Donald Trump has “manufactured a crisis” to justify the notion of sending federalized national guard troops into Chicago next, over the heads of local leaders, a leading Democrat said on Sunday, as the White House advanced plans to militarize more US cities.
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and a New York Democratic congressman, accused the US president of “playing games with the lives of Americans” with his unprecedented domestic deployment of the military, which has escalated to include the arming of troops currently patrolling Washington, DC – after sending troops into Los Angeles in June.
The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, said any such plan from Trump was perpetrating “the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century”.
Late on Friday, Pentagon officials confirmed to Fox News that up to 1,700 men and women of the national guard were poised to mobilize in 19 mostly Republican states to support Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown by assisting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) with “logistical support and clerical functions”.
Jeffries said he supported a statement issued by the Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, that Trump was “abusing his power” in talking about sending the national guard to Chicago, and distracting from the pain he said the president was causing American families.
The national guard is normally under the authority of the individual states, deployed at the request of the state governor and only federalized – or deployed by the federal government – in a national emergency and at the request of a governor.
Jeffries said in an interview with CNN on Sunday morning: “We should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he’s deeply unpopular.”
He continued: “I strongly support the statement that was issued by Governor Pritzker making clear that there’s no basis, no authority for Donald Trump to potentially try to drop federal troops into the city of Chicago.”
The White House has been working on plans to send national guard to Chicago, the third largest US city, dominated by Democratic voters in a Democratic state, to take a hard line on crime, homelessness and immigrants, the Washington Post reported.
Pritzker issued a statement on Saturday night that began: “The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.”
Trump has argued that a military crackdown was necessary in the nation’s capital, and elsewhere, to quell what he said were out of control levels of crime, even though statistics show that serious and violent crime in Washington, and many other American cities, has actually plummeted.
Talking to reporters in the Oval Office on Friday the president insisted that “the people in Chicago are screaming for us to come” as he laid out his plan to send troops there, and that they would later “help with New York”.
“When ready, we will start in Chicago … Chicago is a mess,” Trump said.
Johnson, in an appearance on Sunday on MSNBC, said shootings had dropped by almost 40% in his city in the last year alone, and he and Pritzker said any plan by the White House to override local authority and deploy troops would be illegal.
“The president has repeated this petulant presentation since he assumed office. What he is proposing at this point would be the most flagrant violation of our constitution in the 21st century,” Johnson said.
California sued the federal government when it deployed national guard and US marines to parts of Los Angeles in June over protests against Ice raids, but a court refused to block the troops.
Main target cities mentioned by Trump are not only majority Democratic in their voting but also run by Black mayors, including Washington, DC, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Oakland.
Rahm Emanuel, a Democratic former Illinois congressman, chief of staff to former president Barack Obama, and a former mayor of Chicago, also appeared on CNN on Sunday urging people to reflect that Trump, in two terms of office, had only ever deployed US troops in American cities, never overseas.
Emanuel said if he was still mayor he would call on the president to act like a partner and, although crime was coming down, to “work with us on public safety” to combat carjackings, gun crime and gangs and not “come in and act like we can be an occupied city”.
He added about Trump’s agenda: “He gave his speech in Iowa, he said ‘I hate’ Democrats, and this may be a reflection of that.” The speech was in July, when Trump excoriated Democrats in Congress who refused to vote for his One Big Beautiful Bill, the flagship legislation of the second Trump administration so far that focuses on tax cuts for the wealthy, massive boosts for the anti-immigration agenda and benefits cuts to programs such as Medicaid, which provides health insurance for poor Americans.
Overcoming a major fundraising gap, accusations that he would “defund” the police and public polling that predicted his defeat, progressive Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner and organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, won a hotly contested race for mayor of Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city.
Johnson, who is a Black leftist and former schoolteacher, defeated former CEO of Chicago Public Schools Paul Vallas, a white technocrat at the conservative edge of the contemporary Democratic coalition.
Johnson’s victory in one of the starkest ideological proxy battles in the annals of recent municipal politics is a historic achievement for the activist left that is likely to have ripple effects across the county. Its significance for intra-Democratic Party politics is rivaled perhaps only by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise ouster of then-Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018.
That Johnson prevailed amid an uptick in crime and economic uncertainty that has strengthened the hand of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party in the past three years is that much more remarkable.
