay of about $130,000.

“It’s not right,” an angry and emotional Martinez told reporters after the vote.

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“Obviously I’m disappointed by the board’s decision tonight,” he said, adding that he would ensure a smooth transition for the next CEO. “Leading the system that shaped me has been an opportunity of a lifetime.”

The firing was a dramatic culmination to months of turmoil that pitted the mayor and the teachers union — a close ally that catapulted him into office — against Martinez. The unprecedented development comes weeks before begins work. It also comes as the district enters a decisive phase in its high-stakes over a new contract.

Martinez made Friday to save his job before the vote. His attorneys filed motions seeking to block his potential firing, alleging board members were appointed “to do the bidding” of a mayor and teachers union that have “scapegoated” Martinez.

According to a source close to the CEO, Martinez earlier turned down a settlement offer of more than $500,000 to depart, which would have amounted to salary and benefits owed to him for the remainder of his contract.

CTU issued a statement after the vote saying Martinez was stalling by not agreeing to a new union contract that “guarantees every CPS student a quality school day, protects recent academic gains, and provides classrooms with the resources our students and families deserve.”

“We look forward to the road ahead for CPS, and we urge the board and the mayor to step into the leadership gap that the CEO has created and choose a future candidate who understands the assignment,” the statement read.

Ahead of the vote, incoming elected school board members, education organizations, and former CPS CEOs Arne Duncan and Janice Jackson in support of letting the new board decide Martinez’s fate. That list grew Friday to include U.S. Rep. Chuy Garcia and Yesenia Lopez, an incoming elected school board member who was endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union — which cast a vote of no-confidence in Martinez in the fall.

At the meeting, a group of principals expressed support for Martinez and raised concerns about CTU proposals that they feel will take away instructional time from children. The principals union has expressed similar concerns over the past several weeks. Meanwhile, Jackson Potter, vice president of the CTU, said the union has made more progress in negotiations this week and wants a swift deal.

More than a dozen elected officials also spoke — both in support of and against Martinez.

Tara Stamps, a Cook County commissioner, former teacher, and CTU staffer, blamed Martinez for schools on her home turf of the West Side that still have “chronic underfunding” and “crumbling infrastructure.”

“Pedro Martinez’s leadership have left these schools in a drought and our teachers and our students are paying the price for that,” Stamps said.

Others called for the board to wait. Jennifer Custer, an incoming elected school board member who was backed by the CTU, asked the board to hold off on a decision. She also criticized the union’s contract proposal.

“Are you going to condemn the first elected board to serve in a capacity where our sole job for the next two years is not to address student outcomes and making CPS a better place, but to figure out how to steady the ship in the wake of the chaos that is created by the decision to fire a CEO mid year and inevitably agree to a contract that we can’t afford, and while the district suffers financially already?” Custer said.

After the public comment period, the board met in closed session. After 90 minutes, members emerged and voted Martinez out without comment. The board then left without taking any questions from reporters.

Tensions stem from district’s money woes

The conflict between Martinez and the mayor’s office reflects a fundamental rift over how the district should navigate a time when and major .

The union and Johnson have argued that the district should add more staff, reduce class size, and agree to a litany of other proposals. The mayor’s team suggested over the summer that — and then redouble its push to line up new revenue from the state or other sources. The Martinez administration countered that any prospects for new funding are uncertain, and the district should avoid adding to its significant debt burden.

The previous appointed board — under pressure to oust the CEO and take on the loan — in October. While that board with Martinez, it wasn’t prepared to fire him, sources previously told Chalkbeat.

Johnson . He four of them would continue to serve, while three will step down because they are not eligible based on where they live. The mayor announced six other appointments to the new board and has yet to name one more.

More recently, the fate of schools in one of the city’s largest charter networks has proven divisive.

The board and the mayor’s office criticized Martinez for not acting aggressively enough to find alternatives to planned school closings at Acero charter school network. On Friday, the Board of Education approved a resolution to cover Acero’s budget deficit to keep all seven schools open next school year. The board also directed CPS leadership to create a plan to transition five of the campuses into CPS schools for the 2026-27 school year.

