Money, missteps behind the monthslong CPS saga

Despite Mayor Brandon Johnson pushing to oust Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez, the two men were polite on the first day of classes in August as they stood together outside schools ringing oversized gold bells.

But as the weeks progressed, no resolution came to pass — instead, controversies piled up and the tension grew. Four months later, the pleasantries have subsided. And Johnson’s Board of Education is set to take action on Martinez on a Friday night five days before Christmas.

So why is the drawn out saga coming to a head now? And how did the process become so messy?

There’s the financial answer: The Chicago Teachers Union, the mayor’s staunch ally and former employer who vaulted him to office, wants to settle its contract negotiations with ambitious ideas that could reshape an underfunded school district — and the assurance that layoffs and furloughs won’t follow in the spring as a result.

The costs of even a modest CTU contract, plus a pension payment for non-teacher CPS employees that Martinez has refused to take on from City Hall, are still expected to cause a mid-year budget deficit. A record tax increment financing surplus is helping fill some of that gap. But without an additional solution, an estimated $140 million hole will remain, and budget cuts could come in the second half of the school year.

That’s why the mayor and CTU have pushed for a short-term, high-interest loan to make up the difference this school year, and they’ve criticized Martinez for blocking that plan without finding options other than staffing cuts.

“He (Martinez) still has a budget deficit,” said CTU President Stacy Davis Gates on Wednesday, suggesting once again that CPS would have to take out a loan. “The only thing he will close it with is layoffs and furlough days. … We need a revenue plan.”

Martinez has said it would be fiscally irresponsible to fill a budget deficit using a loan before additional funding is secured. Unable to win him over, the CTU has pushed for a resolution this month before the new 21-member partially elected board takes office in January and brings new dynamics — angering some newly elected members who feel sidelined.

That argument about financial responsibility has contributed to the answer of how this got so messy: It has turned the school system’s budget struggle into an ideological and political battleground — one pitting more conservative, business-oriented corners that have long opposed high spending and the CTU — against a progressive mayor who sees those groups as quick to adopt austerity austere measures, leaving poor families and schools vulnerable.

Ensuing missteps from the mayor’s office and his school board heightened scrutiny, and Martinez’s unprecedented rejections of Johnson’s wishes for the loan and pension payment, bucking traditional dynamics between a mayor and CPS CEO.

Even some of Johnson’s allies criticize his approach. Johnson didn’t bring in his own schools chief, hoping to show his independence from the CTU.

But by the time he decided to push out Martinez this year, Johnson had waited to act until a pressure-packed moment and invited the optics he tried to avoid: that he was taking action to land a contract for his old union.

The traditional opponents of the CTU’s progressive education movement, some of whom have criticized Johnson since he took office, have taken advantage and quickly lined up behind Martinez. They include more conservative and moderate members of the City Council and charter school and business groups.

When Johnson’s entire school board resigned in October under scrutiny and feeling rushed and nervous about being sued, the stunning move expanded the critical voices to include most of the City Council, including some progressive.

Most recently, former CPS CEOs weighed in — people who Johnson and the CTU have long fought against. They included Arne Duncan, Jesse Ruiz and Martinez’s predecessor Janice Jackson, who called the move to fire Martinez “dirty Chicago politics at its worst.”

“These shameful and drastic actions will sacrifice our future instead of investing in it,” Jackson said.

No matter how the process has played out, Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th), chair of the City Council's education committee, said the mayor “gets to choose to do what is best for young people, period.

"Every mayor has had the right to put in that position who they wanted to. When a person expects you to do a job and you don't do it, what do you think is supposed to happen?” she asked.

"Why is it different for [Johnson]? You all are literally doing this man the same way you did Harold Washington," Taylor said of the mayor's opponents.

Taylor, a longtime CPS parent activist, has at times been publicly critical of her allies in the mayor's office and the CTU's progressive education movement. But she has called supporters of Martinez hypocritical and questioned "where was the outrage" from those corners when CPS closed dozens of schools, dropped busing for students and didn't properly clean schools.

The situation has left some parents bewildered and upset.

Katrina Adams, whose three daughters attend Burnside Elementary on the South Side, said she doesn’t want to see cuts, nor does she want the school district to take out a high-interest loan that will “mess up the future.”

“If you cut into positions … or some students need [help] and the only thing you're thinking about is money, you're not thinking about the future of the students,” Adams said. “It's so political, and the only people that suffer are the parents and the students.”