Johnson stood at the podium of the South Side’s Sweet Holy Spirit Church as he took questions about the abrupt resignation, just a few days prior, of all seven of his appointees to the local board of education. Flanked by a roster of supporters and aides, he introduced his choices to fill the departed members’ seats and once again pledged to bring progressive change to the fourth-largest school system in the United States.

It was a theme he’d sounded since nearly two years earlier, and one that helped transform him from a former educator and organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union into in the country. For his allies, particularly the political powerhouse CTU, the consistency of the mayor’s messaging signaled his commitment to find more resources for Chicago Public Schools, even in the face of and vanishing pandemic relief funds.

But if the event was intended to calm the uproar that has swirled around the district’s leadership and finances since the beginning of the school year, it was destined to fall short. From its outset, the mayor was interrupted repeatedly by a group of hecklers protesting the replacement nominees. After some were removed, Johnson grew testy with reporters, objecting several times that their questions were “disrespectful.”

In , the mayor dismissed critics who have rejected his spending plans — including a proposal for the district to take out a $300 million loan to fund teacher pay increases and pension contributions — by comparing their arguments to those of Confederate leaders during the Civil War. 

Yet the number of those has only grown in the last few months. They now include the district’s CEO, Pedro Martinez, who of a short-term loan over the summer; the seven departed board members, who gave up their titles after Johnson to fire Martinez; and no fewer than 41 of Chicago’s 50 aldermen, who signed sternly counseling against further borrowing and voicing concern about the sudden empowerment of “lame-duck appointees” over the remainder of the board’s term. Public opinion is no sunnier, with revealing that 60 percent of Johnson’s constituents disapprove of his leadership.

At the heart of the conflict rests an elemental question: Who will govern Chicago’s schools? Mayors have enjoyed the right to appoint and dismiss members of the school board for nearly three decades, and Johnson’s slate of replacements will be able to approve his agenda once they are seated. But the Illinois legislature recently mayoral control over the district, charging the city with establishing a popularly elected, 21-seat board by 2027. In November, voters will choose the first 10 elected members, with Johnson appointing 11, to a hybrid body that will preside over the transition.

The district will spend that interregnum attempting to balance its accounts, while also negotiating new contracts for teachers and principals and deciding the fate of scores of under-enrolled schools. Local K–12 leaders foresee increasingly bitter disputes arising over the reach of the CTU, which now appears to hold most of the leverage over critical decisions. At the same time, their opponents increasingly question the legitimacy of a process that has seen one iteration of the school board precipitously leave office, and another be appointed in its place, just weeks before the election of a third set of candidates.  

Neither the mayor’s office nor the CTU responded to requests for comment from ����Ӱ��.

Arne Duncan, who served as Chicago Public Schools CEO from 2001 to 2009 and, later, as the U.S. secretary of education, said he hoped both sides could compromise around the most pressing dilemmas facing students and educators. Now helping to lead in dangerous neighborhoods, he observed that the tension around K–12 education could benefit from the type of de-escalation he often sees practiced between feuding gangs.

“Guys who have shot at each other still find ways to put that aside and make peace for themselves and their kids,” Duncan said. “If they can do that every day, I hope our elected leaders can find the courage to, metaphorically, put down the gun and do the right thing.”

But Meredith Paige, the mother of two high schoolers and a leader of the advocacy group CPS Family Dyslexia Collaborative, said that to everyday Chicagoans, the feeling was one of “chaos.”

“We might not see the impact on children for a couple of years, but on the ground, parents are saying, ‘What the [hell] is happening? The schools are falling apart, get me out of here.’”

‘A crisis of leadership’

Families have an immediate opportunity to make their feelings known in November, when Chicago will hold its school board elections. 

The power to appoint members, who wield authority over the major policy choices in a district serving more than 320,000 students, has rested solely with the mayor since 1995. Throughout 2019, long-serving Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel happily used that prerogative to overhaul the school system, lifting academic standards and opening over 150 new schools. Academic achievement flourished in the aftermath, with showing that students in Chicago Public Schools made more academic progress than those in virtually any other district in the United States.