Martinez oversaw pandemic rebound, new strategic plan

Martinez by Johnson’s predecessor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot. He arrived at a turbulent time – as school buildings reopened for full-time in-person instruction after being shuttered during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak – and began the work of addressing the pandemic’s academic and social-emotional damage.

By some accounts, Martinez’s tenure has brought a measure of stability after COVID’s massive disruption. His administration has touted data showing the district’s students have than most other districts across the country.

During his roughly three years at the helm, Martinez presided over a significant expansion of the district’s workforce, using and support staff.

He also oversaw the adoption of a controversial plan to and an this spring that ; instead, the district now provides base staffing positions to all schools and factors in a school’s level of student needs in budgeting for additional positions and support.

Martinez was also at the helm when thousands of migrant children from Central and South American countries enrolled in the district’s schools, leading to for students at many schools, particularly those in low-income, Black communities.

On the day the previous school board passed a new — which focuses on Johnson’s priority of boosting resources for neighborhood schools — the mayor asked Martinez to resign.

When Lightfoot appointed Martinez, a Chicago native and former CPS chief financial officer, he was the superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District. Johnson chose to keep Martinez in the role after defeating Lightfoot in the 2023 mayoral election — which teachers union president Stacy Davis Gates said at the start of this school year she requested of the mayor. The union said at the time that the CEO appeared to be ushering in a new era of more collaboration and better rapport between the CTU and district officials.

But things changed this summer amid over an extensive, Martinez, along with the Johnson-appointed school board, balked at taking on the Johnson had urged the district to take out the loan to pay for the contract’s costs and cover a $175 million payment to a city pension fund that covers non-teaching staff.

The CTU had lambasted and argued the city should continue to cover it as it had in the past. The Johnson administration has in part blamed the city’s budget woes on that pension payment. On Monday, the Chicago City Council narrowly passed Johnson’s $17.1 billion budget plan after a bruising two month budget process during which even his progressive allies criticized his leadership.

Martinez said in September that , citing a need for stability in a district roiled by frequent leadership turnover in recent years.

In recent weeks, the teachers union intensified its criticism of Martinez, even as his administration in the coming years and benefit increases at no cost to teachers, among other concessions. Union leaders have said Martinez is resisting union staffing, class size, and other proposals that would transform a district historically plagued by inequities in the student experiences among campuses and neighborhoods. They also claimed Martinez didn’t lobby for more state funding aggressively enough or make a plan for the expiration of federal COVID relief money.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at . 

Mayor Brandon Johnson picked 10 of 11 people Monday to round out the city’s new half-elected, half-appointed school board — including some who ran unsuccessfully in this November.

The new board will be sworn in Jan. 15, 2025, and will include 10 people who won in November. State law required the mayor choose the other 11 people, including a board president, by Monday.

The shift to an elected school board in Chicago . The process set forth in state law is complicated. Though there were 10 school board races in November, each district was split into two subdistricts. State law limited who Johnson could pick — allowing him to only choose people who did not live in the same subdistrict as winners of the election.

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Johnson announced the school board appointees late Monday, just hours before the deadline.

• Sean Harden, a South Side native and former CPS employee, will serve as president of the Board of Education and represent the city at large.
• Ed Bannon, who ran for alderman in 2023 and served on the Dever Elementary School Local School Council, will represent District 1a alongside Jennifer Custer in 1b.
• Debby Pope, a current appointed school board member and former CTU employee and retired teacher who filed campaign finance paperwork and considered running for an elected school board seat, will represent District 2b alongside Ebony DeBerry in 2a.
• Norma Rios-Sierra, an artist who also works as cultural events manager for nonprofit Palenque LSNA, will presumably represent District 3a alongside Carlos Rivas Jr. in 3b.
• Karen Zaccor, a retired teacher and active CTU member who finished second in a six-way race in November’s election, will represent District 4a alongside the winning candidate Ellen Rosenfeld in 4b.
• Michilla Blaise, a current school board member who withdrew as a candidate one month before Election Day, will represent District 5b alongside Jitu Brown in 5a.
• Anusha Thotakura, a former teacher who also lost her bid in November, will represent District 6a alongside Jessica Biggs in 6b.
• Emma Lozano, a Pilsen pastor and advocate for bilingual education and immigrant rights. It is not clear which district Lozano lives in, but it would presumably be either district 7b or 8b alongside either Yesenia Lopez in 7a or Angel Gutierrez in 8a.
• Frank Niles Thomas, a current board member appointed last month, will represent District 9a alongside Therese Boyle in 9b.
• Olga Bautista, a current board member appointed last month, will presumably represent District 10b alongside Che “Rhymefest” Smith in 10a.

