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 .

Nebraska lawmakers approved a Feb. 27 allowing schools to for violent behavior. Schools will be required to provide a plan to parents whose young children are suspended that describes available resources and how the student’s behavior will be handled in the future. Gov. Jim Pillen said he intends to sign the bill into law.

In the rural Nebraska panhandle, elementary teachers at Kimball Public Schools have watched students as young as 5 throw furniture, bite staff and attack classmates. 

Until a few years ago, in- and out-of-school suspensions were one way that Nebraska schools dealt with this type of behavior. But in 2023, state lawmakers for students in prekindergarten through second grade unless they brought a weapon to school. 

It was billed as a move to protect children with disabilities and prevent the disproportionate suspension of students of color. But now, Nebraska lawmakers are trying to reverse the ban. Educators say suspensions are needed to stop severe or violent behavior — which has gotten worse since the pandemic — and to get parents’ attention about how their children are acting in school. 

“We will have a student physically assault another student, or fight staff members. And then it happens repeatedly. The parents’ support is not there. What are we going to do in Kimball, Nebraska?” asked Superintendent Trevor Anderson. “The only solution that we really have is that they’re still in the building and now it’s essentially one of the staff members babysitting all day long, because (the student) is not able to handle being in the regular classroom setting.”

Nebraska is one of a handful of states, including Minnesota and Texas, that have sought to repeal suspension bans in the last year. At least 18 states prohibit suspensions for students in prekindergarten through second or third grade, according to the most recent published in 2020.

A rise in student misbehavior post-COVID, combined with inadequate funding for special education, has left districts struggling with how to address behaviors — sometimes violent — in the classroom. But research that suspensions disproportionately impact students of color and children with disabilities or from marginalized backgrounds, including those in early grades. 

While Black children made up 18% of U.S. preschoolers during the 2021-22 school year, they represented 38% of students who received at least one out-of-school suspension, according to the latest federal . About 23% of U.S. preschoolers received services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) during that time and represented 41% of those who were suspended.

One found that “receiving a suspension serves as a key turning point toward increased odds of incarceration” for students later in life.

“I don’t … think it works to suspend pre-K students (through) second grade‬ students at all. I was‬ ‭suspended at that age and, quite frankly, I don’t believe it helped. I went home and watched cartoons. I don’t think that changed my behavior‬ ‭at all,” said Nebraska state Sen. Terrell McKinney when he in 2023. “I believe it prepares‬ kids — especially kids that look like me — for the juvenile justice system, the child welfare system and then the‬ ‭criminal justice system.”

Discipline that might be appropriate for older students can be harmful for young children’s development, said Luis Rodriguez, a New York University professor who school discipline. 

“Young children are still learning. They probably are still developing social skills — especially when we’re talking about kindergarten, first grade — and it might be the first time that some of these children are around other children and away from home,” he said. “Exclusionary disciplines such as suspensions at that age can interrupt foundational learning.”

Since the pandemic, some policymakers have focused on ways to combat in schools to protect teacher and student safety, while others have tried to reduce disparities in school discipline and ensure children don’t miss out on learning, said Zeke Perez, assistant director of the nonprofit . 

Maryland was one of the first states to for early grades, in 2017. It prohibited the practice for students in prekindergarten through second grade unless there was an “imminent threat” to staff or students.

A published in 2024 found that the law reduced the probability of K-2 suspensions from 1.9% in 2017 to 0.8% in 2018, while rates remained steady around 3% for grades 3 to 5 following the ban. But disparities still remained in suspension rates for students who were Black, low-income or had disabilities.

Paul Lemle, president of the Maryland State Education Association, said the law has been beneficial for schools.

“We’re always trying to avoid removal from school, especially for our youngest students,” he said. “Everywhere there’s challenging behavior. It comes with the territory. This hasn’t made the job more difficult. It’s the right thing to do for these really young kids.”

While Maryland’s law allows suspensions for violent behavior, Nebraska’s only exception is for bringing a weapon to school. Some educators and lawmakers said revisions are needed to expand the exceptions to protect students and teachers.

Nebraska state Sen. Dave Murman, who proposed in January, said he’s heard from school districts that the same students act out repeatedly and can’t be removed from the classroom. 

“I don’t believe this law is working. Suspension should never be the first option, but what happens when a student behaves in a violent manner and students or staff get hurt?” he said at a Jan. 27 . “I’ve heard stories from teachers and administrators about students biting, hitting, throwing desks and chairs, stabbing with pencils and even kicking the stomach of a pregnant teacher. How can children learn in that environment?”

Murman said suspensions might be the only way administrators can get a parent’s attention to address their child’s behavior. He said some schools aren’t able to make contact with families until they have to physically remove their child from school after a suspension.

These challenges have become more common for Kimball Public Schools since the pandemic, said Anderson. The district is located near the Wyoming and Colorado borders and serves nearly 400 students. About half are enrolled in elementary grades.

Anderson said he had never seen the level of aggression and violent behavior from young elementary students in his eight years as an administrator until recently. He said classroom management has been more difficult since the suspension ban went into effect in 2023.

Small, remote districts like Kimball don’t receive the same resources as metropolitan schools that provide , such as behavioral supports or trauma-informed interventions. A licensed mental health practitioner visits the district once a week. Anderson said he recently filled a behavior specialist position that had been open for a year and a half.

Before the ban, Omaha Public Schools used suspensions in kindergarten through second grade on rare occasions to get a behavior plan in place for a struggling student, said Kathy Poehling, president of the Omaha Education Association. 

“We’re not forced to suspend preschoolers or kindergartners. But if that’s what we need to do in order to get people together, to put a plan in place, sometimes you need 24 hours to do that,” she said. “I don’t really support the idea of repealing the entire ban, because I think then we’re not really looking at the situation and saying, ‘What does the child need?’ We don’t want to suspend just to suspend.”

Omaha’s Education Rights Counsel, a legal advocacy nonprofit, supported the ban because children between the ages of 4 and 7 were being sent home multiple times a year, said Director Lauren Micek Vargas. 

Some students might be exhibiting behaviors because of a disability or possible trauma at home, she said. 

“With our most young, vulnerable children, oftentimes that behavior actually is a form of communication of something else,” she said. “If you punish something without trying to figure out what is happening underneath the surface … we’re missing out on an opportunity to really connect with the child and also see other things that are going on.”

But under IDEA, some legal procedures that could help students get access to special education services are triggered only by suspensions, said Robyn Linscott, director of family and education policy at The Arc of the United States.

Under IDEA, schools are required to hold a meeting with specialists, teachers and the family of any student who has been suspended for 10 or more days during a school year. These sessions determine whether the behavior that led to the suspensions is the result of a disability.

“If that is the case, then the school has to make sure that all these other supports are in place before they can be suspended again, before they can be expelled,” Linscott said. “They often look back to functional behavior assessments and their (individualized education program) to see if it was actually being followed. This is a really important protection and procedural point for students with disabilities.”

Even without suspensions, schools can informally remove students with disabilities by asking their parents to take them home. But that doesn’t count toward the federal 10-day limit.

Last year, Minnesota lawmakers initiated bills to reinstate suspensions and other exclusionary discipline only two years after passing a ban. State Sen. Jim Abeler, one of the bill authors, said the suspension ban had been implemented with good intentions, but “it’s been a disaster.”

“There’s no chance to intervene,” he said. “The kids see no consequences and don’t ever get a chance to get on track with a plan. Superintendents came (to the legislature) and begged for a way to work around this.”

A 2017 in Texas was revised last year to expand the reasons for sending a student in prekindergarten through second grade home. Before the change, young students could be suspended only if they brought a gun to school. Now, include repeated or significant disruption to the classroom or a threat to the health and safety of other students.

In Nebraska, lawmakers like state Sen. Ashlei Spivey are working on a that would allow more exceptions, like chronic disruptive behavior or violence. The legislation, which is separate from the bill to repeal the ban and more likely to pass, is in the second debate and voting stage in the legislature. 

Spivey said that while sending students home might be a tool for discipline, alternative interventions are key to preventing disproportionate suspensions and keeping young children in the classroom.

“If you feel like a 7-year-old should not be in a classroom, my thought is that you cannot throw them away, but you ask, ‘What are they navigating? What type of support do they need?’ ” she said. “There also needs to be clearly defined expectations of what escalates to a suspension and how you are defining that, and how it is being applied to all student populations.”

“The money’s coming. The money’s not coming. Oh no, we have to shut all of our Head Starts. No we don’t,” she said, describing the ping-ponging state leaders have been through between U.S. Secretary Linda McMahon’s efforts to downsize the department and court rulings reversing her actions. “We’re going through total D.C. chaos right now. Every time you turn right, it says turn left.”

To make sense of those shifts, she turns to Adam Schott, her associate secretary for student support and another top official at the Education Department during the Biden administration. In Washington, he oversaw the distribution of $122 billion in relief funds and was a primary point of contact on school improvement efforts. Having him on her team, Marten said, is like having “phone-a-friend on speed dial.”

Schott is part of an exodus of former experts in federal policy, budgeting and data who have literally gone “back to the states,” to borrow McMahon’s catch-phrase. In her eyes, the state level is where the magic happens, away from the one-size-fits-all ethos of Washington. The irony is that a recent crop of state officials are themselves federal ex-pats who resigned or were displaced by McMahon’s layoffs. ����Ӱ�� also spoke to former department staff working in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Illinois. Because of the secretary’s efforts to shutter the department, there have never been so many federal staffers looking for work. 

With the future of the federal government’s role in education uncertain, observers say their expertise is more valuable than ever. 

“The people I worked with were there for like 15, 20 years,” said Kiara Nerenberg, a top data expert who resigned from her position with the National Center for Education Statistics just ahead of the mass layoffs in March. “There’s just so much knowledge that’s now looking for a place to land.”

Maryland’s ‘biggest score’ 

Marten’s team in Delaware also includes , who served as acting secretary at the department before McMahon was confirmed and has decades of experience in the federal government. 

Marten called her “the right hand and the left hand” of multiple secretaries, including Democrat Arne Duncan and Republican Betsy DeVos. Carter stepped into the role of acting chief operating officer for Federal Student Aid last year following after a disastrous launch of the redesigned financial aid form. She oversaw corrections that contributed to a this year. Carter resigned in April and is now helping to overhaul Delaware’s outdated school funding formula.

But Marten didn’t get all the talent. Because of its proximity to Washington, Maryland has scooped up several former staffers. Montgomery County even launched targeting displaced federal employees.

Richard Kincaid leads the division of college and career pathways at the Maryland State Department of Education. His “biggest score,” he said, was hiring Nerenberg, the former NCES staffer. One of her responsibilities was making “all of the tens and hundreds of thousands of points on maps that tell you where schools are,” she said. She was part of to identify neighborhood demographics — vital information for programs like Title I for low-income schools and grants for rural areas.��

Now, she gathers data for career and technical education programs, but is also working to better align career-focused education with the needs of local labor markets. Having Nerenberg “catapulted us years ahead,” Kincaid said.��

Others searching for new jobs traveled far outside Washington. 

Tara Lawley spent 17 years with NCES, where she worked on both higher education and K-12 data collection. She was laid off along with over 1,300 other staff at the department in March while her husband, who worked in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, took the “fork in the road” option, a deferred resignation with several months of paid leave.