In remarks to supporters on Tuesday night, Johnson extended an olive branch to Vallas’ voters, promising that he would be their mayor, too. But he made it clear that he will not let that slow his efforts to make Chicago a more equitable and livable city.
“We will not allow the politics of old to turn us around,” Johnson declared.
“We are building a better, stronger, safer Chicago. We’re doing it together,” he continued. “It’s a multicultural, multi-generational movement that has literally captured the imagination of not just the city of Chicago but the rest of the world.”
Since the start of the runoff, Vallas raised about $13 million to Johnson’s $7 million. Even that level of cash would not have been possible for Johnson without the support of the Chicago Teachers Union and other labor organizations that were responsible for 90% of the money he raised over the course of the entire campaign.
Johnson’s candidacy was the culmination of a decade of organizing and political institution-building by the CTU. His win over Vallas, a charter school proponent and outspoken critic of CTU, likewise solidifies a leftward shift in education policy that has gained steam over the same period.
“CTU’s influence in politics is absolutely crucial to his victory,” said Tom Bowen, a Chicago Democratic consultant who advised Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s unsuccessful reelection campaign.
Vallas, who was endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police, the city’s main police union, hammered Johnson relentlessly for his sympathy for calls to “defund the police” in 2020. Johnson interpreted the slogan as a desire to reallocate funding from law enforcement to social programs that attack the root causes of crime.
As a mayoral candidate, however, Johnson promised not to cut a dime of police spending and issued dubiously worded denials that he had ever embraced “defund the police” in the first place.
But unlike Vallas, Johnson did not promise to increase police funding or fill the 1,600-person backlog that the Chicago Police Department faces relative to its 2019 staffing levels.
He instead proposed redirecting wasteful or unnecessary parts of the police budget to add 200 more detectives to the police force through internal promotion.
Johnson also ran on raising taxes on businesses and affluent households to fund a host of social programs that he billed as the surest route to lower crime in the long run. Key parts of his agenda include reopening shuttered mental health clinics, doubling the city’s summer jobs program for young people and sparing city taxpayers another property tax hike.
The son of a Christian preacher from Elgin, Illinois, Johnson employed soaring oratory to appeal to Chicagoans’ compassionate ideals. Anyone paying a moment’s notice to the race knew that Johnson planned to “invest in people.”
“If we’re going to get a better, stronger, safer Chicago, we have to do what safe American cities do, and they invest in people,” Johnson said in a televised debate against Vallas on March 8.
That message resonated, including among many older and more moderate Black voters who Vallas courted.
LaTrell Rush, a resident of the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, told HuffPost that her priorities for a mayor would be to “stop the killing” and provide better resources for people with mental illnesses.
“Paul ― I’m not connecting with his vibes,” Rush said. “With Brandon, my vibes connect.”
Arjette James-Wallace, a retired emergency medical technician from West Englewood, walked out of the room when Vallas addressed the congregation of New Beginnings Church on March 26. The church’s pastor, Rev. Corey Brooks, had endorsed Vallas, but James-Wallace backed Johnson, whom she described as the “lesser of two evils.”
James-Wallace liked Johnson’s plan to fund mental health clinics and disliked Vallas’ hysteria about crime, which she said reflected a white racial bias. “When it started affecting people not of color, then they want to put it on the news,” she said.
Other voters supporting Johnson simply did not believe that he would be able to defund the police, even if he wanted to do so.
“I don’t think Brandon’s going to do that,” said Ahmed Hattab, an IT specialist living in northwest Chicago’s Belmont-Cragin neighborhood. “It’s not that easy to do.”
Hattab blamed what he sees as the excesses of the Black Lives Matter movement for making police afraid to do their jobs. But his 17-year-old daughter, Jenin, who accompanied him to the polls, helped convince her father to support Johnson.
“He’s the kind of person who starts from the bottom,” Hattab said. “And he worked with the schools a lot.”
Johnson is due to succeed Lightfoot, the city’s first Black woman mayor and first openly gay mayor.
Paul Vallas, center, celebrates a strong showing in the first round of voting on Feb. 28 that enabled him to proceed to a runoff against Johnson on Tuesday.
Nam Y. Hu/Associated Press
Amid unrelenting criticism from the left and right and public outcry over the crime rate, Lightfoot did not survive the first round of Chicago’s instant-runoff elections on Feb. 28.
Johnson’s rise was likely made possible by a fateful miscalculation that Lightfoot made. The incumbent mayor largely ignored Johnson during the first round, focusing her resources instead on cutting down U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García (D-Ill.), who ultimately came in fourth place.
