Editorial: Chicago’s school board has a duty to taxpayers to back Pedro Martinez against Brandon Johnson

They say you can't fight City Hall. But Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez is doing just that, refusing to bow to Mayor Brandon Johnson's desire to replace him with a new boss of the city's troubled school system.

A simmering battle between Martinez and Johnson over whether CPS should take on hundreds of millions in new high-rate loans to fund some of the Chicago Teachers Union's contract demands burst into the open last week. Martinez openly defied Johnson's widely reported request last week that Martinez resign his post.

We now await Thursday's scheduled meeting of Johnson's hand-picked Chicago Board of Education to learn Martinez's fate. Johnson can't fire Martinez directly; his board must do the dirty work. But the board to date has supported Martinez in his opposition to the fiscal recklessness called for by Johnson and CTU. Board members are said now to have "turned" on Martinez. Such reports have cited anonymous aides to the mayor; thus far, the board members have said nothing, including to Martinez himself as of late last week, we're given to understand.

Everything about this stand-off is remarkable — from a mayor who is supposed to be representing taxpayers instead of effectively acting as a party to a union demanding an unaffordable contract to the spectacle of the mayor's own appointed CPS CEO and board members openly defying him. This is not how the public's business should be conducted.

But whereas we ordinarily would support the idea that a mayor ought to be able to hire — and fire — senior leaders in city government, we make an exception in this case. This mayor is so beholden to a union whose tactics in a contract dispute verge on sabotage that we urge the Board of Education to back Martinez on Thursday and for the remainder of the board's term.

Firing this CPS CEO in the middle of a contract negotiation could only be interpreted as handing control of the schools to the union. A quick refresher on what CTU is demanding: annual wage increases of 9%, librarians in every school, money for housing for families of students that are housing-insecure and thousands more CTU members employed by a system that has shrunk 20% in terms of enrollment over a decade. That agenda isn't remotely affordable for a district already facing a deficit exceeding $700 million less than a year from now.

Johnson has demanded that CPS — already the nation's largest junk-bond issuer, paying more than $800 million annually just to service its mountain of ongoing debt — add another $300 million in high-cost debt to cover teacher raises and to make a $175 million pension payment whose responsibility has ping-ponged in recent years between the city government and CPS. A new schools boss hired specifically to strike a deal with a militant and unreasonable union presumably would need to add far more than $300 million to the maxed-out CPS credit card in order to buy labor peace.

The strategy pursued by the unholy alliance of Johnson and CTU is becoming clearer by the day. Gov. JB Pritzker and state legislative leaders, all Democrats and supporters of organized labor, have refused the Johnson-CTU demands for hundreds of millions more in state funds to finance CTU's membership growth. They've done so despite CTU president Stacy Davis Gates' racially charged attacks on them when she didn't get what she wanted from Springfield.

So now Johnson and Davis Gates' seeming gambit is to deliberately sink CPS into insolvency so that the state has "no choice" but to bail out Chicago's schools, nearly 40% of which are enrolled with half or fewer of the students they were designed to serve. That's unconscionable, and is why this school board has a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers to continue to display the courage it's shown so far. A new CEO piling more debt on CPS only will make the inevitable job of right-sizing this district all the more painful.

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It's clear that Martinez enjoys support from hundreds of past and present CPS principals, the business community and, we daresay, ordinary taxpayers paying attention to the disaster-in-the-making at CPS now that the issues are so front and center. CPS' performance in terms of student achievement remains far below where it should be, but the system under Martinez has made some gains in terms of reading and math scores since the pandemic.

Martinez also holds unusually strong cards in this face-off if he's willing to continue to tolerate the awkwardness of running the schools against the mayor's wishes. His employment contract provides for six months' notice, and a severance of 20 weeks' pay, if the board moves to fire him without cause.

Martinez has no financial incentive to make this easy on the mayor — or the board, if they indeed now are in Johnson's corner. Any effort to force him out immediately, whether by terming his removal a firing for cause or some other means, likely would be met with a lawsuit that would cost taxpayers another pretty penny on top of CTU's demands.

Chicago is set to hold its first-ever school board elections in November. The current board members will give way in a few months to a new 21-member board, 11 of whom will be mayoral appointees and 10 of whom will be newly elected. This board would be sowing chaos with a new school year well underway and with the public's voice on the future of Chicago's schools yet to be registered at the polls.

Martinez likes his job, it's clear, and thinks he's doing good work. But this clash really isn't about one man's career and livelihood. It's about the urgent cause of resisting a radical agenda with the power to badly damage a city already facing a financial crisis.