In August, she found her new position with the Illinois Board of Higher Education, where she’s the managing director of policy, research and fiscal analysis.

“We sold our house, tore our children out of everything they knew, and moved them across the country,” she said.

Her kids, 5 and 8, are doing fine, she said. But the experience reinforced her view that some decisions shouldn’t be left up to the states. 

“How do you take a [special education plan] from one state to another? That’s a challenge that still exists and it’s certainly not going to be solved if you do it state by state,” she said. “If you’re in a state that’s really not doing well in K-12 education and you move to a different state, your kid can be really far behind.”

‘Connective tissue’

Some former staffers have branched out into agencies that focus on more than just education.

Sarah Mehrotra spent two years in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, where she administered pandemic recovery efforts like curbing chronic absenteeism and preventing students from becoming homeless. She left the department in January along with other members of Cardona’s team, but knew she wanted to keep doing similar work.

Now she’s part of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s Office for Children, where she works on an initiative to in specific communities. They include Frederick County’s , where more than 80% of students in two elementary schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and Baltimore’s Cherry Hill neighborhood, where a state grant supports a .

When she was with the department, she said officials were “screaming from the rooftops” about ways districts could blend federal dollars with other sources of funding to re-engage students who became disconnected from school during the pandemic. Now, she said, “It’s super helpful to have the federal, state and local perspective” when working with grantees at the community level.

Those with federal experience, she said, can serve as “connective tissue” between states and the Education Department. 

Republicans say there should be fewer ties to Washington, not more. At least one former department official, now at the state level, agrees. McKenzie Snow, Iowa’s education director, worked as an aide to DeVos and held top education positions in New Hampshire and Virginia. 

She’s among those who, like McMahon, say that states are well equipped to manage federal education funds without the department’s strict oversight. Her state was the first to submit to roll federal funds into a block grant.

‘Their own innovation’

McMahon often points to reading gains in Mississippi and Louisiana to argue that the department is unnecessary. 

“The states that are making great progress — it’s through their own innovation,” she said during a recent . “It’s not coming from the Department of Education.”

But not all states have seen the same progress, and many have experienced significant turnover in leadership since the pandemic, which can contribute to disruption across an agency. Just the state chiefs changed in Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oklahoma and Utah, and since the beginning of 2023, more than 30 states have changed superintendents. 

Having staff with some knowledge of federal grants and requirements is a plus right now, said Anna Edwards, co-founder and chief advocacy officer at Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting group. 

“Given the uncertainty at the federal level, having those answers in house within a state is valuable,” she said. “During the shutdown, leaders couldn’t even talk to anyone at the department.”

Elizabeth Ross, who served in the department during the , has worked for three chiefs since joining the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education in 2020. 

“It’s our job to make sure that students don’t feel that transition, that they continue to have access to all of the resources and support,” she said. 

A former third grade teacher in D.C., she led federal efforts to turn around low-performing schools and revamp No Child Left Behind, with its tough testing and accountability requirements, into the more-flexible Every Student Succeeds Act. 

Under Secretary Duncan, the department used stimulus funds as leverage to get states to adopt the Common Core standards and incorporate student test scores into teacher evaluations. The incentives often drew complaints about government overreach, but they also “catalyzed and generated a lot of reform,” she said. 

What she didn’t have was frequent contact with teachers and parents directly affected by those programs. Now an assistant superintendent, she spends a lot of time in schools and often runs into teachers in the community who ask about specific curriculum materials.

She has new appreciation for their input. 

“My perspective has shifted, compared to when I was at the federal level, on how important local buy-in is for the success of policies,” she said. “It’s something that I understand in a much, much deeper way.”

SPRINGFIELD — The first school report card issued under Illinois’ new, revised scoring system shows higher student proficiency rates in English language arts and math, but continuing disparities between racial, ethnic and economic subgroups.

The 2025 report card shows more than half of all students (52.4%) scored proficient or better on English language arts exams, but only 38% met grade-level proficiency standards for math.

Those numbers are based on standardized tests that students from third grade through high school took in the spring 2025 semester. They reflect a the Illinois State Board of Education approved in August that established new benchmarks for proficiency.

“Illinois’ previous benchmarks for English language arts proficiency were the most restrictive in the country, resulting in the mislabeling of high achieving college ready students as being not proficient,” State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders said during a media briefing on the report card.

“This meant that the students who were succeeding in school passing advanced placement and dual credit courses, taking leadership roles within their schools, enrolling in college and still being labeled as not proficient on our state assessment.”

The change in scoring systems was expected to result in more students being classified as proficient in reading and math, but fewer in science. And that is what happened.

In 2024, only 39% of students who were tested scored proficient or better in English language arts and only 28% did so in math. On the science assessment, which is given to fifth and eighth grade students, the proficiency rate dropped from 53.1% in 2024 to 44.6% in 2025.

But Sanders said the 2025 scores cannot really be compared with previous years because the year-over-year changes are mostly the result of the new scoring system, not a change in how well students performed. However, he also said there were other indications that student performance did improve in 2025.

“They would have increased if we had kept the same cut scores,” he said. “However, we changed the cut scores, so we can’t tell you what they would have been. But we know they would have improved.”

Performance gaps

All states have issued annual report cards since the 2002-2003 school year when they were mandated by the federal law known as the . They were intended as a tool to hold districts and individual schools accountable for bringing all students up to a level of proficiency in reading and math, and for improving their high school graduation rates.

That also meant closing the persistent achievement gaps between racial, ethnic and economic subgroups of students.

But the law also gave states flexibility to establish their own standards for proficiency and to develop their own tests to measure student performance.

In Illinois, most students in grades 3-8 take the for English language arts and Math. Students in fifth and eighth grade also take the Illinois Science Assessment.

At the , ninth and 10th grade students take the PreACT Secure exam. High school juniors and some high school seniors take the ACT with Writing, which includes tests in English, math, reading, science and writing.

In Illinois, the 2025 report card shows there are still wide gaps in proficiency rates between white, Black and Hispanic students in both English language arts and math.

Among fourth graders, for example, 55.4% of white students scored proficient or better in math, compared to 28.8% of Hispanic students and 17.4% of Black students.

Among eighth graders, two-thirds of white students (66.6%) scored proficient compared to just over one-third (36.7%) for Black students and 45.4% for Hispanic students.

The 2025 report card also includes data for the first time for a newly categorized ethnic group — “Middle Eastern or North African,” abbreviated MENA in the data files.

Among MENA students, the 2025 report card showed a 53.9% proficiency rate in fourth-grade English language arts and a 42.3% proficiency rate for eighth-grade math.

Graduation rates

One area where Illinois has made progress in closing achievement gaps is high school graduation rates.

In 2025, the statewide four-year graduation rate reached a 15-year high of 89%. That was up 3.4 percentage points from a decade earlier. But the rate was also up across all demographic groups, and the gap between those groups narrowed significantly.

In 2015, the four-year graduation rate among white students was 90.2%. That was 14.7 points higher than the Black graduation rate, and 9.5 points higher than the rate for Hispanic students.

In 2025, the graduation rate for white students inched up to 92.4%, but it also rose among other groups. As a result, the gap between white and Black students narrowed to just 9.5 percentage points, and the gap between white students and Hispanic students narrowed to just 6 points.

Sanders gave credit for much of that improvement to the Evidence-Based Funding formula, which lawmakers passed in 2017. That law called for adding at least $300 million per year in new funding each year to the state’s K-12 education budget.

Since then, Sanders said, Illinois has added more than $3 billion in EBF funding to the budget, with the bulk of that money targeted toward the least-funded school and earmarked for things specifically designed to improve student outcomes.

“Districts have used these resources to expand interventions like summer school,” he said. “They’ve added mentoring, credit recovery courses, transition programs for English and math, and they broadened access to career and technical education, advanced placement, international baccalaureate and dual credit. These opportunities keep students engaged and on track for success.”

Other findings

The report card also contains data on several other measures of the state’s education system.

The number of full-time equivalent teachers working in Illinois reached a new high of 137,899, an increase of 687 from the previous year. The teaching workforce also became slightly more racially diverse, with 21.1% of them classified as nonwhite, compared to 20.4% last year. But total student enrollment decreased slightly to just under 1.85 million.

Chronic absenteeism declined for the third consecutive year in 2025 but still remained high at 25.4%. Students are classified as chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of the days in a school year, regardless of whether the absence is excused or not. The rate shot up during the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a peak of 29.8% in 2022.

is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

With this toxic stew of factors both internal and external, I fear America may be entering a dangerous period for K-12 public education, with an increased risk of corruption and malfeasance.

Look at what’s happening in Illinois. The state Board of Education recently voted to for the Illinois Assessment of Readiness, the standardized test used in the public schools. The result: 53% of students will now be judged to be proficient in reading, rather than 38%. It appears to be a blatant effort to lower standards in order to make the public schools in Illinois look better.

The board claims that it has to do this, because so many of those students are going on to college despite falling short of proficiency. But talk to anyone who works with incoming university freshmen and you will realize that, in the current era, college enrollment is of college readiness.

The K-12 school system is embattled: Enrollment just keep coming, and public support is at an . Since the pandemic, has gone from stagnant to declining, especially when compared with that of other wealthy countries. Many districts have unfunded pension plans that will add even more financial strain. And the current workforce, especially in the big urban districts, is about the future of public education.

K-12 districts are largely controlled by local politicians — school board members — who often have strong incentives to keep powerful interest groups happy in the short term, whether they are parent organizations or union leaders, instead of making difficult decisions that would protect their school system’s long-term integrity. These include closing schools, reducing administrative positions or redrawing (or eliminating) attendance zone lines. These board members control hundreds of in taxpayer funding every year and what may be over a trillion dollars worth of underutilized real estate assets.

This is a powder keg of risk with vast amounts of money at stake, not to mention the public trust and the educational opportunities of a generation of children.

Adding to the problem, local journalism has deteriorated in the last two decades, as newspapers around the country have gone out of business or cut their news desks. The education beat seems to have . What’s more, after being gutted by the Trump administration, it’s unlikely that the federal Department of Education is going to be able to play much of a watchdog role in coming years.

The legal oversight of the public schools mainly falls to state legislatures. But most Republican lawmakers have other fish to fry, focusing on culture war issues and giving families escape routes from the system in the form of tax credit scholarships or educational savings accounts.

Democrats, reeling from recent electoral losses and paralyzed by internal divisions, are reluctant to even acknowledge the potential for bad behavior in the school system, as the public districts and their unions are a tremendous store of political power for them — even in red states. As Dana Goldstein in The New York Times, “Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one.”

As a result, powerful interest groups can often exert their influence over the system and extract special privileges or take advantage of wasteful spending. Here are just a handful of recent stories, many of which received little to no coverage in the mainstream press:

• In Chicago, the district , which could be worth tens of millions of dollars. But, in a classic case of anti-competitive behavior, the district prohibits future owners from operating charter schools there, meaning the properties will go for millions below their true market value. “Our goal is not to sell them for the highest dollar amount,” admits a district spokesperson.

• In New Jersey, the state teachers union to fund the gubernatorial campaign of a candidate — the union’s president — who finishes fifth in the Democratic primary.
  
• In Tampa, the district , a failing school serving African-American students. The nearest school for many of these families is A-rated Gorrie Elementary, which primarily serves wealthy white families. But not one of the Just students is allowed to enroll in Gorrie, instead getting bused to C-rated schools farther from their homes.
  