But the public came to sour on the fast pace of change, especially after Emanuel successfully pushed for the closure of 49 schools in 2013. Public polling, along with a series of held throughout the city, favored direct elections over the political appointment process. The Illinois legislature acknowledged that reality in 2021 by passing legislation to establish an elected board.

have filed to run for seats in the city’s 10 newly created school board districts, with many grouping into two blocs: one backed largely by the Chicago Teachers Union and left-leaning community groups, the other favored by donors inclined toward education reform, including charter school supporters. Campaign donations across the 10 races $2.5 million, with charter-friendly groups for the bulk of spending thus far.

Against that messy backdrop, Mayor Johnson , who are expected to be seated later this month, to preside over the district until newly elected members take office in January. In the new year, they may be either re-appointed or again replaced by a new group of Johnson appointees. 

But in the meantime, they will be left with the critical decisions of whether to terminate the contract of CEO Martinez, who has served since 2021, and approve the mayor’s push to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars to defray short-term expenses, including a $175 million pension payment for non-teaching employees of Chicago Public Schools.

Byron Sigcho-Lopez, one of the nine alderman who did not sign the open letter criticizing the previous board’s mass resignation, said he was untroubled by the move, noting that the school board’s current term has nearly expired and that its members had not chosen to run for any of the elected seats. 

“I don’t see any problem with the board leaving,” Sigcho-Lopez said. “This board had one more session left. I think they’re doing the responsible thing, and I thank them for their service.”

But most other local office holders have objected strenuously both to the substance of Johnson’s plans and the lurching shifts in CPS governance. Democratic State Rep. Ann Williams — who that established a two-year interval of hybrid governance — said she was disturbed by the board’s unplanned turnover just weeks before Election Day. She added that she had been “inundated” with calls from worried constituents in her North Side district about what it might mean.

“This really flies in the face of what I was trying to do as sponsor of this bill in Springfield, which was to bring democracy to Chicago Public Schools,” Williams said. “What’s happened is a crisis of CPS leadership, and that’s how it’s being perceived by Chicagoans.”

Daniel Anello is the CEO of , a nonprofit that receives support from Chicago’s business and philanthropic communities and advocates for more parental voice in education policy. He argued that the developments of the last few weeks more closely resembled Emanuel’s “top-down” management style than the participatory democracy that voters hoped for in 2021.

“They’re just saying, ‘Here’s the replacement board’ and claiming that it was a smooth transition going as intended,” Anello said. “But then, why wasn’t the former board at the press conference? They just disappeared. It’s just not the inclusive promise of community engagement that this mayor ran on.”

Showdown over pensions, debt

The district projects that it will of $505 million in the coming school year, stemming from a combination of normal operating expenses, increasing healthcare costs, and of federal ESSER funds that helped states weather pandemic-related shortfalls in revenue. The long-term picture has been further clouded by steadily decreasing student enrollment, by more than 80,000 students — or roughly one-fifth — since 2010.

The administration of former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Johnson’s immediate predecessor, also transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in pension costs to CPS that had historically been underwritten by City Hall — a reflection, they argued, of the district’s new independence from mayoral control, which Lightfoot had opposed in 2021. While Martinez in May alongside CTU leaders to ask lawmakers for additional funding, the resulting increase to what had been requested. 

A source close to the district, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely about political matters, said the unsuccessful pitch to Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other Illinois Democrats served as a wake-up call that the district would not be spared from retrenchment in the coming years.

“I think that the union thought, once Brandon got elected, that they’d be able to walk into Springfield and get whatever they wanted,” the source said. “But there’s no money, especially after ESSER funds have expired.”

In July, Martinez and the school board that aimed to close the deficit through a mixture of staff cuts and freezes to almost 250 jobs. In an unusual response, the mayor the fiscal direction laid out by his own hand-picked board, counter-offering that $300 million to cover its costs. Instead, the budget was authorized as written.

After that, the source remarked, the relationship between the mayor and district leadership “went south very quickly.” The CTU, Johnson’s attack on the proposed cuts, of planning to close more schools. By mid-August, the mayor was widely thought to be preparing to fire his schools chief. 

