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The Needle has Moved
Public School Teacher Becomes Mayor of Chicago
What do Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas have in common? They both have histories in the education field.
Brandon Johnson is a public school teacher, a paid staff organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) as well as a Cook County Commissioner. He taught in a grade school that was in the middle of what had been the Cabrini-Green housing projects. In his speeches he often mentions how his students could look out their windows and see their own relatively poor neighborhood but also the surrounding gentrified section of the city.
Paul Vallas built a reputation as an opponent of public education when he ran the Chicago school system (1995–2001) as well as similar work in Philadelphia (2002–2007) and New Orleans (2007–2011). He was especially well known for going into post-Katrina New Orleans and completely eliminating public schools in that city through charter schools.
You might think the race for Mayor of Chicago would at least make education a major issue in the city’s discourse about its future. But you would be wrong.
Vallas could not run on an education platform in a city where the CTU had led extraordinary battles to protect Chicago’s public schools and to improve the living conditions of its students. These strikes gained a national reputation for not…