It was not immediately clear why the mayor only announced 10 of 11 picks before the deadline. State law does not spell out any impacts for partially missing the deadline.

Johnson’s picks will make up a majority of the board, giving him significant influence over a governing body that for the past three decades was exclusively controlled by Chicago’s mayor.

The mayor’s appointees included most of the current board members as well as losing school board candidates who were endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, a close ally of the mayor’s.

Johnson’s office announced the names after the mayor struggled to negotiate a deal with aldermen on his second city budget. Late Monday, after multiple amendments and Johnson tossing out his proposed property tax increase entirely, the City Council approved a $17.1 billion city budget by a vote of 27 to 23.

After that budget vote, as he called for more state revenue, Johnson told reporters he was looking for school board members “who understand the urgency of this moment, people who know that they have to organize and work collectively to fight for progressive revenue in the state.”

“But really the big characteristic that I’m proud that people demonstrated was a real care for the families who do the work as well,” Johnson said, adding that he also searched for people who were not “dismissive” of teachers.

The mayor’s influence over the school board may extend beyond his own picks. Four of the election winners were backed by the union, which ideologically aligns with the mayor. That means 15 of the 21 members could often vote in alignment with his policy preferences, such as avoiding school closures and sending more money to neighborhood schools.

It also could mean the board could vote to borrow money in order to cover pension obligations and labor union costs, as Johnson pushed CPS to do in the spring and summer, helping to lead to the resignation of the entire previous board.

Before taking office, school board members are required to complete state-mandated training. Last week, newly elected board members were notified by the school district’s board office that would be postponed, per a request from the current board. Carlos Rivas, who was elected to represent District 3 on the West Side, said the Academy of Local Leadership at National Louis University, in light of the district’s cancellation, is now providing training this week. Rivas was part of .

“At the end of the day, what’s most important is that we are prepared to govern on day one,” Rivas said.

Rivas said the school district’s board office said they still plan to hold five days of sessions with new board members from Jan. 6-10.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.  Sign up for their newsletters at . 

But it’s not just Chicago. Over the last decade, districts have closed fewer and fewer schools. As of 2021-22, the most recent year for which national is available, districts closed 666 schools — the lowest number in more than 20 years. (Charter school closures are also at historically low levels.)

In many cases, closing neighborhood schools is disruptive for students and communities, and deciding which to shutter tears neighborhoods apart. So the decline in shutdowns might seem like a positive trend. If school closures are bad for students, it’s a good thing that fewer kids are displaced, right?

Not necessarily. For one thing, districts may have simply delayed the inevitable, because student headcounts have been falling. Public school enrollments fell by 1.2 million children in the wake of the pandemic, and thousands of schools nationwide suffered declines of 20% or more.

Worse, the most recent suggest enrollments will fall another 5% by 2031 — and those don’t take into account any reductions in immigration during the next Trump administration.

Too many district leaders closed their eyes to financial reality and hoped for population trends to suddenly reverse. But there are signs they may be starting to grapple with the harsh budget truth. Denver tried to close schools two years ago and backed down, but is trying again this year. ; ; ; ; , Texas; and , Georgia, are all in the midst of painful deliberations about school closures. The district outside San Jose, California, is considering closing or consolidating nearly half of its schools.

It is precisely because school closure decisions are disruptive that districts should have acted when times were good. Making these decisions under real financial duress constrains their choices and potentially exacerbates the negative effects. For example, Philadelphia overwhelmed its school system when it was forced into a massive wave of closures a decade ago, ultimately shuttering 10% of its schools over two years. , for both the displaced students and their new peers, as the number of students affected grew.

But the of school closures largely depend on what happens to the affected students. And as EdNavigator’s Tim Daly wrote last year, there are no-cost ways for districts to mitigate the downsides. For example, they could ensure that any displaced student has access to a school that is better than the shuttered one —not just the closest. Money can also help, in the form of counselors and other types of navigators who can help kids with the transition.