• In Los Angeles, the district spends to increase permanent capacity at Ivanhoe Elementary School, one of the most coveted in the district, despite thousands of empty seats in schools just five to six minutes away.

• Outside Sacramento, the Center Joint Unified School District fights efforts of local families to be allowed to that is just blocks from their home, because the district fears losing funding if its archaic district boundaries are redrawn.��

Strong investigative journalists are needed to step into this void, for there will be important stories to tell. Nonprofit watchdogs, like my organization, Available to All, will play a role, too.

Most importantly, state legislators need to step up their oversight of local districts. Legislators need to ensure they do not lower our academic standards to make their schools look better. There also need to be strong transparency laws, and districts should be subject to external audits of their financials and real estate holdings.

Public education can survive the current crisis and emerge stronger than ever, but only if those of us who believe in public education work together to ensure that trust in the system is restored.

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 ����Ӱ��.

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.��Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

��

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.��Sign 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.��

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.��

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.

As , the department told 41 states and the District of Columbia they had another year to spend down the rest of the $122 billion for schools awarded in the 2021 American Rescue Plan. Among the biggest potential losers from McMahon’s move are Texas and Pennsylvania, which have well over $200 million in unspent funds, according to a department spreadsheet shared by a source close to the department. The source asked not to be named to protect former staff members from retaliation. Several more states, including Ohio, New York and Tennessee, have over $100 million left over.

In a letter to state chiefs, Education Secretary Linda McMahon called it “unreasonable” for them to rely on those earlier decisions. She said she might reconsider if states can make a stronger case for how their projects continue to address COVID’s impact.

“We’ve seen a lot of receipts and reimbursement requests coming in that just aren’t aligned with what students need in this moment,” a senior department official told ����Ӱ��. The official asked to remain anonymous to speak freely about the department’s decision. The administration wants to “make sure that funds are still being spent to fix student learning loss.”

The official cited a $1 million window replacement and an order of “glow balls” as examples, but declined to name the district that ordered the balls and offered no additional information on their price or how schools planned to use them. 

The department, however, will pay any invoices that were submitted before Friday at 5 p.m. Most of those are tied to extensions from the second COVID relief package, which included $58 billion in education spending, the official said. The deadline to spend those funds was Monday. 

In total, Congress approved about $200 billion in school relief funds. While states and districts spent the vast majority — — by the end of January, they asked for more time to deal with supply chain delays, labor shortages and the fact that student performance has largely not recovered from the pandemic. McMahon’s action, some experts say, should not have come as a complete shock given by many Republicans that districts failed to make the most of the unprecedented infusion of money. 

But the action leaves states and districts in the lurch, having spent millions of dollars of their own funds and signed contracts with vendors tied to the promise of reimbursement from the education department. 

Some leaders are pleading with McMahon to reconsider.

“This abrupt change in course will slow efforts and, in many cases, grind them to a halt,” Maryland state Superintendent Carey Wright said in a statement. Her state risks losing over $400 million in funding for K-12 schools. The funds, she said, are paying for science of reading materials, teacher training and a variety of facility upgrades. “State and local budgets will be impacted. Maryland students deserve for the federal government to uphold its agreements.” 

McMahon said the extensions offered by both the Biden and Trump administrations were merely “a matter of administrative grace,” and that the department has the authority to hold states to the original spending deadline in the law — Jan. 28. But as with other decisions the department has made to cut off funding Congress already approved, Friday’s announcement is likely to spark legal challenges.

“We are exploring all legal options at this time given the severity of this action,” Joshua Michael, president of the Maryland State Board of Education, told reporters Monday. The funding, he said, is supporting ongoing tutoring programs. “That tutor will probably not be there next week.”

‘Unpaid invoices’

Other states say the department’s decision will have an immediate impact on students. Illinois, for example, is using its remaining relief funds on transportation to school for homeless students, afterschool tutoring and technology for students with disabilities, said Jackie Matthews, spokeswoman for the Illinois State Board of Education. 

Last week, the state was still waiting on a $720,000 reimbursement from the department and had yet to submit another $8 million in expenses. 

“The unpaid invoices continue to stack up,” she said.

In Tennessee, education officials received an extension for nearly $131 million for expenditures like tutoring, nursing services and computers, according to state education department spokesman Brian Blackley. Staff members, he said, were preparing to submit a reimbursement request. 

The American Rescue Plan — the third and largest round of funding — also included $800 million earmarked for homeless students. Extensions on those funds are paying for summer learning programs, mental health services and “” who help homeless families with housing, food and transportation needs, said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, which advocates for homeless students. 

An released just before former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona left office showed the program was effective at helping districts identify homeless students and reduce chronic absenteeism.

Canceling the extension, Duffield said, “pulls the rug out from underneath school district efforts to stabilize and support homeless children and youth.”

David DeSchryver, senior vice president at Whiteboard Advisors, a consulting firm, said states should not have been caught off guard by the department’s latest move, but emphasized that the “door is still open” for further extensions. 

“This is another invitation for state and local leaders to tell better stories about the impact of federal funding on their schools and communities,” he said. 

‘The people’s bank account’

Districts began asking the department for extensions back in 2022 when supply chain delays and escalating construction costs prohibited them from finishing projects on time.

To get reimbursed, the department required to submit funding requests describing how the expenditures related to the pandemic. The department didn’t ask for purchase orders or contracts, but told states to keep those on hand if needed later. 

The department tightened the process in February, states to submit detailed receipts for every purchase in order to get reimbursed. Then on March 11, McMahon fired all 16 staff members in the office responsible for processing payments.

By that point, state education leaders had grown impatient. On March 15, a Pennsylvania official emailed the department, saying “I’m reaching out again to find out the status of these approvals,” according to a copy of the message shared with ����Ӱ��.

“It makes me incredibly angry,” said Laura Jimenez, a Biden administration appointee who led the relief payment office until January. “We very carefully administered $200 billion, and they’re completely destroying that with the last couple of billion.”

In a statement Friday, department spokeswoman Madi Biedermann said it was “past time for the money to be returned to the people’s bank account” and referred to “numerous documented examples of misuse” of relief funds. She declined to offer examples.

The GOP has consistently criticized how districts used the money, focusing on expenditures that appeared removed from helping students recover lost learning, like . They argue that sharp declines in achievement and spending on what they dismiss as like LGBTQ-inclusive efforts and social-emotional learning offer evidence of misspent funds.��

Georgetown University school finance expert pointed to “eyebrow-raising spending decisions,” like contracts to family members, in a teachers lounge in Montana and six-figure salaries for district leaders in Stockton, California. 

But compared to other COVID aid, like the Paycheck Protection Program — which from theft — there’s been little evidence of actual fraud in school relief funds, Roza said. The department took steps to prevent it. In 2023, the found that the agency had taken “significant actions” to improve monitoring of the funds.��

Even so, researchers largely agree that despite many bright spots, districts missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prioritize academic recovery in the aftermath of the COVID emergency. Tutoring is one example. While most districts offered it — and still are — they didn’t always use methods backed by research, experts say.

Some districts initially demonstrated a lack of urgency and were slow to spend the money, according to Roza created to follow relief funds. Then they had to pick up the pace as deadlines approached. Many went on a hiring spree, quickly adding classroom aides, counselors and other support staff, but showed that those positions weren’t always targeted to schools that needed them most.

“You don’t want to force school systems to spend money more quickly than they are wanting to,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research.

shows that while the money contributed to significant recovery in math, students continue to lose ground in reading. But as a one-time school board member, he sympathizes with districts that pushed to spread funds out as long as possible. 

“That rush to get a lot of money out the door,” he said, “may have led to some of it not being spent very well.”

The discovered ongoing issues including increased classroom disruptions and declining trust between teachers and parents, principal and colleagues. The researchers analyzed data from the which collected responses about school wellness from roughly 123,000 to 130,000 teachers in more than 3,300 Illinois schools annually from 2019 to 2023.  

“I would have thought the 2020-21 school year was the big disrupted year,” said Cory Koedel, a University of Missouri professor who worked on the study. “It’s quite reasonable to think that was the worst. But this data is telling us that’s clearly not true. And our findings give no indication that working conditions will rebound naturally now that the pandemic is behind us.”

The 5Essentials survey identifies five main indicators of school success: effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environments and ambitious instruction. Each year, teachers and students are asked to rate their experiences.

The most dramatic change after the pandemic began was in classroom disruptions. A found that 70% of educators said students in their schools misbehaved more than before the pandemic. In , the percentage increased to 72%.

Koedel’s research found the quality of student discussions and professional development also declined from 2019 to 2023. The trust teachers felt toward parents, principals and other educators didn’t worsen from 2019 to 2021 but deteriorated from 2021 to 2023. Teacher safety significantly improved in 2021, when most schools shifted to online learning, only to drop again in 2022 and 2023, once students returned to classrooms. 

A few working conditions initially declined but improved from 2021 to 2023, including collaborative practices and student engagement in learning

The study also analyzed Illinois survey data by school demographics. Teachers from schools in wealthier communities had better working conditions, but experienced the same decline as educators in lower-income schools.

Schools where instruction was delivered online during the 2020-21 school year also had larger declines in working conditions compared with schools where learning was in-person.

Koedel said that while the study focuses on Illinois, educators nationwide have experienced similar working conditions.

“There’s really no reason to think Illinois is some weird place that’s so different from every other [state]” Koedel said. “In my opinion, we should expect Illinois to be like other places, because a lot of what’s happening in schools there is happening everywhere.”

For example, other national studies have highlighted the link between teacher job satisfaction and educators’ well-being and retention. 

A from the RAND Corp. found that teachers who had administrator support and felt they belonged in their schools were less likely to report burnout and job-related stress. Those who had strong positive relationships with their colleagues and felt their students were engaged in learning were also much less likely to report poor well-being.

“There’s a deeper question of, like, ‘What exactly is it that’s driving this?’ ” Koedel said of the University of Missouri results. “I believe this is telling us we have made some sort of bad decisions about how we’re running schools, but this doesn’t tell us what decisions we made that were bad, right? So I’m trying to understand that better.”

A new Illinois bill aims to add some oversight of families who homeschool their children, a response to concerns that the state does little to ensure these students receive an education and are protected from harm.

The measure, , comes after last year found that Illinois is among a small number of states that place virtually no rules on parents who homeschool their children. Parents don’t have to register with any state agency or school district, and authorities cannot compel them to track attendance, demonstrate their teaching methods or show student progress.

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Under the new bill, families would be required to tell their school districts when they decide to homeschool their children, and the parents or guardians would need to have a high school diploma or equivalent. If education authorities have concerns that children are receiving inadequate schooling, they could require parents to share evidence of teaching materials and student work.

Illinois Rep. Terra Costa Howard, a Democrat from a Chicago suburb who is sponsoring the legislation, said she began meeting with education and child welfare officials in response to the news organizations’ investigation, which detailed how some parents claimed to be removing their children from school to homeschool but then failed to educate them.

The investigation documented the case of L.J., a 9-year-old whose parents decided to homeschool him after he missed so much school that he faced the prospect of repeating third grade. He told child welfare authorities that he was beaten and denied food for several years while out of public school and that he received almost no education. In December 2022, on L.J.’s 11th birthday, the state took custody of him and his younger siblings; soon after, he was enrolled in public school.