In a statement, Martinez expressed optimism that some breathing room might be gained from the city’s special “tax increment financing” districts, which are funds designed to attract developers and employers. Using those resources, he argued, “we can address these looming costs without cuts, without taking on expensive short-term debt, and without waiting for additional funding to materialize from the state.”

But even if both sides can agree on a new source of spending, the district and the union are simultaneously engaged in a contentious negotiation over the terms of the next teacher contract. The , a non-partisan research group, has estimated that once the district pays out an expected series of teacher raises and assumes more pension debt from the city, its deficit . 

Karin Norington-Reaves for the elected seat in the city’s 10th school board district. A critic of Mayor Johnson, she has pledged from the CTU. She warned that if Johnson’s newly appointed board resorted to accepting a “payday loan,” it would only bring more financing costs and could lead to the district’s bonds being downgraded. 

“Anybody with any level of financial acumen understands that when you have debt, and you borrow, you create further debt,” Norington-Reaves said. “If you were an individual, that would tank your credit worthiness, and it’s no different for the school district.”

But Sigcho-Lopez, the alderman, countered that Chicago students’ learning needs were too great to countenance staffing reductions, especially given the still-significant trauma of COVID.

“To cut staffing in a time when these kids just survived a pandemic? We’ve got kids who are orphans, who need extra social workers,” he said. “I don’t think teachers and social workers and librarians are where we should focus our energy.”

Tough decisions ahead for new board

The priorities of Johnson’s newly selected board members remain unclear for now. Any action taken against Martinez is likely to prove explosive to politicians and educators alike; in August, when his termination was first rumored, and assistant principals signed a letter opposing the idea.

Though Johnson retains the power to appoint more than half of the incoming members of the hybrid board, November’s election outcomes will also help determine the course taken over much of the remainder of his first term. If the CTU’s preferred candidates prevail in their contests, they will likely take it as an endorsement of the positions shared by both the union and the mayor. 

The expense and pugnacity of the campaigns have already proven discouraging to some who had welcomed the arrival of an elected board. Parent Meredith Paige said that a friend and fellow activist had explored a run, but she was quickly discouraged by the demands of the process — the number of signatures required to run was raised from a proposed 250 to 1,000, more than twice that required to run for the Chicago City Council — and abandoned the notion.

“It just came out how much the charter schools are pouring into these races, and how much CTU has spent,” she lamented. “It’s exactly how people worried it was going to go.”

Norington-Reaves, a longtime nonprofit director and former congressional candidate, sounded confident in her ability to win the support of voters but argued that the stakes for the election seem higher than they should be. A Chicago native, she said she and others had long resisted the temptation to decamp to higher-performing suburban districts, but that her daughter’s learning needs were ill-served in her hometown.

“I don’t want to have to leave my city, but I will, if that’s what I have to do for my child.” Norington-Reaves concluded. “I am tired of fighting what feels like an uphill battle for investment, for economic development, and for good education just to have it be undermined. It feels like [the mayor] is willing to give it all to CTU.”

Duncan, a former high-level college basketball player, drew a comparison between the district’s situation and that of the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls. , he said, that team dissolved not due to failures on the court, but rather to personality conflicts among the franchise’s leadership and players.

Like the Bulls, Duncan said, Chicago Public Schools had a record to be proud of — and protected.

“No one beat the Bulls, they just imploded because they didn’t realize that the whole was bigger than the sum of their parts. Twenty-five years later, Chicago’s never had a championship basketball team. You don’t recover from these kinds of things.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation and the Joyce Foundation provide financial support to Kids First Chicago and ����Ӱ��.

The Hunt Institute announced former United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as its new board chair earlier this month, with Duncan succeeding the organization’s founder and namesake Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr., who served in the role for 20 years.

Former Republican New Mexico was also elected as vice chair. She succeeds Thomas Lambeth, the Board’s inaugural vice chair.

