7:00 pm 3/9: Vallas As Mayor of Chicago Would Put City Classrooms, Public School Students and Vulnerable Communities in Jeopardy

CHICAGO–On Thursday, veteran CPS teachers and charter educators will host a press conference laying out the stakes of the upcoming mayoral race for Chicago’s classrooms in both the public and charter sectors. This press conference comes on the heels of the heated NBC5 Mayoral Debate in which Paul Vallas made clear that if elected, he would push forward on his plan to destabilize city public schools by handing out additional charters and funding to new privatized schools.

With questions swirling about Paul Vallas’ role in destabilizing public education, Chicago voters should look at Paul Vallas’s actual record on education to better understand how he will run CPS and expand privatization. Educators at charter schools—who were told privatization would help their students—have been forced to negotiate, campaign, and even strike to win classroom resources and enforce basic standards. Unionized charter staff are currently negotiating new contracts with charter operators across the city, working to clean up the harm left by his policy of privatization with little oversight, planning or concern for students’ needs.

During Vallas’s time as CEO of CPS, his push for privatization was paired with tireless work to underfund educator pensions, disinvest in special education, and initiate policies that led to years of school closings in some of Chicago’s most vulnerable neighborhoods and the loss of over half the city’s Black teachers. Veteran CPS teachers and retirees experienced first hand Vallas’s fiscal mismanagement of CPS. By choosing to skip pension payments through his “pension holiday” schemes, Vallas saddled CPS with years of massive debts that are still being paid off by sacrificing benefits promised to retired educators and through increased property taxes.

This reckless leadership continued while at the helm of public school systems in New Orleans, LA, Philadelphia, PA, and Bridgeport, CT, where Vallas continued to work with millionaires, billionaires, and outsider interests to privatize public schools, creating a double whammy for students and families in those cities — a lack of access to high-quality neighborhood public schools and destabilized communities shorn of their public-school anchors.

With public schools in Chicago already under-resourced thanks to the willful neglect of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, our students cannot afford four years of Paul Vallas as Mayor of Chicago.