The most recent numbers available at the time of the news organizations’ investigation showed nearly 4,500 children were recorded as withdrawn from public school for homeschooling in 2022 — a number that had doubled over a decade. But there is no way to determine the precise number of students who are homeschooled in Illinois, because the state doesn’t require parents to register.

The bill would require the state to collect data on homeschooling families. Regional Offices of Education would gather the information, and the state board would compile an annual report with details on the number, grade level and gender of homeschooled students within each region.

Homeschool families and advocates said they will fight the measure, which they argue would infringe on parental rights. Past proposals to increase oversight also have met swift resistance. The sponsor of a 2011 bill that would have required homeschool registration withdrew it after hundreds of people protested at the Illinois State Capitol. In 2019, a different lawmaker abandoned her bill after similar opposition to rules that would have required curriculum reviews and inspections by child welfare officials.

The Home School Legal Defense Association, which describes itself as a Christian organization that advocates for homeschool freedom, said it plans to host virtual meetings to educate families on the bill and ways they can lobby against it.

Kathy Wentz of the Illinois Homeschool Association, which is against homeschool regulations, said she is concerned about the provision that would allow the state to review education materials, called a “portfolio review” in the legislation. She said visits from education officials could be disruptive to teaching.

The bill would require all private schools to register with the state.

The Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica investigation found that it’s all but impossible for education officials to intervene when parents claim they are homeschooling. The state’s child welfare agency, the Department of Children and Family Services, doesn’t investigate schooling matters.

Under the proposed law, if the department has concerns about a family that says it is homeschooling, the agency could request that education officials conduct a more thorough investigation of the child’s schooling. The new law would then allow education officials to check whether the family notified its district about its decision to homeschool and compel parents to turn over homeschool materials for review.

The increased oversight also aims to help reduce truancy and protect homeschooled students who lose daily contact with teachers and others who are mandated to report abuse and neglect, Costa Howard said. Some truancy officials said that under existing law they have no recourse to compel attendance or review what students are learning at home when a family says they are homeschooling.

Jonah Stewart, research director for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a national organization of homeschool alumni that advocates for homeschooling regulation, said the lack of oversight in Illinois puts children at risk. “This bill is a commonsense measure and is critical not only to address educational neglect but also child safety,” Stewart said.

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

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 .

By 2030, Gen Z will make up . These young people represent the future of education, and K-12 leaders need a comprehensive plan for attracting and retaining them.

As superintendent of Bellwood School District 88 near Chicago, I believe teaching can be an attractive career choice for today’s youth. I’m proud that 21 Gen Z teachers (11% of our instructional staff) are working at Bellwood, where nearly all our students are identified as low-income. Here are five strategies I’ve found to be effective in recruiting and retaining Gen Z educators.

First, we used the shortage we experienced as an opportunity to innovate. Like many districts nationwide, we saw our teacher retention rate plummet during COVID. At the start of the 2020-21 school year, 48 of Bellwood’s 167 full-time educators did not return. But because the administration sought new ways to position Bellwood as an employer of choice, the retention rate increased from 71% in 2020 to 79% in 2022. In 2023, it reached a seven-year high of 87.5%. 

We reimagined classrooms to make them more functional and inviting for teachers and students. We also expanded recruitment by teaming up with the teachers union and local colleges. In partnership with , we launched a “grow your own” talent initiative this year, which aims to create a diverse pipeline of future educators from within the community by developing a residency-like advancement program. One candidate piloted the program last school year, nine candidates began the certification program this fall and 10 will enter the cohort in spring 2025. One of the administrative assistants in the program has already transitioned to a teaching role.

Second, we’re making sure young people know that teaching is a largely stable career that brings significant value to society. Education is one of the , with high demand across the country for qualified teachers — especially in hard-to-fill subject areas like special education, bilingual education, and math. But in the 2020–21 school year, just 591,000 students were enrolled in teacher preparation programs, a decline of from 2010-11. 

In Bellwood, teaching is seen as a way to give back to the community. Many of the staff have deep roots here, and 38 have been with the district for more than 10 years. Some have spent as many as 20 years here. This commitment is a powerful draw for those who value purpose-driven work. Bellwood’s “grow your own” program shows prospective teachers that the district is invested in their success, which encourages them to invest in their students in turn. 

Third, we leverage Gen Z’s desire for professional growth and career flexibility. Research suggests these benefits are extremely important to today’s  young adults. , more than three-quarters of Gen Z employees want more opportunities to learn new skills, and 61% would like to move up in their careers or increase their responsibilities. 

Teaching can be a dynamic career choice, with opportunities for advancement into positions of leadership, policy or advocacy. This is something that district leaders should emphasize in their recruiting. But, they must also walk the walk.

In Bellwood, educators have access to flexible career pathways that align with Gen Z’s expectations for growth. We engage teachers in discussions about their own professional development, ensuring they feel a sense of agency and investment in their career trajectory. We have that count toward master’s degrees, with financial incentives tied to their professional advancement. Recognizing educators and supporting their ambitions makes the profession more appealing to the next generation.

Fourth, because new teachers likely have significant financial challenges such as student debt, policymakers and district leaders can make the profession more attractive to young people by creating affordable pathways such as apprenticeships, loan forgiveness and other incentives.

Bellwood’s on-the-job training program, created in partnership with BloomBoard, offers prospective educators a teaching degree paid for by the district. Instead of requiring participants to quit their jobs to complete a student teaching internship, they work full time in K-12 classrooms for the duration of the program, with hands-on practice and learning fully integrated into their workday. And instead of writing papers or taking tests, participants submit lesson plans, videos of themselves teaching and student work to their professors.  In addition, the district offers stipends and bonuses to teachers willing to take on hard-to-fill positions.

Lastly, Gen Z can be attracted by promoting teaching as a field ripe for innovation. Gen Z’s digital skills are essential in today’s classrooms, where how and what students need to learn is rapidly shifting as technology evolves. District leaders can appeal to young people by positioning teaching as a career where their understanding of technology can lead to meaningful change.

Bellwood’s investment in tools such as Chromebooks or tablets for every student, interactive whiteboards, fast and reliable wi-fi, and Google Workspace, ensures that the district’s classrooms are equipped for Gen Z educators to create dynamic and interactive learning environments. We also provide training on the use of technology for instruction, and district leadership has created a culture where teachers can feel safe to innovate and try new approaches in their classrooms, including lessons that incorporate new technology, project-based learning, or cross-curricular collaboration.

By investing in innovative recruitment and development strategies, districts can attract and retain the next generation of educators — ensuring students’ long-term success.

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 . 

Among Chicago Public School employees, no one has been a bigger cheerleader for an invention designed to reduce dangerous amounts of lead in water from school drinking fountains than top administrator Robert Christlieb.

Christlieb, the district’s executive director of facilities, operations and maintenance, has worked for at least seven years on the problem of lead in drinking water at CPS schools, a critical issue for student health.

He’s appeared on panel discussions, in news articles and podcasts to highlight the district’s strategies, which has included installing an invention called Noah – a device that automatically flushes student drinking fountains on a set schedule to reduce the build up of lead in stagnant water. Christlieb has touted the device as a cheaper solution than doing extensive plumbing work in hundreds of aging school buildings.

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In public, Christlieb says Michael Ramos, who works for a CPS contractor as the chief building engineer at Von Steuben High School on the Northwest Side, is the inventor of Noah. Christlieb tells the story of how Ramos wanted to protect his students from lead and worked to create a low-cost, reliable device to do just that.

“Michael [Ramos] has solved the lead problem in public schools, not just in Chicago,” Christlieb was quoted as ,. He added in the story that the district had approved expanding Noah to 25 schools as part of a pilot program. But the expansion never happened, “due to resources, staffing and the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to CPS. For now, the Noah device is in five CPS schools — three high schools and two elementary.

Christlieb, who makes more than $170,000 a year at CPS, neglects to mention one key detail as he tells the story of the device’s creation.

He’s more than just a fan of Noah. He’s listed as the co-inventor of the device he’s been promoting for years. Christlieb and Ramos share the U.S. patent for the Noah device, federal records show.

Nor does he mention that he once formed a business with Ramos to sell the device — a business that has since dissolved.

CPS declined to make any school official available to Illinois Answers Project reporters to discuss the district’s actions. CPS repeatedly did not address questions regarding whether Christlieb violated any of its conflict of interest policies but stands by him continuing to promote autoflushing, despite him having a patent on the Noah device. CPS said Christlieb does not supervise Ramos or oversee the contract with the CPS contractor that employs him.

The district explicitly prohibits its employees from working as a vendor and doing business with the school system. Christlieb formed a company with one of his friends and Ramos, in March of 2017 called RCS Water Quality Solutions to sell Noah. RCS listed as its corporate address a residence Christlieb owns in Wisconsin.

In the fall of 2017, CPS says it learned of the partnership and told Christlieb that he could not continue to work at CPS if he didn’t divest.

On the same day that Christlieb dissolved RCS, he completed paperwork to create a new business called Lead Out Manufacturing and listed Ramos as the registered agent. He again used his residence in Wisconsin as corporate headquarters, corporate filings show.

CPS said in a statement that Christlieb “volunteered” his time to help Ramos fill out the administrative paperwork to set up Lead Out and allowed Ramos to use his Wisconsin address but has nothing to do with the company.

CPS said it has no evidence that Christlieb ever profited from the Noah devices. Christlieb wrote in answers to questions that he did not make a profit, and Ramos, in an interview, agreed that Christlieb never made any money from them. Both men indicated that they had been interviewed by the CPS inspector general’s office regarding their ties to Noah, and no action was taken against them.

“Mr. Christlieb helped develop a product that helps remove lead from drinking water and kept his name on the patent as a matter of intellectual property,” CPS said in a statement.

Christlieb used CPS testing data to support the patent for the Noah device as well as for a white paper designed to promote autoflushing at Orr High School, where Noah had been installed. When asked whether Christlieb’s use of the testing data for personal use violated CPS policy, the district noted that water testing data can be obtained by anyone through a public information request.

Despite Christlieb’s significant role in the school water testing, CPS argued that the fact that he has a patent on the Noah device did not compromise its water testing.

The district said in a statement: “CPS implements a proactive lead testing program that goes above and beyond any state requirements and uses the best known practices for testing and preventing lead build up in drinking water. A flusher system … is in a handful of our more than 600 schools and we stand by our district’s proactive practices and testing procedures. The district’s lead mitigation program is overseen by a team of professionals in our facilities department. Mr. Christlieb’s invention of one tool in this field — and that tool’s use in a small fraction of the 600-plus schools in the district — has no impact on the quality or veracity of the district’s program to test for lead, mitigate lead in water and/or repair/resolve for lead in water.”

Conflicting stories

In separate interviews, the two men, once partners in selling the device, disagree on basic facts about who invented the device, what money they contributed to get it patented and what roles they played in the business, called Lead Out Manufacturing. Christlieb has offered varying accounts of his role in the firm, from initially writing in response to questions from reporters that he had 49 percent ownership of Lead Out, to saying in a CPS statement that he divested from the company soon after it was created, to indicating, in a final CPS statement, that he was never an investor at all. Ramos, in an interview, said Christlieb was involved for “a couple years” in Lead Out.

