Transition to partially elected school board will be 'chaos,' Johnson ally says

The transition to a partially elected Chicago Board of Education will be “chaos” and take “five years to make sense,” an influential City Council member warned Thursday.

Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th), Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hand-picked Education Committee chair, said she’s disappointed that Johnson and his allies in the Chicago Teachers Union have backed away from the fully elected, 21-member board they once supported.

Instead, there will be 10 elected members and 11 mayoral appointees, with an eventual transition to a fully elected board by 2027.

Taylor is equally concerned that the June 24 deadline for elected board candidates to gather 1,000 signatures will allow the process to be hijacked by powerful special interests who “want to use it for their political gang” and elect “some of the wrong people.” Those interests, she said, include the CTU.

But no matter who dominates the grand experiment, one thing is guaranteed.

“It’s going to be chaos. …This is not going to be as easy a transition as people think because we’re used to a top-down system. This is now supposed to be from the bottom up. It’s the same thing with Local School Councils,” said Taylor, who was elected to the LSC at Mollison Elementary at age 19.

“It’s going to take time,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times. “It probably won’t be for another five years that it’ll actually make sense and be what we want it to be.”

Johnson’s decision to retain the power to appoint 11 board members — including the president — through all but a few months of his four-year term buys time for his revamped, appointed board to implement fundamental changes.

Among them: shifting the focus away from selective enrollment schools and toward sustainable and fully funded community schools; moving away from student-based budgeting that punishes South and West Side schools with low enrollment; and banning school resource officers instead of leaving that decision up to local school councils.

Taylor agrees with “what they’re doing” but not with “how they’re doing it” — that is, without explanation.

The resulting anger and distrust has prompted two bills to surface in Springfield. One would take decision-making authority over school police officers away from the Chicago Board of Education. The other would prohibit changing funding levels for selective enrollment schools until a fully-elected board is seated.

“You don’t do things without explaining to people why you do those things. We cannot be the same people that we’ve replaced,” Taylor said.

“Now you’re on the other side. It ain’t no fun when a rabbit got the gun,” she added. “You’ve got to do a better job talking about the things we want to see. …It’s definitely not about snatching away education from those specialty schools. We’re saying, ‘Let’s make all the schools great.’”

Johnson, Taylor said, must explain that it’s about finally delivering on promises made to South and West Side communities more than a decade ago, when then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed a record 50 public schools at once.

“Kids who went from one closing school to another were supposed to get the support and all the things they needed. They didn’t get it,” she said. “Why do you think we’ve got thousands of young people out of school who we lost doing school closings and other things? Because the education system is not doing what it’s supposed to do.”

Four months ago, the always-outspoken Taylor told veteran podcaster Ben Joravsky that Johnson and the progressive movement that put him in office was “not ready” to govern, adding: “We look real stupid right now.”

Taylor doubled down Thursday.

“We haven’t been in government long enough. We haven’t been in those spaces and these are systems that need to be broken up and rebuilt,” she said. “While Mayor Johnson may be qualified to be on the fifth floor, just because you qualify don’t mean you should be there.”

Taylor then upped the ante.

She accused Johnson of helping to sabotage his own referendum — known as “Bring Chicago Home” — that would have authorized the City Council to raise the real-estate transfer tax on high-end property sales to create dedicated funding to reduce homelessness.

He did that, she said, by squelching an advisory referendum that would have allowed voters to weigh in on whether Chicago should remain a sanctuary city.

“Folks thought that asking the sanctuary city question was gonna hurt Bring Chicago Home and it backfired on them. … They should have worked with Alderman Anthony Beale. Come up with a question they both could agree on. And it should have been on the ballot as well so that people felt they could” be heard, Taylor said.

“You can’t just do stuff and think people are just gonna trust you and it’s OK. He doesn’t have that luxury — the same luxury that white mayors [have]. It’s what we say about Black people in politics. We can’t just do what they do.”