Of course, selecting which schools to close is no easy task. When I looked at this question recently for a large urban district in the South, I found there was a Venn diagram that found quite a bit of overlap among schools that were small and expensive, that were losing students, and that were getting poor academic results.

Consider the table below, with three real but anonymized schools. The school I call Washington could be a likely candidate for closure. It is serving 40% fewer students than it did pre-pandemic, which has driven its per-pupil cost far above the district average of about $14,000. The state has also given it a “D” rating for academic performance.

But the district wouldn’t want to blindly follow the enrollment and cost trends, or else it might close a school like Adams, which sports an “A” rating from the state. On the other end, the Jefferson school is comparatively cheap to operate, and its student enrollment has held up comparatively well, but those kids are getting only middling results. By closing high-cost, low-performing schools like Washington, this district would have more money to invest in schools like Jefferson, to help them raise their students’ performance.

Outsiders like me have access only to academic and financial factors like these, but districts would also need to factor in geographic and demographic issues to see which communities would be affected, whether there are any potential growth patterns in housing that could improve population trends, and whether the district has other viable uses for the buildings themselves.

A district might also decide on a course of action other than closure or consolidation, but that would require the shrinking schools to operate differently. Could they restructure their compensation packages to invest in fewer, higher-paid employees, like a school in New York City that pays its teachers $140,000 a year? Could they adopt team-based staffing models that break apart the traditional one-classroom, one-teacher approach?

Or, rather than engaging in a centralized decision-making process, district leaders could learn from the school choice world and let families vote with their feet. For example, recent research on found that a combination of improving options for families and closing the lowest-performing schools had large benefits for students. And, when the Reason Foundation looked recently at inter-district transfer programs in three states, it found that families to the highest-rated schools and away from the lowest-rated ones. Similarly, of Los Angeles’ “Zones of Choice” program found that it boosted student achievement and raised college enrollment rates by 5%. Districts could lean into those findings and help families make informed choices about the best options available to them.

But regardless of what approach they take, district leaders need to start with honest projections of enrollment trends in their community, followed by a plan for how to handle them. Students will be better off if district leaders look for proactive solutions sooner rather than later.

The City of Chicago has extended a deadline for low-income families to apply for at least $500 if they have children with disabilities — a cash grant effort meant to provide some relief for students and parents with additional needs who faced challenges during the pandemic.

The original deadline for the effort — — was Oct. 30. The Mayor’s Office for People With Disabilities has extended the deadline to this Friday, Nov. 15.

The new deadline comes after less than half of the desired number of grantees had been approved for or received the grants as of early October. Those interested can apply online at or can text “AdaMOPD” to (877) 478-1359.

When the city announced the program, it said it would provide grants to as many as 8,000 families using federal COVID relief money from the Biden administration. But as of mid-September, roughly six weeks before the original deadline, the city had awarded just 2,000 grants, according to data obtained by Chalkbeat through a Freedom of Information Act request. At that time, a total of 8,722 applications had been submitted, according to the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities.

By Oct. 1, 9,263 applications had been received or started, according to a breakdown provided by then-City Hall spokesperson Ronnie Reese.At that time, a total 3,717 families had been approved for the grants, which included families who hadn’t received the money yet, Reese said. Roughly 4,400 people had started applications but had not completed them and “have not provided all the required documentation or information,” Reese said at the time, adding that a community outreach team was trying to help these families to finish their applications.

The city had asked another 779 applicants to provide more information as of Oct. 1. The city rejected 264 applications because they weren‘t eligible; 57 applications hadn’t yet been reviewed. A City Hall spokesperson did not immediately share updated figures on Monday.

Students with disabilities faced mounting challenges during the pandemic. These students are legally entitled to services at school that are outlined in an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, which can include extra help or therapies at school. School closures during the pandemic, however, separated many students from those supports.

Like other districts, Chicago Public Schools fell far behind during the early part of the pandemic in evaluating students with disabilities for the support they needed,

The city had budgeted $5 million for the program through American Rescue Plan dollars, which the federal government distributed to cities and states during the pandemic. About $1 million of that went to Ada S. McKinley Community Center, which the city partnered with to distribute the grant, in order to cover administrative costs.

