Mayor Johnson’s sorry spectacle of firing CEO Pedro Martinez is another bad move Chicago doesn’t deserve

With all the tawdry drama surrounding Chicago Public Schools in recent months, capped Friday by the bad move of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s hand-picked School Board firing CPS CEO Pedro Martinez, it’s all too easy for too many people to forget what’s most important: the education of 325,305 students.

Forget about the adults for a moment. Chicago’s students have made academic progress in recent years, but too many of them are still not receiving the high-quality education they need in the 21st century. According to the Illinois Report Card, only 30% of students met or exceeded state proficiency levels in English language arts; 18.3% met or exceeded proficiency levels in mathematics; 29% of eighth-graders passed Algebra 1, a gateway course for high school and college-level math; 41% of students were chronically absent.

That’s only a snapshot, but it tells a story, which is that many Chicago students just aren’t getting what they need academically.

Learning is what schools are supposed to be about, and what the board and Johnson should be focused on. Not the ugly drama of ousting Martinez, who played a role in improving CPS and had widespread support from civic leaders, school principals, parents and others.

“Dirty Chicago politics at its worst,” as former CEO Janice Jackson, who now heads the nonprofit Hope Chicago, put it in a statement after the board and mayor scheduled Friday’s special evening meeting to fire Martinez.

The drama also undermines — probably destroys — any plan to get additional state aid from Springfield. “It makes the ask very difficult when it looks, from the outside at least, extremely chaotic,” state Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago, told WBBM Newsradio.

Just before Friday’s meeting, Martinez’s lawyer had filed a lawsuit against the board, alleging that they breached his contract by planning action against him; he also sought a temporary restraining order to stop the meeting from taking place.

Who can blame parents, and the rest of Chicago, if they’re shaking their heads right now, wondering where the district will end up? Or worse yet, tuning out and throwing up their hands in frustration and anger at another fine mess created by Johnson and his Chicago Teachers Union allies, all with the goal of paving the way for a new CTU labor contract that the district, under Martinez, has said could cost up to $10 billion in the coming years. The CTU has pared back its initial demands and says the CPS estimate is misleading, as the Sun-Times’ Nader Issa and WBEZ’s Sarah Karp reported earlier this month. That $10 billion does seem high, but so do those 6% raises the CTU is asking for in the first two years of its contract, with 5% raises in years 3 and 4.

The board is considering installing Sean Harden — Johnson’s pick to be the new School Board president — as interim co-CEO.

So much for letting all-important questions about the district’s future, such as its leader and what a new teachers’ contract ought to include, be decided by the new hybrid school board that includes 10 members elected by, and accountable to, the public.

Johnson, of course, is entitled to his pick as CEO. If he had selected someone else and given Martinez his contractually obligated six months’ notice soon after becoming mayor, so be it. But an ugly, monthslong campaign to oust the CEO to please the CTU makes the mayor look like a puppet — does anyone in Chicago think otherwise at this point? — not a chief executive.

Now Johnson and his appointed board have the freedom to move ahead with steps that Martinez wisely blocked: settling a new union contract and taking out a costly short-term loan (!) to help pay for it.

It’s worth nothing that the proposed contract also includes provisions that both parents and principals have rightly found fault with.

“Our children’s futures depend on us getting this right,” as Jesse Ruiz, a former interim CPS CEO, wrote in a Sun-Times op-ed on the Martinez saga.

The board and Johnson did the opposite: They got it wrong.

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