With the general election on the horizon, Chicago voters have yet another position to vote for this fall: the city’s school board members.
Regardless of their outcome, the elections will be historic, both expanding the seven-person board to 21 members and giving the public direct control over some of the members of the Chicago Board of Education. Since 1995, the mayor has elected all seven board members and has held essentially complete firing power over sitting members.
After months of debate, state legislators settled on the formal transition process back in March, with a hybrid elected model beginning this fall.
Despite the looming change, experts say there’s no concrete evidence demonstrating that elected school boards have different outcomes for students when compared with appointed boards.
“Whether it’s elections for the mayor or whether it’s for school boards, it’s really about different adult interests that up at the ballot box,” said Vladimir Kogan, a political science professor at Ohio State University who studies education policy. “Very little is usually fundamentally at the end of day about the kids and what’s good for student learning.”
However, research has shown that holding school board elections in on-cycle years — as Chicago will — can equate to more accountability for board members and result in a wider net of people voting for those who will control public schools.
And with recent heated debates — including between Mayor Brandon Johnson and Gov. J.B. Pritzker — over the future of neighborhood and selective enrollment schools, a busing shortage, equitable district funding and SROs in schools, outspoken critics of the current board could get their chance to shake up the status quo.
District breakdown
This fall, 10 of the 21 seats will be elected by the public, with the mayor continuing to elect the remaining 11 seats and appointing a board president. By 2027, all 21 members will be voted in. Those members will be elected by voters in 20 districts, who will also elect one president at-large.
The law signed by Pritzker in March maps out 10 districts for the November general election, in addition to the 20 areas for the 2026 elections.
That map includes seven majority-Black districts, six majority-Latino districts, five majority-white districts and two in which no group has a majority.
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Candidates must file petitions to run between June 17 and June 24 after collecting at least 1,000 signatures. Members will serve two-year terms on the board.
Last month, an unofficial debate was hosted by CPS Parents for Buses, a parent group advocating for the return of busing for general education students. At that debate, which the group believes was the first gathering of candidates, candidates spoke on issues including transportation, funding and equity.
Participants included Jennifer Custer and Michelle Pierre in District 1; Kate Doyle, Daniel Steven Kleinman and Maggie Cullerton Hooper in District 2; Jason Dones in District 3; Kimberly Brown and Thomas Day in District 4; Jesus Ayala Jr. in District 7; Lanetta Thomas in District 9; and Adam Parrott-Sheffer and Che “Rhymefest” Smith in District 10.
At least 17 others have filed paperwork to raise campaign funds, including Ebony DeBerry and Debby Pope, District 2; Carlos Rivas, District 3; Andy Davis and Ellen Rosenfeld, District 4; Aaron “Jitu” Brown and Anthony Hargrove in District 5; Danielle Wallace, Andre Smith and Anusha Thotakura, District 6; Katie Marciniak, Eva A. Villalobos and Yesenia Lopez, District 7; Miquel Lewis and Therese Boyle in District 9; and the Rev. Robert Jones and Brian Alexander in District 10.
CPS Parents for Buses said all seven current board members were invited but did not attend the debate.
Tension between state and city officials
Mayor Johnson championed the move to an elected school board as part of his progressive campaign, with his former employer, Chicago Teachers Union, also heavily supporting the change.
Later, once the proposal hit the state legislature, Johnson pivoted to supporting a hybrid model. Legislators ultimately submitted to the ask.
Since then, tensions between city and state officials have played out in the public eye as state politicians expressed concerns over Johnson’s appointed school board’s decision to prioritize neighborhood schools.
Most recently, Pritzker expressed support for a moratorium that would prevent Chicago Public Schools from closing any schools or changing selective enrollment admissions practices until 2027, when the board is fully elected, but the future of the legislation is unclear.
Teacher unions can boost candidates’ chances
The largest force at the ballot box is an endorsement from the local teachers union, according to a 2023 national study that found candidates backed by teacher unions “overwhelmingly win” school board elections.
That could mean big wins for the powerful 30,000-member teachers union in Chicago.
“The reason that Brandon Johnson and the teachers union have long desired an elected school board is not just ‘Well, we’re in favor of democracy and empowering people to be able to choose their school board’ but because the teachers union’s favorite candidates tend to do exceptionally well in school board elections,” said Michael Hartney, research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.
Hartney, who co-wrote the study on how teacher union endorsements can affect school board races, said such elections typically have some of the lowest voter turnout, averaging around 10% of registered voters.
“There’s this sort of paradox that people feel like having control over their local schools is democratic, but they don’t tend to show up and so who does show up? The teachers union,” Hartney said.
The average voter also put faith in teacher endorsements if they had positive experiences in school, regardless of their connection or involvement in the union.
“Ordinary voters, they trust teachers, they have really good feelings for teachers,” Hartney said. “Voters don’t tend to distinguish between the teachers union and the teachers themselves.”
How could turnout affect races?
Election officials said voter turnout in the March primary election was “pretty sleepy,” with less than 26% of registered voters showing out to a presidential primary with both candidates all but confirmed.
When voter turnout is low, voters are disproportionately older adults without kids, which can skew election results that affect public schools, Kogan said.
With Chicago’s school board elections occurring in either a presidential year and a mayoral election year, the Board of Education should in theory be more representative of what the average community member wants to prioritize in schools.
On-cycle elections can also hold elected school board members to higher standards, as more voters can equate to more pressure for elected officials to show that student outcomes have improved during their term.
“There’s some evidence … that when elections are on cycle, there’s more accountability for learning, and so there’s more incentives for elected officials to reprioritize student learning outcomes,” Kogan said.
Training school board members
In addition to not receiving pay, school board members don’t receive training by the district. With the new frontier of schools rapidly approaching, local advocates launched the Academy for Local Leadership earlier this year to train a group of fellows on how school districts operate.
Run in collaboration with National Louis University, the academy follows a nine-month schedule leading up to the general election in November. Students learn what a school board does, discuss current big issues in education, and attend and debrief monthly Board of Education meetings.
Some experts question how much training could impact policy beliefs, many of which are inherently political.
“To the extent that a lot of the dysfunction is baked into the political centers, you can’t undo it by training. You have to change the incentives themselves. The training doesn’t really get the root cause of the problem,” Kogan said.
