Chicago School Board: For Sale

It’s time to talk about how the wealthy are trying to buy the Chicago School Board. 

It’s time to talk about how the wealthy are trying to buy the school board. 

If you remember how we got here, then it is an appalling prospect that the very forces that helped Rahm Emanuel close 50 schools, who handed over millions to school privatizers, and fought tooth and nail against the idea of an elected school board in the first place are now trying to buy every seat and the presidency of that school board for themselves.

Let’s start with the donations by billionaire insider, education privatizer and longtime Rahm ally Michael Sacks and his wife Cari to seven of the candidates for school board president (the “Sacks 7,” if you will):

• *Jessica Biggs, $17,300

• *Carlos Rivas, $7,300

• *Ellen Rosenfeld, $41,600

• *Angel Gutierrez, $21,100 

• *Theresa Boyle, $7,300

• *Che Smith, $7,300

• *Jennifer Custer, $7.300

And that’s just from Sacks. The corporate class of this city is showering these candidates - all of whom have indicated they are willing to close schools - with gobs of money. Don’t take my word for it: Go to Illinois Sunshine and read through their receipts - the list is a who’s who of the city’s elite. Disgraced and corrupt former charter operator turned political operative Juan Rangel, Republican CEO Jim Frank, billionaire Donald Wilson, billionaire David Weinberg, billionaire Arthur Rock, and on and on. 

WHO IS MICHAEL SACKS?

Let’s look a little closer at Michael Sacks, the “leader” of the Chicago billionaire pack when it comes to spending on elections and the school board race in particular. The head of multi-billion dollar investment firm Grosvenor Capital doesn’t appear to be donating all this money out of the goodness of his heart. His past political donations have been good investments, as it turns out, whether it’s the $70,000 he gave former Governor Pat Quinn right before he handed over the Illinois teachers pension fund to be managed by Sacks’s Grosvenor Capital or the $2 million+ he gave to Rahm Emanuel, who moved the city pension fund into the state pension to be managed by - you guessed it - Michael Sacks. Records showed Sacks exchanged 1,500 emails with Rahm leading up to the move, many discussing pension issues. This is the guy leading the charge to buy the school board now.

Sadly, from the looks of some of the discourse on here, Sacks and the other billionaires’ money is already working as intended. Too few remember where this historic opportunity to elect the school board comes from and too many are willing to echo these billionaires’ talking points, demonizing the teachers of the CTU or making slicker attempts at posturing as progressives while opening a door to close more schools (“yeah, school closure was a disaster and didn’t save money and caused an uptick in violence, but there’s a right way to close schools, just trust me and my corporate-backed friends to lead a community process” - 👀). So, at risk of sounding like an old man (“back in my day…”), please indulge me in re-visiting a little history.

HOW WE GOT HERE

The demand for an elected school board comes from DECADES of organizing by communities and organizations across this city, from the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization to Northside Action for Justice to LSNA/Palenque to the Lugenia Burns Hope Center to the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council to Blocks Together to STOP and many more, especially from groups on the south and west sides of this city organizing in areas hit hardest by school closure and privatization. 

Then in 2010, a group of teachers from The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), ran on a platform of taking on the school privatizers and building a movement alongside community to fight not just for better conditions for teachers but to address the conditions faced by students and their communities inside and outside the classroom, and won leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union.