“I cannot think of two better people to serve the Board and The Hunt Institute than Secretary Duncan and Governor Martinez,” President and CEO Dr. Javaid Siddiqi said in . “Even during this exciting period of growth and expansion at The Institute, top of mind for me always is how to keep us grounded in the legacy of Governor Hunt. These two bring with them many years of personal experiences with Governor Hunt and share his commitment to equitable access to quality education for all students. I look forward to seeing how they use their new roles to push his mission forward.”

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The Hunt Institute, an affiliate of the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, was established in 2001 as the the James B. Hunt, Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy.

The organization works to bring together bipartisan elected officials and policymakers on key issues in public education “to help build and nurture visionary leadership and mobilize strategic action for greater educational outcomes and student success,” per its website. Recently, the institute has hosted its to talk about education policy, along with several partner webinars and conferences to highlight meeting student needs, like the inaugural Avanza cohort focused

The institute honors James Hunt, a former Democratic governor of North Carolina known for his strong support of public education. In 2021, the organization celebrated .

Both Duncan and Martinez were elected unanimously by the institute’s Board of Directors at its biannual meeting on June 1. They will each serve for the next two years.

In their roles, the new chair and vice chair will oversee all institutional activities, the release said, including strategic planning and budget oversight.

“I am excited to step into this new role as vice chair and serve the institute in an even more meaningful way,” Martinez said. “As a member of the Hunt-Kean Leadership Fellows advisory board as well, I’ve seen firsthand the impact this organization continues to have on policy and policymakers across the country. As vice chair, I look forward to working with Secretary Duncan to ensure that impact continues to grow.”

Martinez “has spent decades breaking glass ceilings,” per the release, serving as New Mexico’s first female governor and the nation’s first female minority governor from 2011 to 2018.

During his career spanning nearly 30 years, Duncan was the longest-serving secretary of education in American history, the release said. He served during the Obama Administration from 2009 to 2015.

“I have admired Gov. Hunt and his Institute for many years – he truly is one of my heroes in this space,” Duncan said. “I am deeply honored to have been elected to this position and to have the opportunity to lead the board. The institute has done a phenomenal job pushing the governor’s vision forward and making real change in schools, districts, and states across the country, and as chair, I will do everything in my power to support the critical work being done and spread that vision even further.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

At a press conference for former teacher and union organizer Brandon Johnson, activists from multiple cities gathered to denounce the record of his rival, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas. But their jeers — focused on his aggressive posture toward transforming districts, including by closing schools — were loudly met by Vallas’s own backers, who defended his decades-long career as an educational improvement czar. The cacophony of chants and counter-claims seemed to end in confusion.

Both the spectacle and the larger campaign, which will be decided in an April 4 runoff vote, capture competing visions both for urban education and the Democratic Party, which presides over America’s biggest and most troubled school systems. A onetime celebrity of the education reform movement, promoting school choice and tough accountability measures in struggling districts, while the more progressive Johnson during the Chicago Teachers Union’s rise to national prominence. 

But for all the contrast between the two, the discussion around schools seems oddly flat. The reason is simple: Within a few years, the office of the mayor will have little authority to act in the K–12 arena.

By 2027, governance of Chicago Public Schools will revert to (elections for half of its seats will be held next November), bringing an end to more than three decades of mayoral control over the district. That period saw massive improvement in school performance throughout the 2000s, followed by costly battles over teacher contracts and the fate of underperforming schools. More recently, scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that in math after spending much of the pandemic in remote instruction. 

As educators attempt to repair that damage in classrooms, the next mayor will have to contend with structural challenges that may not yield to either union-powered or reform-friendly solutions. Principal among these is a long-term slide in enrollment that has seen as the third-largest district in the country. The number of charter students , albeit more slowly, as African American families in disproportionate numbers. 

Less than a week before a winner is decided, the race appears to be the closest mayoral contest Chicago has seen in decades. Vallas and Johnson finished first and second, respectively, in a February primary (defeating, among others, unpopular incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot), but collectively received just over half of all votes cast. Vallas has in subsequent polling and collected the endorsement of local supporters like Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Johnson, meanwhile, has swept the support of progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Beth Swanson, CEO of the venture philanthropy fund and former deputy chief of staff to former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, called the next four years a remarkable “political moment in time for public education.”

