After months of political turmoil, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously to fire the chief executive of the city’s public school system on Friday night. The move to oust the executive, Pedro Martinez, represented a show of force for the Chicago Teachers Union and for Mayor Brandon Johnson, a close ally and former employee of the union.
There had been a crescendo of chaos at the district all fall that included Mr. Martinez resisting a proposal to take out a high-interest loan to help cover a budget gap, the entire School Board resigning, and the president of Mr. Johnson’s handpicked replacement board quitting after elected officials criticized his old social media posts as antisemitic and misogynistic.
All that played out amid a drawn-out fight over Chicago’s budget, an ongoing contract negotiation with the powerful teachers’ union and painful questions about whether a post-pandemic surge in school staffing and services would be financially sustainable.
After months of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to oust Mr. Martinez, the discord reached its climax at an evening board meeting on Friday, just weeks before Chicago shifts to a new system in which a portion of the school board is elected. Mr. Martinez has, through his lawyer, threatened to sue if he was fired or the board sought to limit his power.
That lawyer, William J. Quinlan, accused the mayor and the union of campaigning to “improperly and unlawfully terminate Mr. Martinez based on wholly pretextual reasons.” Neither the mayor’s office nor the union immediately responded to a request for comment on Friday.
The dispute over Mr. Martinez’s job status centered on some of the most vexing post-pandemic challenges that big city school systems are wrestling with: under-enrollment, budget crises and debates over just how powerful public employee unions should be.
Chicago Public Schools used federal Covid-19 relief money to hire thousands of teachers, instructional coaches, counselors, nurses and social workers, even as student enrollment shrunk. The district’s 300,000 students have demonstrated unusually strong recovery from pandemic-era learning loss in reading, and more students than ever are enrolling in college-level courses. But money is now running out, and the system is hundreds of millions of dollars in the red.
Mr. Johnson, a former social studies teacher and union organizer, was elected mayor last year after receiving significant support from the teachers’ union. He ran in part on a vision of investing in public schools and using them as an engine to address the city’s problems, though his tenure has been complicated by Chicago’s tight finances and a tense relationship with the City Council. He has been widely reported to have spent months working behind the scenes to push Mr. Martinez out of his role.
Mr. Johnson, a Democrat, declined to discuss Mr. Martinez in an interview earlier this fall. But the mayor has defended calling for investments in schools.
“I was elected to invest in people,” Mr. Johnson said in that earlier interview. “Guess what I’m doing? I’m investing in people.”
But his philosophy and the effort to remove Mr. Martinez have drawn significant criticism from elected officials and education experts. Some are worried that the city’s finances do not allow for the sort of investments favored by the mayor and union, or that ousting Mr. Martinez will disrupt academic improvement efforts.
Silvana Tabares, a City Council member who was one of several elected officials to address the Board of Education on Friday, said “the mayor is a walking conflict of interest” when it comes to Chicago schools and the teachers’ union.
She told board members that “you are being used.”
“You’re not just firing a C.E.O.,” Ms. Tabares said before the vote. “You are intentionally clearing a way to saddle taxpayers with billions in costs.”
In a statement opposing Mr. Martinez’s firing, Janice K. Jackson, a previous chief executive of the district, called Friday’s Board of Education meeting “dirty Chicago politics at its worst.”
“We will lose ground on the academic progress we have made and can continue to make as a city,” she said.
But while many elected officials urged the Board of Education to keep Mr. Martinez, others who spoke at Friday’s meeting expressed deep concerns about his performance.
“Pedro Martinez has failed to create stability,” Tara Stamps, a county commissioner, told the board, adding that it is time for the city’s schools “to move forward with the leadership that understands the urgency of now.”
The conflict in Chicago was being closely watched by educators and policymakers across the country. Some of the challenges facing the district are shared broadly, including under-enrolled schools and the end of federal pandemic relief money.
But it is unusual to see a teachers’ union wield so much influence over a school system, and so openly. Some of the union’s contract demands, such as higher pay and more support staff, are typical in negotiations. Others are less common, like a demand that committees of teachers set curriculum and disciplinary practices rather than principals or district officials.
The union and mayor have had an adversarial relationship with Mr. Martinez, yet they have also shared goals, including avoiding school closures.
The budget deficit is at the heart of their dispute. Chicago Public Schools used temporary federal pandemic relief dollars to hire thousands of teachers, instructional coaches, counselors, nurses and social workers, even as student enrollment shrunk.
In an October interview with The New York Times, Mr. Martinez defended that approach, noting that the district’s post-pandemic academic recovery outpaced many other school systems. To make up for the loss of federal funding, Mr. Martinez suggested appealing to the state and tapping property tax reserves — but avoiding a high-interest loan, a strategy favored by Mr. Johnson and the union.
Mr. Martinez had previously served as the district’s top financial officer, and said deficit spending would replicate problems from the past.
Leadership turnover is a significant problem for the nation’s schools, with many heads of districts reporting that political pressures and the stresses of pandemic-era schooling have pushed them from their jobs.
A fifth of the nation’s largest 500 school districts replaced superintendents last year, according to a report from the ILO Group, a consulting firm.
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