In the runoff against Vallas, Johnson consolidated his existing support among largely young and white progressive voters on the city’s North Side while adding to his coalition in the majority-Black precincts on the South and West sides where Lightfoot was dominant in February.
To achieve the latter, Johnson succeeded in framing the race as a choice between an heir of the Black civil rights movement and a reactionary Republican posing as a “lifelong Democrat.” He enlisted the support of local Black icons like Cook County Board of Commissioners President Toni Preckwinkle and Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., alongside national Black surrogates like Rev. Al Sharpton and House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.).
Vallas’ long trail of impolitic comments on conservative talk shows — from his 2009 admission that he was “more of a Republican than a Democrat” to more recent remarks disparaging former President Barack Obama — made Johnson’s job easier. And while Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) stayed out of the race, Vallas’ criticism of Pritzker’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Pritzker’s team to take a swipe at Vallas.
Johnson and Vallas are “both candidates who come from their bases, and they’re both candidates that are flawed,” Bowen said. “The winner is the one that essentially covered up those flaws best.”
As hard as the campaign was for Johnson, the challenges that await him in City Hall are perhaps even more formidable. He stands to inherit the same public safety crisis and fiscal challenges as Lightfoot and possibly face even more political opposition. The Chicago City Council, which is expected to be more moderate than Johnson, recently voted to expand its power vis-a-vis the mayor.
Bowen predicted that forces outside of Johnson’s control would force him to disappoint his base and govern more from the middle.
“An odd thing about Chicago politics is that the extreme left hates you and the extreme right hates you, which just automatically forces you to the center,” he said.
But some of Johnson’s allies have already indicated that they are aware of the limitations that Johnson will face once in office.
“People will have everyone else believe that if Brandon becomes mayor, that, magically, generations of underfunding, generations of segregation, generations of an equitable application of school funding is suddenly going to be over,” Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, told HuffPost in an interview in late March. “That’s not going to happen.”
In that way, Johnson’s mayoralty is a “starting point” rather than an “endpoint,” she added.
CHICAGO — If Brandon Johnson, a progressive Cook County commissioner, wins Chicago’s mayoral election on Tuesday, it will be one of the most consequential victories for the United States’ activist left in recent history.
It will also be thanks in significant part to more than a decade of organizing and investment by the Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU.
Johnson, a former schoolteacher turned union organizer and legislative representative, is himself one of the CTU’s nearly 30,000 members. And without the union’s institutional convening power and financial resources, it is hard to imagine Johnson being competitive against the more conservative mayoral hopeful Paul Vallas.
CTU’s influence goes much deeper, however. In conjunction with its allies, the union methodically built the multiracial social movement on top of which Johnson stands.
Now the union is closer than it has ever been to gaining an ally in the Chicago mayor’s office — and delivering a devastating blow to the anti-union school reform movement in the process. Vallas, a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and longtime critic of CTU, is running on ending what he calls the union’s “stranglehold” on the city’s public school system.
But a union that measures progress in decades is already tempering expectations about what that will mean.
“People will have everyone else believe that if Brandon becomes mayor, that, magically, generations of underfunding, generations of segregation, generations of an equitable application of school funding is suddenly going to be over. That’s not going to happen,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates told HuffPost in a late March interview at CTU’s Chicago headquarters.
“We’re still going to have our needs, and we’re going to have a partner to figure out how we sequence and scaffold and implement and provide, that’s what we will have,” Gates added. “And that’s the starting point. That’s not the endpoint.”
At the same time, a loss for Johnson would represent a significant setback for CTU that could embolden politicians seeking to curb the union’s power.
“If they lose, this will stop the momentum of the CTU having outsize influence in Chicago politics,” said Pat Brady, a Vallas supporter and former chair of the Illinois Republican Party, who has a lobbying and media consulting practice in Chicago. “If it doesn’t stop it, it slows it tremendously.”
The late Karen Lewis, then president of CTU, addresses supporters during a teachers strike in September 2012. Lewis began the process of transforming the union into a political powerhouse.
Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press
From A Union To A Movement
The slow-moving political earthquake that has brought Johnson to the brink of citywide power began in earnest in June 2010. That’s when the late Karen Lewis, a high school chemistry teacher affiliated with the progressive Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE, won her election as president of the union, ousting a leader that had been more accommodating to the Chicago mayor’s office.