In an interview, Ramos said he is the sole inventor of Noah and he put Christlieb on the patent to persuade Christlieb to become a partner with him. Ramos noted that Christlieb as a high-ranking CPS official had “a big reach” and having him as part of the company could help sales of the device to other school districts. He said that they weren’t “necessarily” going to go after CPS business.

“His name does appear on the patent, but that doesn’t mean that he had anything to do with the invention,” Ramos said in an interview with Illinois Answers reporters earlier this year.

Michael Ramos, chief building engineer at Von Steuben High School, shows a Noah device in December 2023 installed at one of the drinking fountains there. (Victor Hilitski/For Illinois Answers Project)

Ramos said initially after they met in 2016 both men “were basically planning on starting a partnership to take it to New York, New Jersey, and do all these other things, you know, because Rob has a big reach. And I felt like, wow, what a better partner than having Rob, you know, so … as a sign of like, good faith to, like, try to bring him in and say, Rob, you know, I’ll put you on a patent with me.”

“I’m trying to introduce this to districts,” Ramos said. “The schools need it. I figured this is something that’s affordable, the districts could use. Why wouldn’t I reach out to someone like Rob, who has the title, who has the name and has the respect in the industry?”

Earlier this year, within some school buildings, prompting Ramos to text Christlieb.

“Good morning Rob, this is another candidate for Noah. Is there any way you can reach out to them? I can reach out, but they usually don’t respond because I seem to come across as selling snake oil. If it comes from you, they will see it as valid.” Records provided by CPS do not include Christlieb’s response.

Ramos said the men worked together for a couple years trying to sell the device to school districts across the country but never realized much success. Ramos said he and Christlieb parted ways after he realized the arrangement could look suspect to CPS but argued the men never did anything wrong and that Christlieb never received any money from the company.

In an interview at Von Steuben High School in December last year, Christlieb credited Ramos with inventing the device and marveled at how Ramos was able to build what Christlieb could only think about. He talked about how just the month before he came out to Von Steuben High School, where Ramos worked, to see his Noah device, he had just been thinking the month before about such an invention.

“So the interesting thing was, before I came out here in October of 2016, to see what he had done. In September of 2016, I had sat down one night, and I sketched out the idea of doing a bypass filter and having some type of controller on it,” Christlieb said in the interview with Illinois Answers reporters. “And I’m like, ‘Man if I could build something like this.’ But I didn’t have the skill set, right? And Michael did, and Michael must have been listening to me across the city because we didn’t know each other at that time and then all of a sudden I’m being called out here a month later and I’m like this is exactly what I was hoping for. But someone was actually able to put it together and the concept works and the mechanics work. It’s very simple … Simplicity is key for us.”

After reporters discovered that Christlieb’s name was on the patent, they attempted to interview him at his Wisconsin address where he was staying. He declined to answer questions in person but responded to a set of written questions.

Christlieb wrote that he was on the patent because he had made substantial contributions to the invention of Noah. He did not answer follow-up questions that asked him to detail those contributions.

Robert Christlieb, right, CPS’s executive director of facilities, operations and maintenance, talks during a demonstration of the Noah system at Von Steuben High School in December. (Victor Hilitski/For Illinois Answers Project)

The men also disagree on other issues regarding the patent. Ramos said he paid all the legal fees for the patent work on the Noah device. Christlieb, though, wrote he contributed about $5,000 for the legal work. The patent was granted to Ramos and Christlieb in 2021.

CPS provided two documents that it said showed that Christlieb had nothing to do with Lead Out. One is the most recently available Wisconsin corporate filing that shows Ramos is the registered agent for the firm, but while Christlieb’s name is not on the document, it does not address ownership. The document lists Lead Out’s corporate address as Christlieb’s Wisconsin address.

The other document provided by CPS and Christlieb involves him assigning his rights to the patent on the Noah device to Lead Out. The document is dated June 2018, more than six months after Lead Out was formed. The document is signed by Christlieb, but not by Ramos, and once again lists Christlieb’s Wisconsin address as Lead Out’s corporate address.

Starting with Flint

The district began focusing on assessing its drinking water in 2016 after , and began a 10-year testing program by sampling its over 12,000 water fixtures for lead levels.

In the first year of testing, 60% of the 490 schools tested returned at least one sample with a lead level over 5 parts per billion, exceeding the state’s action level for lead in water. Last year, the district tested 174 schools, and 92, or 53%, had at least one sample exceeding the state limit.

Since replacing all lead pipes could cost up to $2.5 billion, according to district estimates, CPS first focused on limiting the stagnant water in pipes, where lead collects, by having building engineers manually flush all drinking water faucets in its 528 campuses. Building engineers, tasked with maintaining the HVAC, electrical and plumbing systems, are required by district protocols to flush schools after a “period of nonattendance,” such as a weekend or break, once a week.

At a campus like Von Steuben, where Ramos works, manual flushing would require him and his team of two engineers to individually run the water on all 42 fixtures in the school for 3 minutes before students arrive on Monday or after a long break, Ramos said. Additionally, they would still need to complete other responsibilities such as preventative maintenance and repairs before students arrive. Experts say that while flushing can decrease lead levels, the manual process doesn’t guarantee water is safe to drink because it’s prone to human error. The district employs 685 engineers who oversee 800 buildings, meaning some engineers cover multiple schools.

A sign on the wall at Von Steuben High School in December tells students the Noah device has been installed at a drinking fountain there. (Victor Hilitski/For Illinois Answers Project)

Christlieb and Ramos argue that Noah works well because the device automatically flushes the water fountains and doesn’t rely on employees to do it.

In addition to Von Steuben, the devices have been added to drinking fountains in CPS schools at Orr High School, Belding Elementary, Onahan Elementary and Kelvyn Park High School.

All the devices installed at CPS schools have been donated by Ramos or purchased by local school councils.  There are no records showing that CPS has cut a check to Lead Out Manufacturing, but in some instances, CPS paid a contractor to install the devices. The devices cost about $395.

The devices also have been installed at two suburban school districts — Crete-Monee School District Indian Springs School District 109, according to documents obtained by Illinois Answers.

Years of promoting autoflushing — and Noah

Christlieb has promoted the Noah device for years, at times using CPS resources, starting as early as July 2017.

In that month, Christlieb a case study about the Noah flushing system at Orr Academy. And Christlieb shared the Orr case study widely to multiple school districts and city governments using his CPS email account.

In March of 2019, he appeared in a Chicago Health Magazine article that promoted autoflushing and appeared in a photo with Ramos in the story.

In a podcast interview, Christlieb said he installed Noah in his own home and that it worked “perfectly.”

And as recently as May of this year, Christlieb, using his CPS title, for , in which he discussed the Orr High School pilot program and Noah’s benefit to the district.

CPS emails and text messages show that Christlieb and Ramos also talked during the workday about promoting Noah to schools in Chicago such as City Colleges and outside Illinois including Philadelphia Public Schools and New York City Public Schools.

Christlieb appears to have played a role in efforts at establishing Noah’s credibility as an effective solution.

In March of 2021, Christlieb emailed the white paper he wrote on Noah’s use at Orr as well hundreds of pages of testing data to a Philadelphia school official, who was interested in the invention and who thanked him for his time “explaining the benefits of your Noah system.”

Christlieb responded to the official by telling him who else at CPS was involved in the project.

“For Noah,” Christlieb added, “I would recommend talking with Michael Ramos.”

Von Steuben High School on the Northwest Side of Chicago was the first site where Noah autoflushing devices were tested to reduce lead in water from student drinking fountains. (Victor Hilitski/For Illinois Answers Project)

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

At the end of the last school year, with the teacher contract expiring, the union released an list of demands, asking for even more staffing and a minimum of 9% annual raises for the next four years.

But over the last few months, the budget reality has started to hit home. The district is considering taking out a high-interest $284 million loan to cover this year’s operating budget. And next year, the city will face a shortfall of .

The math is not that complicated. Chicago has more employees and is paying them higher salaries than before the pandemic, even as it has lost student enrollment. According to state data, Chicago added 895 general teachers and 1,140 special education teachers from 2018-19 to 2023-24. Across all categories of teachers and administrators, Chicago added the equivalent of 3,448 more full-time staff members, an increase of 17%.

Chicago Has More Teachers and Administrators

Over the same time period, Chicago lost 38,000 students, a drop of 10.5%. With more employees serving fewer students, the district dramatically lowered its staffing ratios. In elementary schools, for example, it its student-to-teacher ratio from 24.5 to 1 in 2018 to 18.5 to 1 in 2023.

Chicago has also not skimped on salaries for those employees. In 2019, an analysis by the National Council on Teacher Quality found that Chicago already its educators more than any district in the country. That didn’t stop the union from going out on an 11-day strike or eventually winning what then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot called a “” contract that raised the teacher salary schedule by 16% over five years.

But that figure is underselling what actually happened, because individual teachers continued to move up the salary ladder. As an example, consider a new hire who started teaching in Chicago right out of college in 2019-20. That novice would have earned $54,547 the first year. By year five, the salary would have jumped to $67,444, a 24% raise over five years. Of course, pay varies by experience level, but teachers with master’s degrees earned increases of 20% to 38% over the same period. Inflation also rose a lot over that time, but almost all Chicago teachers did better.

In fact, despite adding a lot more new teachers, who tend to come in on the lower end of the salary schedule, average teacher pay in Chicago rose from $68,153 five years ago to nearly $88,000 last year. That’s a five-year increase of $19,055, or 28%.

Chicago Is Paying Higher Salaries

Going forward, the district’s budget office has annual raises of 4% to 5%, and even at that level it already projects a substantial budget deficit. The union is asking for a minimum of 9%, compounded annually for the next four years. That works out to at least a 41% increase, and that’s before taking into account teachers advancing up the salary ladder. District officials estimate these increases would put Chicago into by the end of the contract.

Chicago’s first-ever school board election next month will go a long way toward determining the fate of these proposals. Will Johnson be able to deliver another “historic” win for the teachers union? And if so, how will he pay for it? 

The entire seven-member Chicago Board of Education will resign in the coming weeks after months of tension between Mayor Brandon Johnson and Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez.

The resignations pave the way for Johnson to appoint new board members who could then carry out his wishes, including potentially firing Martinez. Johnson’s office said late Friday he will announce new appointments on Monday at 10:30 a.m.

Word of the resignations comes more than a week after the school board took no action to remove Martinez and about a month before the city’s first school board elections, which will create for the first time a hybrid board of 10 elected members and 11 appointed by the mayor. In three decades of mayoral control, no Chicago mayor has replaced all of their hand-picked members so quickly. Johnson last July.

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The upheaval is also happening amid with Johnson’s former employer the Chicago Teachers Union.

In a joint statement Friday, Johnson and the current appointed school board announced all current members would “transition from service” later this month.

“None of the members leaving the current Board planned to continue onto the hybrid Board, and none are running for election. With the unprecedented increase in Board membership, transitioning new members now will allow them time to orient and gain critical experience prior to welcoming additional elected and appointed members in 2025,” the statement read.

Johnson said this week that he never discusses personnel issues in public. But he , “I was elected to fight for the people of the city and whoever is in the way, get out of it.”

In an interview with Chalkbeat, Jen Johnson, deputy mayor for education, youth, and human services, said the mayor’s office “did not ask for resignations.”