Chicago received almost $2 billion in American Rescue Plan funds. Similar to that went to school districts, these funds are temporary and must be earmarked by next month, .

Grantees for the program must be parents or guardians of students with disabilities and can apply for up to two grants per household. Applicants must be Chicago residents and must earn no more than 300% of the federal poverty level, or $93,600 at most for a family of four, according to the

Families must have documentation that proves their child receives services at school, such as an Individualized Education Program or 504 plan, or proof from a doctor that their child has a disability.

In a prepared statement, Jamal Malone, CEO of Ada S. McKinley Community Services, which contracted with the city to help sign people up for the grant, said that with school in “full swing,” families may learn about the grant during school visits, such as during parent-teacher conferences.

His organization is also hosting events at local libraries to inform families about the grants.

Sherry Henry, whose son is in middle school and is on the autism spectrum, attended the mayor’s announcement in April and said she received her grant money over the summer. She said she largely used the grant to pay her bills, but she also let her son choose something he wanted. He picked out some sketchbooks.

She credits the extra money for sparking a love of art in her son, who chose to buy the sketchbooks.

“He never said he was going to be an artist before, but he said he’s gonna be an artist now, so yeah, so I can smile about that,” Henry said.

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The proximate cause of the political fracas is a in Chicago Public Schools’ annual budget, driven primarily by the drying up of federal pandemic relief dollars. But funding challenges in the Windy City are downstream of a concerning reality: Chicago is increasingly beholden to the wishes of its teachers union. This is especially the case under the leadership of Mayor Brandon Johnson, who spent a decade as an organizer for the CTU and ascended to the mayoralty with its backing. At the helm of the city, Johnson has been willing to bend over backward to put his union sympathies into policy. A since-retired reporter Chicago Magazine editor Edward McClelland that CTU President Stacy Davis Gates “made Brandon Johnson.” Now, “Stacy Davis Gates owns Brandon Johnson.” 

Former U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) a similar sentiment: “We have a new political machine [in Chicago], and it’s called the CTU, and its vassal is Mayor Johnson.”

The previous board’s resignations marked the apex of the tensions that have been simmering between it and Johnson ever since the board a controversial $9.9 billion budget in July. In addition, the board has sided with CPS CEO Pedro Martinez in opposing a $300 million short-term, high-interest loan to pay for the expensive raises sought by the CTU, which is negotiating a new contract with the board. After Johnson’s hardball move, there’s little question that the union’s negotiators are breathing a sigh of relief. In the memorable words of Chicago Magazine’s McClelland, following the board’s resignations, “Mayor CTU will appoint a set of lackeys, brownnosers, and apple polishers who will carry out the Chicago Teachers Union’s program” — fire Martinez, take out the loan, and use the money to hand out for teachers.

Indeed, it’s clear that Johnson’s recent school board moves align well with the CTU’s positions. The union, which is toward Martinez, wants him gone. But the school board, which was almost entirely hand-picked by Johnson himself, refused to play along because it recognized the irresponsibility of taking on a risky loan.

It’s worth dwelling a bit on the financial situation of CPS. It can be boiled down to two words: not good. The school board a $9.9 billion budget in July that money for the contract that the board is currently negotiating with the CTU, which typically $100 million to $120 million annually to the district’s operating costs, nor a non-teaching-staff pension payment that will cost the district $175 million. 

These two expenses culminated in the roughly $300 million gap mentioned above. Mayor Johnson has pushed the school board and Martinez to take out a loan to close this gap, but because CPS bonds are “junk” rated, the interest payments on the loan would likely be exorbitant. Indeed, CPS is already $9.3 billion in debt, and principal and interest payments on outstanding debt — the debt that exists before this potential new loan would take effect — will $817 million this year alone. When Johnson first floated the idea of taking out a loan in July, an internal CPS memo by Chalkbeat called it a “fictional or phantom revenue source.”

An apparent lack of adequate state funding may also be at play here. In 2017, Illinois changed its to better fund historically under-resourced districts. Under the reformed funding formula, CPS 79% of its required funding this year the district’s recent increase in English language learners and a decrease in local revenue, both of which increased the required funding per the state’s formula. 