“These are complex waters that the city leadership haven’t navigated before,” Swanson said.

The rise and fall of Chicago reform

When longtime Mayor Richard Daley sought and received broader authority over Chicago Public Schools in 1995, less than a decade after Education Secretary Bill Bennett , he tapped Vallas to spearhead that nudged and won national praise. A longtime budget specialist in both Chicago and Springfield, the new CEO spent billions to renovate facilities, open new afterschool and magnet programs and offer significant salary increases for teachers.

He also established an accountability regime that prefigured much of what would become national law in No Child Left Behind. Ending the phenomenon he derided as “social promotion,” that third-, sixth-, and eighth-graders who didn’t meet benchmark scores on standardized tests would have to attend summer school or even repeat a grade. That move earned a commendation from , which Vallas’s mayoral campaign has since recycled into an election ad. 

It is an how much credit Vallas deserves for the progress CPS made after he left in 2001, but the district’s momentum was startling and well-documented. carried over into the tenure of his successor as CEO, Duncan, who transformed Chicago’s K–12 landscape by in less than a decade. And the markers of success continued to accumulate, with Duncan riding a wave of acclaim to an appointment as U.S. secretary of education.

Elaine Allensworth, director of the , said that “huge improvements in high school graduation rates, in college-going rates, in the rigor of coursework, [and] in the quality of instruction” belied commonly held narratives of dysfunction.

“People look at Chicago in terms of what makes the papers, and a lot of the time, they think it’s…struggling,” Allensworth said. “But what people don’t realize is that it’s actually a school system that made incredible progress over the last 15 years.”

Chicago’s reputation as a reformer’s playground hit its apex in 2017, when research from Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon indicated that CPS students made the most academic progress , experiencing six years of growth in the five calendar years between 2009 and 2014. By that point, however, the city was being run by Emanuel, and the public had begun to reject nostrums of disruptive innovation.

As in other cities where reform ran out of steam in the 2010s, the shuttering of failing schools helped ignite a backlash. Citing chronically poor performance and under-enrollment, Emanuel’s administration targeted nearly 50 buildings for closure before the 2013–14 school year, low-income and minority students on the city’s South and West sides. Both parents and educators expressed outrage, and a later study found that the chaos of the process hurt student achievement.

The gradual souring on charter schools, testing, and high-stakes accountability found its reflection in the itinerant career of Paul Vallas, who left Chicago for subsequent stints as a superintendent in and , and . In most of his stops, Vallas’s energetic management style yielded major changes and higher test scores; but he also tended to with local politicians and sometimes left in his wake.

Representatives for both campaigns ignored interview requests. But Thomas Bowen, a Chicago-based political consultant who recently advised Mayor Lightfoot’s reelection campaign, said that elements of Vallas’s technocratic history could prove a liability.

“The policy direction on this has pretty clearly moved away from the education reform model of the ’90s and 2000s,” he said. “So if you’re someone like Paul Vallas, who has a policy history as an education reformer, the smart thing to do is to not really run much on that.” 

Union goes ‘big time’

Bowen, who previously helped both Emanuel and Lightfoot claim the mayoralty, compared the attitudes of the electorate with the action of a rubber band. Overstretched by the likes of Vallas, Duncan and Emanuel for so many years, it eventually snapped in the other direction. 

Waiting there were the more than 20,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union, who had watched in frustration as CPS’s leadership embraced ambitious changes. In 2012, and tweaks to teacher tenure policies, the union went on its first strike in 25 years; nine days after that, they declared victory.

At least one poll showed that the strike among Chicagoans, who sympathized with the CTU’s complaints about poor working conditions and outdated school buildings. More importantly, to the national labor movement — on its heels for most of the the NCLB era — that they could take on reform administrations and win. Today, the 2012 Chicago strike is , including the 2018 #RedforEd wave.

Closer to home, CTU helped build a network of labor and advocacy groups , which it co-founded with other unions. Brandon Johnson, then serving as CTU’s deputy political director, said in with the socialist journal Jacobin that the necessity of such independent political organizations lay in the fact that elected Democrats were “not responding to the needs of the community.”