After more than a decade in which the city had ramped up the use of standardized testing to assess school performance, allowed non-union charter schools to proliferate and shuttered dozens of unionized community public schools, Lewis vowed to go on the offensive against a Chicago mayor’s office that had been exercising direct control over the public school system since 1995.
In 2012, under Lewis’s leadership, CTU went on strike for the first time since 1987, demanding higher pay and less reliance on standardized testing in teacher and school assessments, but also more funding for art, music, wrap-around social services and smaller classrooms. Brandishing the slogan “The Schools Students Deserve,” the CTU won the support of plenty of parents, some of whom memorably joined the union on the picket line.
“Karen’s coming in and she’s trying to impress upon people that you can survive this onslaught of ‘education deform,’ as she called it,” recalled Gates, a history teacher who joined the union staff as political director in 2011. “And the 2012 strike is emblematic of them saying, ‘Yes, we can.’”
But the 2012 deal that ended the strike also included painful concessions for CTU, such as an increase in the extent to which the assessment of teachers’ performances would be based on their students’ standardized test scores.
“We don’t get here without every election between 2013 and 2023.”
– Stacy Davis Gates, president, Chicago Teachers Union
The following year, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel pushed ahead with his agenda to shutter schools where enrollment had declined and a high percentage of students were failing to meet his performance metrics. He ultimately closed 49 schools — the largest mass closure in city history.
The shuttered schools were concentrated in predominantly Black neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West sides. Many people in those communities lamented that students at those schools would have to be bused across town to schools in unfamiliar communities where rival gangs posed a risk to their physical safety.
“That’s one thing they weren’t understanding before,” said Rev. Shun Fox, a minister in the West Side’s Austin neighborhood, where Johnson lives. “The city of Chicago is so sectioned off.”
The school closures “didn’t resonate well with Chicago,” he added.
Lewis concluded from the experience that, absent a more meaningful role in city politics, the union’s membership — and the traditional public school system itself — would continue to suffer a slow decline.
Gates remembers Lewis effectively saying, “We’re under mayoral control, this guy is our boss — let’s take our grievances directly to the voters.”
The union took a two-pronged approach to the task of increasing its political footprint.
First, it began taking the process of recruiting, endorsing and electing candidates more seriously, with an understanding that even losses at the ballot box would help the union build power.
To that end, CTU founded United Working Families, a political party affiliated with the national Working Families Party that serves as a one-stop shop for the union and its allies’ progressive electioneering.
“We are still a union. We’re not a political party,” Gates said. “But we helped to build one.”
Early victories for CTU and United Working Families included the elections of democratic socialist Carlos Ramirez-Rosa and Susan Sadlowski Garza, a CTU member and official, to the Chicago City Council in 2015. Lewis considered running for mayor that year, but her 2014 cancer diagnosis ruled that out.
Brandon Johnson, left, and Paul Vallas share a light moment before the start of a televised debate on March 16.
Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/Associated Press
Instead, the union endorsed Jesús “Chuy” García, who is now a congressman. García ultimately lost to Emanuel, but not before forcing him into a runoff election for the first time since runoffs became a possibility in 1999.
By 2018, CTU was helping Johnson win his place on the Cook County Board of Commissioners and Delia Ramirez land her seat in the state House of Representatives. Ramirez, who is now a progressive member of Congress, introduced the state-level legislation that is set to shift Chicago from a school district under direct mayoral control to one governed by a 21-member elected school board. The board, long sought by CTU, would be the largest school board in the country.
And this year, seven of the Chicago City Council candidates whom CTU endorsed have already won their races. Another five CTU-backed candidates are competing in runoff elections on Tuesday.
“We don’t get here without every election between 2013 and 2023,” Gates told HuffPost. “That’s why every election is important.”
Under Gates’ leadership ― first as political director and now president ― CTU also doubled down on a comprehensive progressive policy agenda. That agenda is based on a belief that poverty, segregation and government neglect, rather than teacher quality, are to blame for underprivileged students’ difficulties in school.
The union has accordingly taken strong stances in support of building more affordable housing in the city, imposing higher taxes on the rich and ending police abuses. On the latter front, the union even got behind an effort to expel police officers from city public schools.
“There is no focusing on the classroom if you don’t focus on the social issues that are impacting the students in the classroom.”
– U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.)