Lurking in the background of this shortfall is the between Johnson and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, providing fertile ground for the conspiracy-minded to suspect that the governor is holding back funding from Chicago’s schools out of personal pettiness. But the reality is more prosaic: in Illinois are even worse off than Chicago, including the 49 of them that are funded below 70%of what the state formula says they need. This suggests that Chicago is not being squashed by gubernatorial caprices. In the words of one person close to CPS, “I think that the union thought, once Brandon [Johnson] got elected, that they’d be able to walk into Springfield and get whatever they wanted. . . . But there’s no money, especially after ESSER funds have expired.”

Still, Chicago spends a lot of money each year on education. Per-student operating expenses in FY 22 $24,132, roughly double the . Moreover, as Chad Aldeman wrote last month, CPS has added thousands of personnel at the same time that enrollment in the district has been declining. “Budgeting decisions like these would be anathema in any other industry,” argues Aldeman, “where leaders normally try to match up the number of employees with customer demand.” But “Chicago Public Schools is doing the opposite.” 

Indeed, Aldeman notes that the district “chose to invest 92% of its one-time relief funds in full-time school employees,” a decision that greatly benefited the CTU’s members — and, by extension, CTU’s coffers.

But “Mayor CTU” refuses to countenance worries about the CPS’s dire financial straits. In the press conference during which Johnson announced the board’s new appointees — which local news outlets have described as “” and “” — he compared those raising concerns about fiscal responsibility to slaveholders. “They said it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate Black people,” Johnson argued. “And now you have detractors making the same argument of the Confederacy when it comes to public education in this system.”

One can hardly blame the CTU for its insistence that its members receive generous raises, financial considerations be damned. The first concern of a union, after all, is simple: to act in the best interests of its members. But Brandon Johnson deserves less sympathy. In a time of unprecedented financial chaos for the school district, Mayor Johnson is acting in the interests not of Chicago as a whole but of the CTU. This is not to suggest that Johnson is a stooge of the union. Johnson strikes this observer as a full-throated advocate for the cause on which he rose to power, which is why the CTU funded him so generously in the first place; the arrow of causality does not point in the opposite direction.

Still, Johnson should know better than to jeopardize the financial health of the city’s school system in order to push forward the interests of just one of his many constituencies. In contrast, Chicago voters delivered a strong anti-union verdict in last week’s elections, as just four of the 10 school-board candidates elected were backed by the CTU. 

Perhaps this is a sign that Chicagoans have recognized the peril of being beholden to the union.

showed that candidates backed by the powerful Chicago Teachers Union won four seats, one of them unopposed. Meanwhile, pro-school choice candidates backed by wealthy donors won three seats, with three seats won by independent candidates.

The independents include a rapper who beat three opponents on the city’s South Side. said he ran to ensure that every school gets a registered nurse, a librarian, counselors, tutors, support staff and quality arts instruction.

The 10 new board members will join 11 others who will be appointed in coming weeks by Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and union organizer.

“There’s a lot going on here,” said Hugo Jacobo of , a nonprofit that supports independent school board candidates.

Groups that advocate for charter schools spent about $3 million on the race, The Chicago Sun-Times , with the union spending about $1.6 million on its endorsed candidates through its own political action committees and at least eight other PACs. Other estimates show the union spending more than on the races.

The union’s preferred candidate came up empty in District 3, one of Chicago’s most politically progressive areas. A reform-oriented candidate, , beat union-endorsed candidate by 12 percentage points, despite a reported $300,000 in donations. The union painted a more positive picture Tuesday night, with President Stacy Davis Gates , “Billionaires spent a lot of money to get three out of 21,” referring to the larger board that will eventually be seated. “I keep telling you, it’s cumulative. It keeps getting bigger and it keeps growing. And we want more people for this group project.”

Tuesday’s results push Chicago Public Schools, the fourth-largest school system in the United States, into a new phase, with observers saying a fully elected board could improve schools and make them more responsive to parents and taxpayers. 

But whether the shift will curb the system’s recent chaos is another matter. 

Last month, the entire seven-member board resigned after Mayor Brandon Johnson threatened to oust schools CEO Pedro Martinez. Johnson had appointed six of the seven members . 

