What Happened When Chicago’s Mayor Followed a Teachers’ Union Playbook

For years, Chicago was ground zero for the Democratic Party’s big transition on education.

With the support of longtime resident Barack Obama, who was in the White House, and his close ally Rahm Emanuel, then in the mayor’s office, the city turned away from policies favored by teachers’ unions and toward policies meant to provide families with choices and accountability, like charter schools and school-grading systems based on student test scores.

That was then.

Now, Chicago is in the midst of a radically different experiment: What would happen if one of the nation’s feistiest teachers’ unions was able to elevate the mayor of its choice, who then embraced the union’s agenda almost unequivocally?

On one hand, results have been good. The district’s 300,000 students have demonstrated unusually strong recovery from pandemic-era learning loss in reading, and more students than ever are enrolling in college-level courses.

On the other hand, there has been financial and political turmoil. The school district used federal Covid-19 relief money to hire thousands of teachers, instructional coaches, counselors, nurses and social workers, even as student enrollment shrunk.

That money is now running out, and the system is hundreds of millions of dollars in the red. Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former social studies teacher and teachers’ union organizer, has been trying to oust the schools chief executive, Pedro Martinez, who resisted the mayor’s proposal for the district to take out a high-interest loan to help cover the gap.

Amid this dispute, the entire school board resigned en masse this month, and was replaced by a new group of mayoral appointees.