“People say, well, ‘Why are the teachers obsessed about affordable housing or addressing homelessness, or clinical social workers issues? Just focus on the classroom,’” Ramirez told HuffPost while campaigning for Johnson and two city council candidates in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood. “There is no focusing on the classroom if you don’t focus on the social issues that are impacting the students in the classroom.”
The union has continued to suffer setbacks on the road to greater influence. In 2019, the union endorsed Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Commission, for Chicago mayor. Preckwinkle lost to Lori Lightfoot, the current mayor, in a landslide.
Soon after, CTU had a chance to flex its muscles against Lightfoot at the bargaining table. When CTU went on strike for 11 days in 2019, the union prevailed on the city to spend hundreds of millions more dollars on reducing class sizes and hiring nurses, social workers and librarians to work in schools that lacked them.
CTU has enlisted allies in these fights, forming a loose coalition of progressive labor unions with local chapters of SEIU and AFSCME, both of which represent a racially diverse group of public-sector and service employees in the city.
Other unions across the country have either rapidly scaled up their political operations in recent years or followed CTU’s lead in making common cause with other unions to pursue a broad, progressive policy agenda. But perhaps no union has done both with as much speed and effectiveness as the CTU, according to Alex Han, a former top official at SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana and co-founder of United Working Families.
“For combining that progressive vision with deep community ties and political power, there is no parallel,” said Han, who is now executive director of the nonprofit left-wing news outlet In These Times.
Brandon Johnson speaks at a campaign rally on March 30. His critics worry that he is too close to the Chicago Teachers Union to govern independently.
Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Fears Of A Union Takeover
The strength of the coalition that CTU has assembled is evident in the fact that 90% of Johnson’s $11 million campaign haul has come from unions.
Not every member of CTU is happy about the amount that their union is spending to support Johnson. Specifically, a group of members is suing union leadership for approving the bundling of $8 from each member’s dues to transfer as much as $2 million to Johnson’s campaign. The members allege that the union violated a part of its bylaws requiring greater member input on political spending.
Gates maintains that what CTU did is a standard practice among unions in state and city politics. She argued that the scrutiny she’s facing from within the union reflects a sexist double standard.
“It is difficult for people to grab hold of the idea that a group of women can figure out how to do it just like the boys do,” she said.
A union president in another state confirmed to HuffPost that bundling from dues for political donations is common in state and local elections where it is permitted, even though federal law prohibits the practice in federal elections. (In federal elections, unions can voluntarily seek donations from members and allocate them to a separate political action committee.)
Then, there are the fears that Johnson, if elected, would be too beholden to CTU. The union’s current five-year contract is set to expire at the end of 2024, setting the stage for contentious negotiations with the city sometime in the next year and a half. Those talks will take place at a time when federal COVID-19 relief money will have largely dried up, straining the city’s finances.
“How do you like negotiating when both sides of the argument are the teachers union? You’re negotiating with yourself,” outgoing Alderman Tom Tunney, a moderate backing Vallas, told HuffPost. “Where’s the check and balance on this thing?”
“The unions are concerned about themselves.”
– Rev. Corey Brooks
Tunney also suggested that, in keeping with CTU’s skepticism toward selective-enrollment or “magnet” schools, Johnson would do away with those more elite schools’ application processes. That could, in turn, prompt more educated and affluent parents like those in Tunney’s northern lakefront ward to either leave the city or turn to private schools, Tunney warned.
Johnson, who is still receiving a salary from CTU alongside the pay he receives for his post on the Cook County commission, has repeatedly emphasized that, if elected, he will end his membership in CTU and govern independently. In a March 8 debate with Vallas, Johnson promised to serve as a mayor “for everyone” and that his “fiduciary responsibility” to the city would take precedence over his ties to the union.
At an impromptu press conference at the City Club of Chicago on March 27, however, Johnson struggled to articulate his position on selective-enrollment public schools.
“We cannot afford to have a stratified school district where you have to apply in order to have access to a quality school,” he said.
Pressed on whether his vision for a less stratified school system would require an outright elimination of selective admissions processes, Johnson did not answer. Shortly after the press conference, his campaign issued a statement clarifying that he would seek to bolster funding for community schools, “not end” selective enrollment.
CTU has grown in prominence at a time when the Democratic Party has shifted to the left more broadly and the kinds of “school choice” reforms favored by Vallas have fallen out of favor.