“We knew that none of these board members were running [for election] or going to stay, and so we collaborated to ensure that there was a shepherding, a passing of the torch, as we approach this new board,” Johnson said, adding that all seven board members signed on to the statement the mayor’s office sent to the press.

Earlier this month, the mayor asked Martinez to step down — which he Nonetheless, Martinez and the has declined so far to fire him.

Board members have declined to comment publicly on Martinez’s clash with Brandon Johnson, but the board has in recent months backed Martinez in a couple of decisions that defied the mayor’s wishes. That includes adopting this year’s budget, as well as declining Johnson’s request for CPS to take out a short-term loan to cover some upcoming costs.

The board members stepping down are Board President Jianan Shi, Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who was appointed by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Mary Fahey Hughes, Tanya Woods, Mariela Estrada, Michelle Morales, and Rudy Lozano Jr.

Shi and Todd-Breland declined to comment further Friday. The other members have not returned emails or calls asking for comment on the resignation rumors this week.

The resignations will pave the way for Johnson to appoint new people to fill the vacancies on the board, who could then vote to approve a short-term loan and fire Martinez. The next school board meeting is Oct. 16, one of few remaining scheduled meetings before the is sworn in on Jan. 15, 2025.

“The board certainly will have the same authority, to evaluate the CEO against the objectives, and they will, you know, have to certainly tackle the incompleteness of the budget,” Deputy Mayor Johnson said.

Johnson did not directly answer when asked if it is the mayor’s hope that the new board will fire Martinez and approve a loan.

The mayor “will work with this new board just as he did with the current board to ensure we are protecting investments in our schools and that we are not cutting and using the truly chaotic solutions of past administrations, which harmed students in communities for generations,” she said.

In a statement, CPS CEO Martinez commended the board members “for their steadfast dedication to ensuring greater equity in our system, emphasizing our collective responsibility to improve the quality of education for those who are furthest from opportunity.”

If the mayor’s intention is to install a new board in order to fire Martinez, it would “be a group that has never evaluated [Martinez], has never worked with him,” according to a source familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak with the press. “They don’t know any of his work, they haven’t been part of any of these conversations.”

That source also noted that new board members typically have an orientation, which could be difficult to wedge in before the board’s first meeting.

In order to conduct business, the school board must have a quorum, which define as “a majority of the full membership of the Board of Education then serving.”

Deputy Mayor Johnson declined to specify the exact date of departure for each current board member, calling the latter a “personal decision” for each person.

A CPS central office staffer, who was not authorized to speak with the press, said the board “doesn’t want to undermine the mayor publicly” and feels board members were pressured to leave for not adhering to the mayor’s wishes. Another source familiar with the situation, also not authorized to speak with the media, questioned the official explanation.

“The mayor’s office will try to spin this as a transition,” the source said. “There is no credible explanation for why seven people would all leave a month or two ahead of time to facilitate a transition.”

The mood in the CPS central office was “like a funeral home” Friday as news of the resignations broke, according to the central office staffer, who said many people were sad to see the board departures.

“You could tell they really care about what’s going on at the district,” the staffer said, adding that they have worked with multiple CPS boards. “They have a sense of responsibility that I think I haven’t seen in the past.”

Multiple board members had been in serious discussions to resign as of at least Sunday, three sources told Chalkbeat.

As rumors of resignations floated earlier this week, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said before new members are elected. Friday morning, former Chicago school board member and once interim-CPS CEO Jesse Ruiz thanking current board members and urging them to “stay the course.”

“Despite all the pressures I know you all are under, I truly hope you continue to provide the steady leadership, governance and oversight that is critical for our public institutions to operate in the best interest of ALL its stakeholders,” Ruiz , the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

The school board shakeup likely won’t have an immediate effect on schools, students, and educators, said Jeffery Henig, professor emeritus of politics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, who has studied mayoral control of school boards.

The resignations “will create a potential embarrassment” for the mayor, but also give Johnson a chance to “step in strongly” and make swift decisions that he thinks are necessary, Henig said.

The turmoil could, however, create long-term problems for the new board, which may be tasked with replacing Martinez, hiring a permanent replacement, or addressing the issue of borrowing to cover costs, he said.

“This dramatic gesture by the current board could set into motion enough turmoil and public positioning and open vying for leadership in one faction [of the school board] versus another, that it would make it harder for the new board to set an even course at the beginning,” Henig said.

Some candidates running for school board in the November election began issuing statements.

Kate Doyle, a candidate in District 2, said she was “disappointed to see leaders step away” at a critical time and that if elected, she would “work to ensure that decisions are made transparently and with the long-term success of our students in mind.”

Tensions between Martinez, Johnson building for months

In its year-plus tenure, the Johnson-appointed Board of Education has pursued and approved policies that line up ideologically with the mayor. That includes making a commitment to moving away from , and

Martinez and his administration worked in tandem with the board to develop and implement those changes. But the school board has had some with his performance, WBEZ . According to documents related to his annual evaluation, board members felt blindsided or unprepared in certain circumstances. Still, CPS told WBEZ that the board and Martinez “have worked collaboratively throughout our tenure to have open dialogue, fostering a respectful and professional relationship.”

“It’s true that the board has been frustrated with Pedro along the way,” said the source familiar with the situation. “But I do think that, in my knowledge of the situation, there has been this relentless pressure to fire Pedro for cause and do it quickly, and the board is not comfortable doing that.”

According to Martinez’s contract, the board would need to provide six months notice before firing him without cause. If the board fired him for just cause, such as criminal activity, he would have to leave immediately. Martinez could sue the district if he believes he was wrongfully terminated.

At the heart of the tension between Johnson, his school board, and Martinez is the district’s budget, which faced a half-billion-dollar deficit before CPS made cuts to close it. That deficit existed largely because that the district used to beef up staffing and invest in new programs, such as tutoring, expired this week.

The district’s $9.9 billion did not set aside dollars for the new teachers contract, which it is currently negotiating. It is not unusual for the school district to amend its budget once a contract deal has been reached. WBEZ recently reported that the district has outlined several options, of furloughs and layoffs.

Johnson which included the same amount of funding for schools but resulted in other cuts, including of support staff who CPS said will be reassigned or paid for the rest of the year.

The district also did not include a $175 million pension payment for non-teaching staff that . Johnson opposed that cost shift before he became mayor, but has now asked CPS to continue paying it as he works to close .

Johnson was expected to deliver his city budget proposal in a speech to City Council on Oct. 16, but earlier this week the mayor’s office announced Johnson would deliver his budget on Oct. 30, a week after the school board is scheduled to meet.

Over the summer, Johnson asked CPS to take out to help pay for the cost of the pension payment and the added expenses of contracts for the teachers and principals unions. Martinez and the board refused, in fear that taking on such a loan would saddle the district with high-interest rates and deepen its looming deficit for years to come.

The board’s departure so close to the election will likely turn up heat on school board candidates, said Henig, the Columbia professor who has studied mayoral control.

“If the candidates haven’t been forced to address this, there’s gonna be a lot of pressure on them to address this,” Henig said.

Union negotiations turn up heat on Martinez

The conflict is compounded by between the district and the Chicago Teachers Union, where Johnson worked as an organizer before his foray into politics. The union’s wide-ranging proposal package asks for 9% raises, more staffing, and more support for students, but the district has said its financial challenges remain – and less than 10% of the CTU proposals could create .

The union further turned up the heat on school district officials after saying it obtained a list of potential co-locations between 140 schools. The district, Martinez, and the Board of Education have said they have no plans to close schools. In letters to staff and families earlier this month, Martinez said the list was created as part of its analysis for the five-year strategic plan, and that it led district leaders and the board to affirm that they did not want to close schools.

The union’s House of Delegates recently passed a vote of no-confidence in Martinez.

Under state law, no school closures can happen in Chicago until Jan. 15, 2025. After the union’s claims over the past couple of weeks, the now-outgoing board passed a resolution Thursday, which Martinez prompted, that calls for .

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Chicago Public Schools unveiled a new five-year strategic plan Monday that sets out to increase the number of students attending schools in their neighborhood and redefine what it means to be a successful student.

The plan did not call for specific changes to selective enrollment, magnet, or charter schools, a possibility signaled in December when the board first announced its . But the plan does seek to bolster resources for neighborhood schools “with an intentional focus on disinvested communities.”

Roughly 44% of elementary school students enrolled at a school other than the one they were zoned for in the 2022-23 school year, while about 75% of high schoolers did the same,

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Twenty years ago, when Chicago started expanding magnet, selective, and charter schools, just about a quarter of elementary school students enrolled in schools outside of their attendance area and 46% of high schoolers did the same.

The plan outlines priorities and specific goals to reach by 2029 in three different areas — students, schools, and communities — but did not signal policy changes. Officials, however, left the possibility open for future changes as a result of the plan.

“I don’t think this document is intended to indicate new policies,” Chicago Board of Education Vice President Elizabeth Todd-Breland told reporters. “As engagement continues around the different topics and areas there, if a policy change is seen as necessary, then perhaps that will be the case.”

The board will vote on the plan on Wednesday at a special meeting.

Under the plan, the district set the following goals to reach by 2029:

• Increase the percentage of students who attend a school in their neighborhood or community area. The district said it does not have a specific percentage it wants to reach, and that this is not just limited to a student’s zoned school.
• Increase the number of students in grades 3-8 who pass the state’s reading and math exams by 20%.
• Reduce chronic absenteeism – when a student misses 10 or more days of school – by 15%.
• Reduce teacher vacancies by 25% in schools that serve majorities of Black and Hispanic students.
• Increase funding for improving school facilities by $250 million.
• Increase internet bandwidth by 400% at elementary schools and by 900% at high schools to prevent outages and slow internet connections.
• Ensure that all schools will have a “robust” behavioral health team.
• Decrease class sizes, with priority on schools with higher needs.
• Ensure that all schools have the capacity to hire arts, P.E., and other “special instruction” staff.
• Increase the percentage of students enrolled in at least one district after-school program by 8 percentage points, from 42% currently to 50%.
• Transition 25% of personnel who come from the private sector, such as custodians and bus drivers, to district employees.

District wants to redefine student success

The plan also outlines specific priorities for certain groups of students. For example, the district said it wants to improve achievement and opportunities for Black students, who are disproportionately less likely to read and do math on grade level compared to their peers and are disciplined at higher rates; ensure students learn more than one language by the time they graduate and boost support for English learners; and improve quality of education and instruction for both students with disabilities and kids in pre-K through second grade.

District officials and school board leaders also want more emphasis on how students experience school.

Officials said the district will continue to track things like graduation rate and student growth and proficiency on subjects for their grade level. But it will also consider other factors when considering student and school success, such as how well schools are supporting students who are chronically absent, how many students are participating in early college and career credit programs, and if schools are providing “high quality curriculum,” according to CPS CEO Pedro Martinez and Chief Education Officer Bogdana Chkoumbova.

The district has also set an explicit goal to improve the number of schools rated strongly as “supportive environments” on the annual survey, which comes from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research and is supposed to measure a school’s culture and climate.

“Social-emotional learning, student well-being, it’s not an add-on,” Todd-Breland said. “If it’s not deeply integrated into everything that we do, then learning cannot happen.”

The district also included priorities to increase funding for all of its schools.

Todd-Breland said board meetings will soon be restructured so they monitor the plan’s goals, “so that every month when you come to a board meeting, you’re going to find out something new about how the strategic plan is being monitored and how things are moving.”