They collaborated with the organizations who had been fighting for an elected school board and together brought community issues to the bargaining table as 30,000 teachers led the historic 2012 strike for “the schools our students deserve.” At the time I was organizing the fight against Rahm’s closure of half our city mental health clinics, and evidence of this broader focus on the common good by the CTU was the way teachers and clinicians of the CTU took up our struggle as their own before, during and after that strike. They recognized that we had a common enemy - the billionaires and their politicians (Rahm principle among them) - who wanted to push working people out of the city, especially black and brown communities, and cash in on privatizing every city asset they could get their hands on.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Angry at the gains of the CTU and education justice movement in the 2012 strike, Rahm swung back, closing 50 schools - overwhelmingly on the south and west sides in majority black and Latino neighborhoods. I was at hearings for pretty much every one of those school closures as the lead Spanish interpreter and language access coordinator for them. Day after day, for weeks and weeks, parents and students and teachers showed up to hearings crying their hearts out, warning of spikes in violence, sharing their love of these schools not just as buildings or institutions but as communities. They offered personal and powerful testimony to a board and CPS bureaucracy that stared back with blank faces, unmoved because they had no accountability to anybody but the hand-picked CEO of CPS, who was in turn accountable only to Rahm and his billionaire buddies - like Michael Sacks.

So communities moved from the meeting rooms to the streets. People marched on foot from every corner of the city for three days, culminating in a massive protest downtown. There were camp outs in front of the board, sit-ins, die-ins, vigils, civil disobedience. In some of these photos you see Woodlawn at that time, where a group of students laid down on 61st and Cottage Grove blocking traffic in a powerful die-in at the exact place some of their friends would later actually die from the violence that is the all-too-predictable result of displacing and destabilizing students and communities. 

IN THE STREETS AND AT THE BALLOT BOX

While those powerful actions were unsuccessful at stopping Rahm and his billionaire buddies at that moment, they laid the groundwork for major political upheaval. United Working Families and other independent political organizations sprung up out of these struggles, building an electoral arm for the city’s social movements. In 2015, we elected organizer Carlos Daniel Rosa to city council, in 2019 we added hunger striker and longtime KOCO organizer Jeanette Beatrice Taylor and organizers like Rossana Rodriguez and Byron Sigcho Lopez, in 2021 we finally got an elected school board bill passed in Springfield, in 202,3 we added more organizers and allies to city council, and against all odds, elected someone who had been in the trenches with us through all of these struggles, former middle school teacher and organizer Brandon Johnson as mayor. 

THE REACTION

All of this came with new challenges and tensions. The right wing, ascendant since Trump’s first presidency, started to use migrants as political pawns, shipping them from Texas and Florida to Chicago to sow division and strain city resources, precisely because of the success of our political project. The billionaires of this city - Sacks chief among them - smelled blood and started an all-out media and political war to take down Brandon and his city hall allies. The point was to  teach not him, but all of us, a lesson about who is really allowed to call the shots in this city. 

Billionaires have fought every step of the way to undermine attempts to fully fund and protect schools, create funds for housing the homeless, reopen mental health clinics, and make the rich pay their fair share. Desperate to re-assert their power and crush the labor, social and political movements that have threatened their domination for the first time in decades, the billionaires of this city have been busy working to fracture our coalition and confuse our communities. They’ve sought out the opportunistic politicians willing to jump ship and generously welcomed them aboard. They’ve seeded candidates, they’ve started countless PACs, spending millions and millions. Now, they are trying to buy themselves a school board and school board president.

OUR SCHOOLS ARE NOT FOR SALE 

But the city of big shoulders doesn’t need the billionaires to tell us who should run our kids’ schools. Let’s show them what this city is made of. I believe Chicago is capable of seeing through the onslaught of mailers and ads and lies and attacks that are coming our way. The Sacks Seven - Biggs, Custer, Smith, Rivas, Rosenfeld, Gutierrez, and Boyle - are united in their willingness to close schools and take money (and orders) from billionaires. Not one went to a CPS school. Only the one they’ll tell you to fear because he is beholden to Big Teacher (oh the horror!), Hilario Dominguez, has been both a student and a teacher in the district and more importantly, in the trenches with the rest of us fighting school closures, for an elected board, and for the fully funded schools our children deserve. I encourage you to support him for president and the other candidates who earn the endorsement of the Our Schools coalition, to be announced in the weeks to come. 

It’s time to unite and tell the billionaires, their candidates and their apologists that Chicago’s schools are not for sale!