But the debate among Democrats over how best to improve public schools continues to simmer beneath the surface. Those who remain sympathetic to charter schools and to demanding more from unionized public school teachers tend to argue that the persistence of poverty and other obstacles to educational advancement does not preclude the possibility that better teacher quality and school administration can meaningfully improve students’ lives.
Students at Mt. Greenwood Elementary School in Chicago depart after a full day of classes following the strike in January 2022.
Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press
“The unions are concerned about themselves,” said Rev. Corey Brooks, a pastor and anti-violence advocate in the South Side’s Woodlawn neighborhood who is supporting Vallas. “They’re not concerned about students. And they’re definitely not concerned about the Black community.”
Brooks soured on CTU during the COVID-19 pandemic, believing that the union kept schools closed to in-person learning for too long.
Specifically, Brooks and other critics blame the union for approving a last-minute strike in January 2022 to insist on a continuation of remote learning amid the omicron wave. The teachers were demanding stricter health and safety protocols from the city, including more KN95 masks and antigen testing for students, though Lightfoot’s team maintained that they were already offering those things.
The relative frequency with which the union has gone on strike has even bothered Fox, the West side pastor, who is supporting Johnson.
“I think they need better leadership,” he said of the union.
Johnson has stood by the union’s decisions on in-person learning. And Gates blames Lightfoot for what she says was the mayor’s refusal to accommodate reasonable safety demands, including that immunocompromised teachers receive exemptions allowing them to continue teaching at home.
“Look, Lori Lightfoot has been repudiated for her leadership in the city,” said Gates, noting that Lightfoot failed to make Tuesday’s runoff. “And now y’all want to come back and talk to me about her leadership during COVID?!”
Inside CTU headquarters, the union practices what it preaches. Masks are still required inside the building.
The union also maintains that its concerns about in-person learning were consistent with the worries of a majority of public school parents. At least some polling suggested that that was true, as an education policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute noted during the 2022 strike.
Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas has a history of enacting policies loathed by teachers unions.
Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press
‘This Is About Survival’
Regardless, the challenges facing the city’s public school system — and CTU, by extension — are indisputable. The pandemic accelerated a decadeslong decline in school enrollment. Chicago Public Schools enrolled 9,000 fewer students in the current school year than in the previous one. As a result, Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida has overtaken Chicago as the country’s third-largest school district.
When I ask Gates if the union has ideas about how to improve enrollment, she harks back to her holistic critique of racist economic policies starving the school system and the families that use it. She specifically faults Vallas, who was Chicago budget director in the early 1990s before taking over as schools CEO, and other business-friendly Chicago officials, for allowing the city to become unaffordable for low-income and working-class families.
“If you don’t have kids in the school, it means you don’t have families in the city. Those things go together,” she said. “And if families aren’t in the city, they don’t have anywhere to live that they can afford.”
In Vallas, CTU has an ideological opponent every bit as pure as the ally it has in Johnson.
Vallas, who ran Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001, is keen to note that he did not close down any schools, but his introduction of probation and other disciplinary measures for schools that he deemed inadequate laid the groundwork for his successors’ more aggressive measures.
After Chicago, Vallas went on to run public school systems in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he followed a similar formula of consolidating traditional public schools, allowing charter schools to proliferate and increasing the test-based assessment of teacher performance. Vallas drew praise from some local school officials and politicians in those cash-strapped cities for squeezing municipal budgets for savings that could be used to improve school buildings and shutting down mediocre charter schools, even when it angered conservative allies.
“The Chicago Teachers Union has had a stranglehold over our schools – an absolute stranglehold over the schools … to the detriment of the kids.”
– Paul Vallas, candidate for Chicago mayor
Now Vallas promises to do the same as mayor of Chicago.
“We’ve got to open our [school] buildings, in the dinner hour, on weekends, over the summer and over the holidays, and we’ve got to bring faith-based and community-based organizations to the schools,” Vallas said at a March 27 press conference with leaders of more conservative labor unions that support him. “The Chicago Teachers Union has had a stranglehold over our schools — an absolute stranglehold over the schools … to the detriment of the kids.”
But in the cities where he served as a schools turnaround specialist, Vallas also elicited loud opposition from unions and other local stakeholders, who blame him for making a mess of the budget and then leaving before the political blowback could force him out. Those detractors include Democratic U.S. Reps. Troy Carter of New Orleans and Brendan Boyle of Philadelphia — both mainstream liberals who appeared in a Johnson campaign digital ad titled “Trail of Destruction” that blasted Vallas.