He brought in a new board, but a week later the newly appointed president, the Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson, after news reports revealed he’d written antisemitic and sexist posts on social media and posted that he agreed with a theory that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were an “inside job.”

Tuesday’s split result, while offering what will likely be a variety of perspectives on finances, management and curriculum, is bound to be just the beginning of a new, and perhaps even more tumultuous era — for one thing, all 21 seats, including the 10 from Tuesday, will be on the ballot in 2026.

“This first cycle was really a warm-up for 2026, when all 21 seats are up for election and the stakes are real,” said Peter Cunningham, a former head of communications for the district and founder of the nonprofit .

Cunningham, who also served as a spokesman for U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, said Tuesday’s election “became a referendum on Mayor Johnson and the teacher’s union because of the chaos at the board over the last few months. They did not get a clear mandate to pursue their more controversial policy proposals, but they will likely do it anyway because this is their last chance to control the board.”

The range of ideologies among fully elected board members could fuel further drama, said Meredith Paige, a mother of two high schoolers and leader of , an advocacy group.

“The chaos is going to continue,” she said.

From appointed to elected board  

For nearly 30 years, Chicago’s mayors have enjoyed the right to appoint and dismiss board members, with the city standing for decades as one of just a handful with mayoral control — New York City, Boston, Washington, D.C. and Detroit are among others where mayors still wield considerable power over school policy. 

Until now, Chicago Public Schools was also the school district in Illinois that didn’t have an elected board. But the state legislature in 2021 ordered the city to transition to a fully elected, 21-seat board. 

It may take a while for the changes to sink in with voters, said Paige, who canvassed in neighborhoods last week and met “a lot of people who had no idea that there was a school board election.” Others believed Chicago already had an elected school board. “So that’s been a problem the whole time,” she said. “Even now, parents don’t understand how this is going to work.”

Among the first business items the hybrid board will face in coming months: whether to terminate the contract of Martinez, the schools CEO, who has served since 2021. They must also decide whether to approve Johnson’s push to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to defray short-term expenses, including a $175 million pension payment for non-teaching employees.

The district faces a projected deficit of $505 million next fall, due partly to rising healthcare costs and the expiration of federal ESSER pandemic funds. Johnson’s predecessor, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, also shifted hundreds of millions of dollars in pension costs from City Hall, which had historically underwritten them, to the district.

And the city is also hemorrhaging students: enrollment has dropped by 20%, or more than 80,000 students, since 2010.

In July, Martinez and the school board proposed a $9.9 billion budget that aimed to close the deficit through staff cuts and freezes affecting nearly 250 jobs. The board authorized the budget as written, but relations between the mayor and the district soured. 

Johnson has proposed taking out a $300 million loan to fund teacher pay increases and pension contributions, and he in October for comparing his critics to confederates who opposed freeing slaves “because it would be too expensive.”

Even if both sides agree on a new source of spending, the district and the union are also engaged in a contentious negotiation over the terms of the next teacher contract. One estimate said paying out an expected series of teacher raises and taking on more pension debt from the city could increase its deficit to nearly $1 billion. 

Despite Johnson’s bid to fire Martinez, the CEO remains popular, said Jacobo of Chicago Democrats for Education. “He’s the only one really concerned about the financial situation of our city and our school district system, so people want someone responsible like him to stay.”

Paige, the parent advocate, agreed. “The mayor and CTU want to fire the CEO, who has brought a lot of stability to the district. So there’s a lot of frustration over that.”

She said the bitter, two-week in 2019 is also having lingering effects: “There’s still a lot of toxicity in the system over that — and just a general” she hesitated, “‘frustration’ is the nicest word I can think of right now — that the mayor seems so disconnected from reality of the financials that he wants to put the district in peril to pay the teacher’s contract.”

The state legislature has given Chicago until 2027 to transition to a fully elected board, and despite the challenges, Jacobo said the change will be welcome.

“I’m very glad that there will be a number of these new school board elected members who honestly are just not beholden to anyone but the parents, the voters in their district,” he said. “And when they talk, when they speak, it’ll be with a perspective of what is best for their community. I think it’s one step forward, but a lot of work to go.” 