“They work with other progressive organizations in Chicago, some of which they are charter members and funders of,” Bowen said. “That progressive coalition is very successful not just at the city level, but also at the state level.”

But the prize of the mayoralty eluded them, even as CTU-endorsed challengers pushed Emanuel and Lightfoot to runoff elections in 2015 and 2019. Instead, successive clashes over contracts and school funding led to in 2016 and at the beginning of the 2019–20 school year. 

The COVID era brought mixed signals about the union’s potency. Chicago students spent over a year in virtual or hybrid learning, only returning to full-time, in-person instruction . But within a few months, the district over union members’ demands for another period of remote instruction at the height of the Omicron wave. After enduring a public scolding from city officials, the employees five days later, having failed to secure their top safety priorities. 

If that spat didn’t achieve its intended result, however, the CTU could take solace in a string of legislative successes at the state capital, where Democratic lawmakers have spent the last half-decade delivering on the union’s top priorities. In 2019, newly elected Gov. J.B. Pritzker the Illinois Charter Commission, which previously acted as an authorizer of last resort if local school boards rejected new charter school applications. The governor also over matters like class size and the length of the school year, which had been disallowed in the 1990s with the move to mayoral control. 

As Chicago Public Schools charts its way forward from COVID, the city’s policy environment is significantly more antagonistic to the reform movement than it was a decade ago. The district’s school ratings system, which was suspended during the pandemic, with a less “punitive” metric, and beginning next year, grade promotion — the hallmark of Vallas’s tenure as CEO — rather than test scores.

Peter Cunningham, a longtime Democratic staffer who worked alongside Vallas in Chicago and served as assistant secretary of education in the Obama administration, remarked that CTU had completed the long metamorphosis from a player that “didn’t quite know how to compete in the political sphere” into one that was comfortable winning and wielding power.

“They’ve graduated into the big-time,” Cunningham said. “Over the last 10 years, they’ve achieved enormous power in Chicago and in Springfield. And here they are, on the cusp of competing for the top job in the city.”

Mayoral control experiment ends

Of the slew of union wins in the last half-decade, likely none was more significant than the state assembly’s 2021 creation of . The 21-member board, established , will begin as a hybrid entity before switching to a fully elected body by 2027. 

However those campaigns develop — school board races in other major districts, such as Los Angeles, have sometimes grown into spending wars waged between reformers and union allies — CTU will undoubtedly cheer the end of Chicago’s mayoral control experiment. But if Johnson finally breaks through as teachers’ champion in City Hall, he will ironically take office just as power begins to drain from that building.

Aside from the initial elections for board seats, the key event during the mayor’s first term will be the negotiation of a new union contract when the existing one expires in 2024.

While Vallas generally presided over labor peace in his time as a district leader, Cunningham said, the CTU would inevitably take a more adversarial posture toward him than one of their own. The specter of another strike, echoing those launched in the early years of Emanuel’s and Lightfoot’s mayoralties, already hangs over the city’s politics.

“They’re not just going to go away quietly,” Cunningham noted. “If they lose, I fully expect that they’ll come back even harder to maintain their position.”

Another action item is the diminishing size of the districts. One provision of the school board law on all school closures until 2025, when the first elected members take office. At that time, Mayor Johnson or Vallas will be sorely tempted to sunset buildings operating drastically below capacity. Between the city’s shifting demographic patterns, declining fertility, and COVID flight, CPS enrollment in the past 20 years; that figure is easily the equivalent of 200-plus schools. 

The loss of those children has the amount of new funding the city receives from Springfield this year. Even more concerning, the arrival of an independent school board will sever CPS’s finances from the city’s. In anticipation of that decoupling, the Lightfoot administration in pension costs to the district’s books, effectively saddling them with an unfunded mandate. 

Without a new source of local or state revenue, the new costs could explode the district deficit. Pension payments alone will eventually “take any new revenues we have — state or local,” in a recent school board meeting. 