But it’s unclear if that meeting structure will remain come January when the school board grows from 7 appointed members to 21 members, on Nov. 5.

Strategic plan comes amid change, tensions at CPS

Martinez and his administration unveiled the plan eight months after the signaling the district’s intent to curtail a choice system that leaders said has undermined many neighborhood schools and bred inequities in the experience of students in different parts of the city.

That resolution was in keeping with campaign promises by Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago Teachers Union organizer, who called the district’s system “a Hunger Games scenario” in which families scramble to flee their neighborhood campuses for spots in coveted test-in and lottery programs across the city. Chicago’s selective enrollment, magnet, and charter schools are , and district leaders have spent the intervening months reassuring state lawmakers, parents, and others that they won’t close or severely weaken these choices.

Asked why the plan revealed Monday did not include explicit policy changes for choice schools, Todd-Breland said the board heard from people who valued schools beyond their neighborhood options, including selective enrollment and charter schools.

“What felt more important, and what continues to be the more important thing … is that the lever of change in Chicago Public Schools is to invest in neighborhood schools and our communities furthest from opportunity to make sure there are pathways that families are confident in and have high quality education provided in them from pre-K through high school in their neighborhood,” Todd-Breland said.

Still, the strategic plan says academic gaps among students and challenges have worsened because of “our current competitive enrollment policies and previous accountability policy, which pitted schools against each other and sorted students based on academic performance in an under-resourced system, reinforcing cycles of inequity.”

Martinez is putting out the plan just as reports emerged that Johnson might be following disagreements with City Hall over and with the Chicago Teachers Union. Those reports raise questions about the district’s ability to see the new blueprint through, after a run of frequent CEO comings-and-goings that have destabilized CPS.

In a statement, CTU president Stacy Davis Gates said the “best parts” of the plan mirror the union’s current contract proposals with the district and that, at the bargaining table, Martinez is “out of step” with his own district.

“If the district actually led with this plan, then we’d have the partner we’re looking for to deliver for our students,” Davis Gates said.

Efforts to reinvigorate Chicago’s neighborhood schools date back to the tenure of Martinez’s predecessor, Janice Jackson, who served for three and a half years. She launched “equity grants” to give campuses with shrinking enrollment a funding boost as well as a program in which schools applied for dollars to start specialized programming, such as arts or STEM, in a bid to lure families seeking distinctive learning options. also emphasized improving how the district serves its Black students, especially Black boys.

After the school board’s December resolution, Martinez’ administration disclosed few details about the development of a new strategic plan, with officials saying they wanted to first hear from community members at . Officials said Monday that nearly 14,000 people “engaged” with the plan by providing feedback or attending community meetings.

But for some, the wait for more details on the plan produced anxiety about the future of school choice in Chicago. Families in the district’s selective enrollment and magnet programs worried those schools would be diminished – a claim CPS officials repeatedly denied and is not a part of the strategic plan released Monday. On some campuses, those worries spiked as the district unveiled in the spring that district leaders said would steer more dollars to campuses with the highest needs and correct for historical inequities in how Chicago distributed resources. At some selective schools, officials and parents said newly tight budgets made it hard to staff specialized programs.

The plan released Monday calls for the district to monitor both the strengths and weaknesses of the new funding formula.

In the spring, state lawmakers introduced if Chicago moved to close any of its selective and magnet programs. The bill didn’t gain traction during the legislative session, but it elicited reassurance from Johnson and district leaders that there were no plans to shutter these schools.

Anxiety has also run high among charter operators and families, who felt that the December resolution was taking clear aim at their schools. Last week, charter officials and parents to demand more clarity on the plan and a promise that it won’t undermine the city’s charters, which serve roughly a fifth of its students.

The plan calls for revisiting the district’s renewal process for charter schools in a couple of years, but provides no additional details.

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 ckbe.at/newsletters. 

Illinois public schools wishing to teach their students about the dangers of overdoses and substance use disorder now have a blueprint to do so from the state.

The Illinois State Board of Education published the resource guides in accordance with a law passed in 2023. While a school’s use of any of the state’s  is voluntary, some public health advocates consider the creation of the guides a step in the right direction. Administrators and educators can download age-appropriate presentations, lesson plans or fact sheets.

Various courses developed by  nonprofits and federal agencies provide options for curricula about what prescription drugs are, the science of drug interactions, harm reduction, and how to manage medication alongside mental health struggles. Complexity increases with age; high school resources include lessons on different classes of drugs.

Some links connect to materials or videos from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and a “virtual field trip” produced by the .

One resource referenced multiple times in the guides, , was developed in part by Cardinal Health, a pharmaceutical distributor who paid out part of a  with 45 states, , in 2022.

Overdose remains a leading cause of accidental death in the state and across the country, something not lost on the various public health organizations that supported the legislation to create the guides. The Illinois Harm Reduction and Recovery Coalition, an advocacy network of organizations and individuals dedicated to , released a statement praising ISBE and the Department of Human Services for their work but said there was a “lack of opportunities” for more involvement from community members.

During 2022 – the most recent year with comparable data – more than  people died of an overdose in Illinois, while almost  were killed by firearms, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That same year, more than  people in Illinois died due to a traffic accident, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation.

The law requiring the guides  the House and the Senate unanimously. It’s known as Louie’s Law in honor of Louie Miceli, who died of an overdose in 2012 at 24 years old.

Felicia Miceli, Louie’s mother, said he was first exposed to opioids at age 17 following a high school football injury.

“We know this guidance will equip communities with vital information, tools, and resources,” Miceli said in a . “But only if they know about it and have an implementation plan.”

The Illinois Harm Reduction and Recovery Coalition and the LTM Heroin Awareness and Support Foundation – which Miceli started in honor of her son – released a statement celebrating the “first-of-its-kind” guides but also said the process could have benefitted from including more perspectives while crafting various guides.

“The organizations are concerned about the lack of opportunities for broader stakeholder involvement in the guidelines’ development, including the primary target audiences (and) marginalized groups,” the release reads.

Last year, 30 teenagers in Cook County died due to drug toxicity, according to the .

 is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of newspapers, radio and TV stations statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.

Senior reporter Jo Napolitano spent nearly a year and a half calling 630 high schools in every state plus Washington, D.C. to test whether they would admit a 19-year-old Venezuelan transplant who spoke little English and whose education was interrupted after ninth grade. Using her own name, she told school officials the new arrival was her nephew, that he had recently moved to their district and was eager to resume his studies. 

“Hector Guerrero,” a stand-in for others like him, was refused 330 times, including more than 200 denials in states where he had a legal right to attend according to his age. Many schools, including those that reluctantly accepted him, tried hard to steer Hector to GED programs, adult education or community college — anything but public school.

����Ӱ��’s investigation, which exposed a pervasive hostility and suspicion toward older newcomers, proved enrollment for this group is arbitrary across the map, with little consistency within states, counties or school districts: Staffers within the very same building sometimes disagreed. 

And those answering these high-stakes enrollment questions — from temporary office workers to school principals — often provided bad information. 

Almost all 50 states and D.C. have laws establishing a maximum age for public school enrollment. In 35 states and the District of Columbia, general education students can attend high school to at least 20 — often to 21. 

����Ӱ�� reached out to 25 states and the U.S. Capitol where Hector was within the maximum enrollment age but faced a high volume of rejections to alert education department officials to our findings.

“It is very concerning that there is confusion among school districts about this issue,” said Jackie Matthews of the Illinois State Board of Education. “We are updating our enrollment to clarify the maximum age of enrollment and are issuing additional guidance to address specific questions about enrolling newcomer students. We hope to bring greater clarity to the field.”

Illinois, where students can stay in high school until age 21, had among the highest refusal rates of any state in the country — 25 out of 32 schools turned Hector away.

In Chicago alone, he was rejected by seven out of eight high schools — and was likely to be refused by one other. Among the rejections: Benito Juarez Community Academy, founded in 1977 when a group of Latina mothers in their neighborhood.

“We are concerned anytime we hear reports that a prospective student and/or family member may have been turned away from their right to a free public education,” a spokeswoman for the city’s public schools, which serve , wrote in an email. “We have shared the findings on specific schools and are doubling down on our efforts to ensure those particular schools — and all staff — understand the law and our own CPS policies.”

The school system, like many other districts and state education departments around the country, noted it has long taken steps to educate staff about newcomers’ rights. Chicago Public Schools, which at the district level has — many arriving to the city after being bused from southern states — called it “a matter of rightful presence.”

The New Mexico Public Education Department’s general counsel drafted a memorandum to all districts and charters outlining their legal obligations to these and other students. A spokeswoman there confirmed the action is in response to ����Ӱ��’s findings. The memo was sent out in early August.

“School districts and charter schools have a responsibility to educate these students regardless of  their relative academic ability or likelihood of success,” it reads. “They are entitled to receive as much education as other students, until graduation or equivalent, or aging out of the public school system.” 

State education officials in Michigan say they need additional legislative action to guarantee students’ rights. Spokesman Bob Wheaton said current state law is silent on whether districts must enroll prospective students who will turn 19 or 20 during the school year — even though the law states such students are eligible to attend and school districts receive state aid for supporting them. 

“State law says these students are eligible to attend but doesn’t say schools must enroll them,” Wheaton wrote. “That’s why we support legislation to change that.” 

Hector was turned down by 11 of 16 Michigan high schools with one other saying it would likely refuse him. Wheaton said a team of staffers within the department is working to explore and recommend a change to the statute’s language.

He said ����Ӱ��’s investigation “shines a light on the need for states to improve not just their policy in this area but the implementation of their policy.”

Officials in D.C., where Hector was rejected by 6 out of 7 schools, also vowed to take action on the issue before the start of the academic year. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education will “ensure staff consistently share key resources and information with any student or family that contacts a school about enrollment, so that the correct process can be followed and the student enrolled,” a spokesman wrote. 

����Ӱ�� called 20 high schools in Georgia, where students have a right to attend until age 21, and received 14 refusals and two likely rejections. The state education department did not pledge to take any additional steps to ensure immigrant students’ rights based on our findings — but the Atlanta Public Schools had a starkly different reaction. 

A district administrator who works with multilingual learners reached out to ����Ӱ�� two days after our story published and said the 50,000-student school system had been “diligently educating our registrars to ensure no eligible student is denied enrollment in our district.” She said it intended to take further steps based on our findings. 

State education department officials in Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Mississippi and South Carolina said they will reach out to all of the individual schools that refused Hector — in addition to numerous other measures — while Colorado said it will contact the districts as a whole.   

Colorado will also advise school superintendents of their responsibility toward these students at upcoming presentations and conferences, a spokesman said. It will highlight enrollment in the commissioner’s monthly communication to superintendents for August and include periodic reminders throughout the school year.

Virginia, where Hector was accepted by just 1 out of 11 schools, also pledged to act on our findings. 

“Your reporting showed that a number of our school divisions could use a refresher on the current enrollment requirements, so we are using the start of the school year as an opportunity to remind all divisions of the obligations involving enrollment,” state education officials said. “It is not something we would usually send.”

The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction holds an annual workshop in the summer for school administrators, typically in August, to help prepare for the new school year. At this year’s gathering, a spokesperson said, the department will remind administrators of the state law about maximum age for school admittance — and ask that they ensure staffers who handle enrollment are made aware of it. 