Financial dysfunction is plaguing many city school districts.

is the most concerning. The district’s current $300 million budget gap is set to triple next year, which isn’t surprising since enrollment dropped 10% over six years as the district added staff. Now, it won’t close schools, won’t reduce the workforce and is being told by the mayor to give in to union demands for big raises. How would the math work? The mayor wants the district to take out a short-term, high-interest loan. Oh, and the city and district still need to work out how to .

is a close second. Two years ago, leaders agreed to a costly labor agreement that they admitted would require major cuts. But then they didn’t make those cuts. Instead, leaders exhausted all reserves and are borrowing money they’ll have to pay back by 2026. What’s the plan for the $100 million budget deficit? None yet. 

Why are financial crises suddenly common among large urban districts? Federal relief funds are part of the issue. Despite warnings that the money was temporary, many city districts used those one-time funds for salary raises and new staff hires.  

Some never had a plan for what would happen next. For example, when the federal relief funds ended, leaders in seemed surprised by a glaring $143 million hole in their budget forecast.

Of course, it’s never easy to cut labor. But avoidance makes it worse over time. In a recent hostage-like negotiation, the superintendent demanded $10 million from the city within 24 hours or the district would start issuing pink slips.

Falling birth rates are another factor. Over the long term, fewer kids means fewer dollars and a need for fewer schools. Closing schools is tough work, and many city districts especially aren’t up for it. In , schools are down to capacity. After pressing pause on its school closures, now has until Dec. 15 to come up with an alternative or face a potential .

Sometimes it’s basic financial mismanagement. For months, , inadvertently overpaid its staff, which, not surprisingly, has created a drain on the budget.

got behind on filing its financial reports and ended up with a state-imposed “corrective action plan” that involved repayment of $43 million. After the state imposed an external financial audit, the district has since .

In , where Las Vegas is located, “miscalculations” keep shifting the budget gap by tens of millions. And because New Orleans dragged its feet on surfacing a $20 million miscalculation of local tax revenue, each of its schools must cut some six or more staff midyear.

In St. Louis, the issue appears to be an unwarranted spending spree by a newly hired — and now fired — superintendent.

All these financial messes are leaving kids in the lurch. The dysfunction destabilizes the district, often leaving little time to make consequential decisions like staffing cuts or school closures. Employees are demoralized. Trust in the system erodes. Families with means pursue other options. Most of all, the financial upheaval takes all eyes off the district’s primary responsibility: student learning.

What is it about city school systems that predisposes them to such financial dysfunction? One obvious factor is that leaders are underprepared to manage complex financial operations that can involve upward of a billion dollars — or more — in public funds. Coming off a that outpaced inflation, few of today’s leaders have any experience with making hard budget tradeoffs. As forecasts change, leaders ignore the signs, stall or, in the case of , pass off major budget-cutting to a task force of 40 volunteers.  

Another reality is the intense, unbalanced political dynamics common in today’s urban centers. Powerful labor groups make unaffordable demands. Vocal parents resist program reductions or school closures. Some elected board members reverse planned cuts, imagining they’re defending constituents from the heartless bean counters in the district’s finance office. The good finance leaders flee the turmoil. Eventually, the district runs out of beans.

Strong district leadership should be an antidote. Leaders need to be , sharing options and explaining financial tradeoffs. They need to make hard choices, laser-focused on what’s best for students. They need to safeguard their schools’ financial integrity, ensuring that today’s decisions don’t erode the education of tomorrow’s students.

Missing in action are states. Typically, legislatures throw up their hands and bemoan local control. Many are wary of state takeover policies in part because of their of impacts on students.

But there are . Requiring multi-year budget forecasts and minimum levels of fiscal reserves are a start. States can then adopt policies that get triggered when districts overspend and deplete those reserves, each with the goal of helping the district get back on track. With some 80% to 90% of expenses going to personnel, states could mandate that labor contracts be reopened for renegotiation. They could appoint a financial auditor to communicate honestly about district finances. Also triggered could be a requirement that the board and leaders undergo finance training and hold more frequent meetings until budget gaps are addressed.

Standing by while finances erode further in these urban districts is unfair to the many students who depend on their leaders to manage the billions being deployed for their education. Continuing to look the other way will make things worse. City kids need the adults to figure this out.