All those administrative challenges are layered atop a student population profoundly scarred by the experience of COVID and remote instruction. Compared with Illinois as a whole, which mostly saw modest drops in achievement during the pandemic, to levels last seen during the 2000s. Social and behavioral problems persist as well: Last school year, 45 percent of CPS students (and about half of its poor students) . 

Meredith Paige, the mother of two CPS students and a leader of the advocacy group CPS Family Dyslexia Collaborative, agreed that the demands of stabilizing and improving the system would likely overwhelm the educational designs of Lightfoot’s successor. But between the influence remaining in the office and the ideological separation between Johnson and Vallas, she added, the election’s two potential results would carry vastly different implications for education in Chicago.

“Either outcome dramatically changes education policy in Chicago because they have such different views,” she said. “Schools are going to change regardless, either toward the CTU view of the world or the Vallas view of the world.”

Scan the constitutions of most states, and you won’t find any clause guaranteeing every child the right to a quality public education. They promise a free public education, but not a great one. 

It is no wonder states across the nation have failed to deliver a quality public education for so many students, particularly children of color and those who are economically disadvantaged. Even before the pandemic, just 35 percent of American fourth graders were reading at grade level, along with only 22 percent of Latino and 15 percent of African-American eighth graders, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

These outcomes are not inevitable. They are the result, in many cases, of policies formulated by a system that was never designed and is not incentivized to put the needs of all students first. Convinced that a quality public education — not just a free one — should be a civil right for all American children, President Obama and I advocated for parent empowerment and a student-centered agenda with better educational opportunities for millions of young people across the nation.

But so much more work must be done to meet this moment for the children and parents of America. At the state level, countless policies perpetuate educational injustice. In most states, these have so far been nearly impossible to change because kids can’t vote, parents don’t have lobbyists and the right to a quality public education is not enshrined in the constitution.

A growing movement of parents, educators and community leaders across multiple states have begun to advocate for change in their state constitutions. Last year, bills were introduced in the , and legislatures to enshrine a right to a quality education in their constitutions. These movements have continued to accelerate recently in to establish a long-overdue seat at the table for public school parents to advocate for the interests of all students. 

The Page Amendment campaign in Minnesota is leading this national movement. It is driven by a broad coalition that includes youth, parents, education and community leaders, businesses, sovereign tribal nations and, notably, Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, and Alan Page, former Minnesota Supreme Court justice and iconic former Minnesota Viking. Their initiative would amend the state’s constitution to add: “All children have a fundamental right to a quality public education that fully prepares them with the skills necessary for participation in the economy, our democracy, and society.”      

The campaign has built a broad bipartisan legislative coalition, with the goal of a historic education civil rights public referendum this November.  

Throughout two decades of working to improve American public education, as superintendent of Chicago Public Schools then as Obama’s education secretary, I have learned that it takes bold action to transform struggling schools and entrenched bureaucracies. When politicians and special interests defend the status quo, it takes parent power to compel the public school system to meet the needs of students. 

Establishing a constitutional right to a quality public education would empower parents with the right to challenge policies that harm students and double down on longstanding injustices. Such a tool would be particularly valuable for communities of color, where the education bureaucracy has failed generations of children and ignored generations of parents. 

In the wake of pandemic-related school closures that denied in-person learning to millions of children for up to 18 months, parents in Virginia, San Francisco and elsewhere have voted against Democrats who were perceived to embrace the status quo at the expense of children. Especially in this unique moment, relegating parents to the sidelines and telling them to leave the education of their children to the so-called experts has proven to be a losing political strategy.

Politicians have talked about education as a civil right for generations, but too often only as a metaphor. Empowering parents to advocate for the interests of all students would make public education more public. It would reorient education policymaking around the student learning because all children deserve the opportunity to reach their full potential regardless of race, ethnicity, disability, geography or socioeconomic status. 

This is our moment. Now is the time for Minnesota to chart a path forward for the nation by translating “kids first” from a soundbite into a civil right for all public school students. 

 Arne Duncan is managing partner at the Emerson Collective, a former secretary of education and Chicago superintendent of schools, and author of “How Schools Work.”