Education
Pritzker Calls CPS Budget Deficit ‘Challenging,’ Advises Against Borrowing
Gov. J.B. Pritzker is pictured in a file photo in his Illinois State Capitol office. (Jerry Nowicki / Capitol News Illinois)
The political dogfight for control of Chicago Public Schools has escalated ahead of a high-stakes meeting Thursday during which CPS board members could have to take a side.
As CPS CEO Pedro Martinez fights to hold onto the job Mayor Brandon Johnson wants him removed from, the Chicago Teachers Union, City Council members, a coalition of Latino activists, prominent members of the business community and recent CPS executives are on the battlelines.
But Gov. J.B. Pritzker is pointedly staying out of the fray, calling the city and district’s budget issues “challenging.”
“You know, that’s a personnel matter for the (Chicago) Board of Education, and a decision that I guess the mayor is making, so, not something that I intend for the state to interfere with,” Pritzker said Wednesday in response to reporters’ questions.
A key reason that Johnson is trying to oust Martinez is due to funding.
The nearly $10 billion CPS budget advanced by Martinez and approved in July by the Johnson-appointed Chicago Board of Education, relied on cuts to cover a deficit and doesn’t cover $175 million in non-teacher pension costs. It also doesn’t contemplate additional spending that is sure to come once the CTU and CPS reach new contract terms.
Johnson reportedly called for the district to borrow $300 million to cover the pension and extra spending.
Martinez has rejected doing so, and the board doesn’t have a loan on its Thursday agenda.
“Borrowing to pay for operating expenses in a business, in a government, etc., is not a great idea unless you know how you’re going to pay for that, because it’s going to come due,” Pritzker said, “speaking as a businessperson.”
He went on to point out that less than a quarter of Illinois students attend K-12 classes in Chicago, “the other roughly 80% are outside the city, and many of them downstate Illinois. So we have to think about the education systems across the state, the superintendents of those school systems. And make sure that we’re supporting them.”
Pritzker said that since he became governor in 2019, the state has funneled an additional $2 billion into K-12 education.
But the pressure to spend more on schools isn’t coming exclusively from Chicago.
Last week, the heads of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Education Association penned a joint op-ed calling state education funding “increasingly insufficient.”
Since he became governor in 2019, Pritzker noted that the state has funneled an additional $2 billion into K-12 education, mainly by adding $350 million most years into an evidence-based funding model intended to help all schools reach an “adequacy” target.
“However, it (the model) falls short of its promise; it is not expected to meet adequacy standards until 2040 — 13 years behind schedule,” the IFT’s Dan Montgomery and the IEA’s Al Llorens wrote. “This shortfall was highlighted in the latest legislative session when minimal funding increases proved inadequate for Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and other districts across the state, underscoring a deepening crisis in educational investment as student needs grow.”
Pritzker said Wednesday that he’s “on their side.”
“To be clear, I would like to put more money into our education system,” he said. “I think we all acknowledge, just by virtue of our following the evidenced-based funding model, that we are not funding properly education, K-12 education in the state of Illinois. So now the question is, where do you find the dollars to do that? And that’s obviously one of the biggest challenges of being governor.”
Funding is at the heart of the division between Martinez and Johnson, who according to multiple media reports last week asked Martinez for his resignation last week.
Johnson is closely aligned with the CTU, a major campaign contributor and where he worked prior to becoming mayor.
In the spring, Johnson and CTU members jointly traveled to Springfield on a failed mission to pitch legislators on giving CPS the full $1.1 billion it would take for the district to reach the adequacy target.
CTU leadership on Sunday unanimously approved a vote of no confidence in Martinez, with CTU President Stacy Davis appearing on “Chicago Tonight” Monday and calling him a “sore thumb.”
CPS, the mayor’s office and CTU have never before been in more alignment, she said, with the just-approved CPS five-year vision mirroring the union’s proposed contract terms and Johnson’s priorities.
Davis Gates said Martinez publicly claims to also be in alignment, but “there is a PR Pedro and then there is another Pedro,” Davis Gates said.
“On the other end of this, he is saying that all of our alignment is impossible to bring to fruition because we don’t have the budget,” she said. “And then he doubles down and says ‘and I don’t have a plan to win the budget either.’”
She called on Martinez to “get in line” with the shared vision, and “he needs to create a vision and a plan for how we win the revenue and the funding to offer students what they deserve. Offering them cuts only is not the vision we have for this district.”
Pritzker, who lives in Chicago, said that the city, as well as the rest of the state, “needs an excellent education system to provide for your young people.”
CTU also said Martinez wants to close the district’s budget gap by closing schools, and points to a confidential document obtained by the union that analyzes CPS facilities.
Martinez has been emphatic that he doesn’t back school closures, saying that the notion he’s trying to is part of a “misinformation campaign.”
“So let me be 100% clear — there are absolutely no plans to close, consolidate or phase out any District-managed schools. This simply is not a direction that CPS is considering as we plan for the future of our District,” he wrote in a public letter on Thursday.
As if to prove that, the CPS board added a resolution to its Thursday agenda that “adopts the CEO’s recommendation to place a moratorium on closures, consolidations, and phase-outs for district-managed schools through school year 2026-2027.”
Contact Amanda Vinicky: @AmandaVinicky | [email protected]