Asked whether investing so much in Johnson’s mayoral bid did not carry significant risk, Gates responded that the union had no alternative, given the dangers of Vallas’ potential mayoralty.
“This is about survival,” she said.
If Vallas wins, some of CTU’s earlier wins could limit his influence over city schools. For example, in the next few years, the management of Chicago Public Schools will shift out of direct mayoral control to an elected school board. But as part of the transition to a completely elected board, the next mayor will still have the power to appoint 11 of the 21 school board members in 2024.
What’s more, the Chicago City Council, which is almost certain to be friendlier to CTU than Vallas would be if he wins, recently voted to expand its power vis-a-vis the next mayor.
Still, I wanted to know what Gates planned to do if Johnson “falls short.”
“He wouldn’t fall short,” she said. “The movement would fall short.”
Paul Vallas, one of two finalists in the race for Chicago mayor, has often been critical of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D).
The Pritzker policies with which Vallas took issue included an election-year tax cut that Vallas saw as an effort to “fool” voters, a reduction in a tax credit for low-income private school parents and, most of all, the progressive governor’s cautious approach to reopening public schools and lifting mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking on a conservative talk-radio show in December 2021, Vallas, the former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, argued that Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot were relying on executive orders to implement public health policy because it “gives them the ability to act like dictators” by circumventing their respective legislatures.
Pritzker has remained neutral in the Chicago mayoral runoff, which is due to conclude on April 4. In that contest, Vallas, a centrist, faces off against Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, a progressive.
HuffPost nonetheless asked Pritzker’s political staff whether he had any response to Vallas’ most striking criticism of the governor.
Pritzker campaign spokesperson Natalie Edelstein replied with a statement that both defended Pritzker’s conduct and took a subtle jab at Vallas, homing in on his affinity for right-wing talk radio.
“Throughout the pandemic, Governor Pritzker spent every day fighting to save people’s lives and livelihoods,” Edelstein said. “He did it by following the advice of the nation’s best virologists and epidemiologists, many of whom are at Illinois’s world-class research institutions and hospitals.”
“Leadership requires making tough choices and not pandering to the loudest voices driven by politics,” she added. “The next mayor of Chicago may be called upon to lead in a similar type of emergency and residents deserve to know if their next Mayor will listen to experts or instead to right wing talk show hosts when making decisions about people’s lives.”
HuffPost sought a response from the Vallas campaign.
“Paul Vallas looks forward to working with state leaders in tackling all the issues facing Chicago, from making the city safer to improving education to confronting crisis situations whenever they emerge,” Vallas campaign spokesperson Phil Swibinski said in a statement. “As a lifelong Democrat, Paul respects Gov. Pritzker’s leadership and voted for him in the past election.”
The two mayoral candidates competing in the runoff ― Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson (left) and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas ― campaign in Chicago in February.
Chicago Tribune/Getty Images
Vallas, a charter-school proponent backed by Chicago’s main police union, has run on a message of restoring public safety. He proposes filling the city’s more than one thousand person police backlog and reviving community policing without raising any taxes.
Johnson, a former school teacher and organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, previously embraced the idea of cutting police funding to fund social programs. He is now running on using efficiency savings to add 200 detectives through promotion, as well as raising an array of taxes to finance youth jobs and comprehensive mental health care.
Liberal cities’ prolonged school closures and other non-pharmaceutical efforts to limit the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have elicited criticism from across the ideological spectrum as even some progressives second-guess the tradeoffs of these policies.
But Vallas’s criticism of Pritzker is part of a pattern of bashing prominent Democrats and cozying up to right-wing activists, pundits, and even politicians, that has helped Johnson in his quest to define Vallas as a Republican ― and apparently even irked Pritzker.
In other appearances on right-wing radio in recent years, Vallas has suggested that certain left-wing methods for teaching Black history create an “excuse for bad behavior,” and disparaged former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden.
Vallas has had a consistently frosty attitude toward Pritzker, whom he dissed in the same interview where he spoke critically about Obama and Biden.
Vallas even encouraged the leader of a right-wing parents’ rights group to run against Pritzker. He has since apologized for associating with the group after learning of its views on LGBTQ issues.
Vallas led Johnson by six percentage points in the only public poll conducted since the runoff got underway.
To close that gap, Johnson is hoping to convince enough moderate Democrats ― especially moderate Black Democrats ― that he is the only real Democrat in the race.