North Dakota must admit all students who have not turned 21 by Aug. 1 of that school year.

“This reminder will certainly be verbal and I suspect there will also be a written reminder as well,” the spokesperson said. “I’m sure your story will be mentioned.”

The department has also reached out to the two high schools that refused Hector. 

����Ӱ�� contacted a minimum of five high schools in each state. Napolitano then added hundreds more in various locations across the country based primarily on the number and percentage of Hispanic and immigrant residents living there. The calls, which numbered in the thousands, were made between February 2023 and May 2024. They were recorded in those states that allow for one-party consent. 

Roughly 1.1 million people ages 18 to 20 entered the United States between 2012 and 2021, according to the Migration Policy Institute. 

����Ӱ�� aimed to expose how schools handle enrollment requests for older immigrant  students in this openly xenophobic era, one in which the southern border has become a and more and more Americans say for the country despite newcomers bring. 

Conservative forces have been from school for . They now want schools to collect information on students’ immigration status when they enroll and charge tuition for undocumented children or the children of undocumented parents. Such steps would defy — and potentially set the stage to overturn — Plyler v. Doe, the landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that a child cannot be denied a public education based on immigration status. 

Texas, which has and is constantly pushing for even more , had among the worst acceptance rates in the nation: 18 of 29 schools refused to admit Hector. Two others said they were likely to turn him away. 

The Texas Education Agency said it shared ����Ӱ��’s findings with the state’s Special Investigations Unit. It’s unclear what action may be taken. In Texas, where roughly is an immigrant, students can remain in high school until age 21 and, if a school district accepts them, . 

State education officials in Alaska, Hawaii and Maine — where Hector was denied by 16 of 27 total schools — did not respond to repeated calls and emails asking for comment. 

Educators and advocates from across the country reached out to ����Ӱ�� on their own shortly after our June 17 investigation was published to report that these discriminatory enrollment practices were widespread — sometimes involving immigrants as young as 17.

Several said they were heartened to hear at least some states are moving quickly to re-enforce the law.

“I believe that when people are reminded of the facts and stop to think about the importance of allowing all students to pursue an education, they will push for positive change,” said student immigration advocate and policy expert Timothy Boals. 

Adam Strom, of Re-Imagining Migration, said immigrant students still face barriers once they enter school, but getting through the door is a crucial first step.

“That work begins, but does not end, with ensuring that all eligible students have unfettered access to education,” he said. “There is more work to be done to ensure equitable educational opportunities, however this is a hopeful start.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

An Illinois lawmaker heading a child welfare committee said the state must strengthen its laws and policies to protect homeschooled children facing inadequate education, abuse and neglect. 

Rep. Terra Costa Howard, the chair of the Adoption and Child Welfare Committee in the Illinois House, called for action following a Capitol News Illinois and ProPublica investigation, which revealed little accountability for parents who pull their kids from school and then fail to ensure they receive an education. In the worst cases, the investigation found, parents isolated and mistreated their children. 

“We cannot turn a blind eye to children who are not being educated,” Costa Howard said in an interview with Capitol News Illinois. Costa Howard, a lawyer with extensive experience in juvenile court, said she supports homeschoolers but that the article made clear the state needs to make changes.

While regulations on homeschooling are minimal across the nation, Illinois is among a small number of states with virtually no rules about homeschooling: state authorities can’t compel proof of teaching methods, attendance, curriculum or testing outcomes; homeschool teachers don’t need a high school diploma or GED; and parents aren’t required to notify anyone if they remove their kids from school. 

The Democrat from suburban Glen Ellyn said that “at a bare minimum” the state should mandate that parents must notify a school district or other governmental entity when they choose to homeschool. This is a requirement in 39 states and Washington, D.C., but is entirely optional for parents in Illinois. “We need to know these kids exist,” Costa Howard said.  

Past efforts in Illinois to implement regulations on homeschools have faced strong resistance, including against a bill in 2011 to require registration and another in 2019 to enact inspections and curriculum reviews of homeschools. In both instances, the outcry was so intense that Illinois lawmakers swiftly withdrew the bills from consideration. 

That resistance persists today, as evidenced by the numerous emails that reporters received from homeschool families and their advocates in response to the article. They argued that public schools, despite being heavily regulated, can also subject children to abuse and inadequate instruction. “Most public schools in Illinois are not doing a good job,” wrote Steven Durfey, of Bartlett, a village 35 miles west of Chicago, whose children were homeschooled. In other states, recent efforts to bolster homeschool regulations have failed in the face of similar opposition from families who homeschool and the groups that represent them.

Michael Mobley, who worked as a truancy officer for eight years in south-central Illinois until his retirement in 2018, has experienced this backlash firsthand. Illinois law says that homeschools must provide an education equivalent to what is taught in public schools, and if they don’t, those children would be truant – in violation of Illinois’ mandatory education laws. Around 2013 he proposed a system to verify whether homeschools were meeting this mandate, but homeschool advocates protested his proposal. And Mobley said he didn’t find much support from state officials either.  

“Homeschooling is the third rail of politics in Illinois. The legislature, the Illinois State Board of Education, which are all politically appointed, will not do anything,” said Mobley. “I hope that this renewed attention to this problem brings change. But I can tell you first-hand that any legislative attempt to regulate homeschooling will be met with swift and certain opposition.”

But in the wake of the reporting, the governor and other key lawmakers also signaled a willingness to engage in discussions about what changes might be needed, although they offered few specifics. Spokespeople for Senate President Don Harmon and House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch said both legislative leaders were interested in hearing more from experts and advocates, including officials from the Department of Children and Family Services and the Illinois State Board of Education, to find “best solutions” and “address problems.” 

Alex Gough, a spokesperson for Gov. JB Pritzker, said the governor supports parents’ rights to choose homeschooling for their kids’ education, but also “believes every child deserves to be protected during their educational experience.” He said the governor is “open to input and feedback from the General Assembly on this issue.” 

The June news article highlighted cases involving two children who had been removed from public schools to homeschools. One child was beaten and given little to eat while he received almost no schooling, according to police records and court testimony; on his 11th birthday in December 2022, he was taken into state protective custody, where he remains. That same month, a 9-year-old boy accidentally shot himself with a gun he found in the home while his mom was running errands. Instead of alerting police, she hid the body. Seven months passed before police, responding to a concerned call from a friend, found the child’s body in a garbage can in the garage.

Homeschool groups that oppose changes in the law say cases of abuse among homeschooled children are tragic but rare. 

But the June reporting highlighted another issue with the state’s oversight of homeschooling: Schools may offer protection and stability to children in a volatile home environment, but there is often poor coordination between education departments and DCFS. 

Decades ago, DCFS was able to open an investigation into educational neglect if a homeschool family was accused of failing to provide an adequate education to their children or neglected to register them for school or ensure their regular attendance. But in 1989, lawmakers voted to remove that authority from DCFS and place it with regional offices of education, which oversee truancy intervention. 

The two entities do not coordinate their investigations or share results of their findings. 

Costa Howard plans to convene meetings in the coming months between state child welfare and education officials. And she plans to call on DCFS to improve its data collection about the schooling status of the children it investigates. 

The DCFS Office of Inspector General is required to review the agency’s actions when a child dies while in the custody of the state, or whose family was investigated within a year of their death. 

The reports do not generally include whether the child who died was regularly attending school, chronically truant or homeschooled, but Costa Howard believes they should.

Other child advocates also welcomed changes in the law. 

Dr. Veena Ramaiah, a board-certified child abuse pediatrician, said homeschooling is sometimes a red flag.  

“I completely understand that abusive parents who ‘homeschool’ and are trying to hide their children are a small minority but I wonder if the thousands of parents who are sincere would ever be willing to compromise a little on oversight in order to save that handful of children who are being abused and hidden,” she said. “I would hope that the safety of even one child would trump the minimal effect on parental rights that more oversight would provide.” 

Diana Hartmann, superintendent of Regional Office of Education 44 in upstate McHenry County, north of Chicago, said offices like hers feel like they have little authority to intervene if there are allegations of inadequate homeschooling, such as in cases where parents pull a child from school to evade responsibility for truancy. She also welcomes legislative action. 

“I’m wholeheartedly ready to align with others that would like to introduce legislation to clean up the abuses of withdrawing students for homeschooling,” she said. 

Hartmann took exception to a statement that ISBE provided reporters, included in the June story, saying that regional education offices can take action under existing truancy laws. Families who homeschool, she noted, are not required to maintain any records of their activities; therefore, “without proper legislation to close the loophole, there is nothing we as an ROE can do besides ask.” And asking, she said, “will have no benefit” because “there is nothing to do after they say no.” 

In response to questions seeking clarification on the agency’s position, ISBE noted that while ROEs have authority to investigate truancy, the law does not provide “explicit authority to an ROE to verify the adequacy of a homeschool program; thus, when a family that is suspected of truancy claims to be homeschooling, an ROE’s ability to intervene can be limited.” 

For its part, ISBE said it stands ready to help find solutions.

“We are committed to working with lawmakers and regional offices of education on this issue to ensure student safety and wellbeing are protected,” the agency said. 

 is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of print and broadcast outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.

SPRINGFIELD – When Illinois high school students sit down to take their annual state assessments next year, they will take a different exam than in recent years.

The Illinois State Board of Education recently announced that starting next spring, it will use the ACT exam rather than the SAT.

Both are standardized tests that measure students’ proficiency in core subjects such as English language arts and math. Both are also commonly used for college admissions – although many colleges and universities have stopped requiring them – as well as scholarship applications.

Illinois, however, also uses them as part of the battery of tests schools administer each year to meet federal mandates under the . Results of those tests are reported each year on the  and are used to hold schools and districts accountable for meeting basic academic standards.

Illinois started using the  as the state assessment for 11^th grade students in spring 2017. Two years later, it began using the PSAT 8/9 exam for 9^th grade students and the PSAT 10 for high school sophomores.

At the time, , incorporating a college entrance exam into the state’s annual assessment program was considered a bonus because it gave nearly all graduating high school students a reportable score, paid for by the state, which they could then use for college and scholarship applications.

In recent years, though, many colleges and universities stopped requiring either the SAT or ACT as part of their application and admission processes. 

In 2021, Illinois lawmakers passed the  requiring all public universities and community colleges to adopt a “test-optional” policy for admissions, meaning students could voluntarily choose whether to include them in their application package. But ISBE continued using the tests as part of its federally mandated statewide assessments.

The upcoming switch to the ACT exam came about through ISBE’s routine procurement process. The agency’s contract with the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that operates the SAT, was set to expire on June 30, prompting the agency to open a new bidding process.

The state board agreed to open the bidding process and solicit sealed proposals from testing companies at its regular monthly meeting in September 2023. The decision to award a six-year, $53 million contract to ACT was finalized in May.

According to an  that ISBE has circulated, one of the advantages of switching exams is the ACT includes a science component, whereas the SAT only covered the core subjects of reading, writing and math. That means 11^th grade students will no longer have to take a separate Illinois Science Assessment, thereby reducing overall testing time.

The change also means that students who still want to take the SAT or the PSAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test will have to do so on their own, in addition to the statewide ACT accountability exam. Local schools and districts will have the option of choosing whether to administer those tests during the school day, but the state will not pay for students to take those tests.

 is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of newspapers, radio and TV stations statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association.