The campaign literature in voters’ mailboxes was vicious, dishonest, over the top and vaguely nauseating, rife with accusations of racism, incompetence and greed. One digitally altered image in particular showed a Jewish candidate clutching a fistful of cash and wearing a garish dollar-symbol pendant around his neck. Another insinuated that a candidate was responsible for a sexual molestation scandal.
Politics as usual, in other words. Nothing that would truly shock anyone who’s lived through a few election seasons in the Chicago area.
These attack mailers, however, were from the 2020 school board elections in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where voters and not the mayor are responsible for selecting the seven members who shape education policy in the second-largest public school system in the country. It’s also where a national record $17.7 million was spent last year as various factions tried to gain the upper hand in the long-running battle between teachers unions and charter school advocates.
I mention this since the perennial idea of electing members of the school board in Chicago — the nation’s third-largest district — is again in the news. Democratic state Sen. Robert Martwick introduced Senate Bill 2497 last month calling for a change that activists have long championed, that Mayor Lori Lightfoot has said she is behind, that has passed both chambers in the General Assembly in various forms in recent years, that the Chicago Teachers Union backs and that voters in 2015 nonbinding referendums supported by a nearly 9 to 1 margin.
It certainly sounds great. Democracy! Make those who oversee the operation of this vital government service directly accountable to voters, as they are in every other school district in Illinois and most school districts in the nation. Give parents “a seat at the table,” as Lightfoot has put it. Don’t leave it to the mayor to hand-pick the members of the board to do her bidding.
Not only is the idea philosophically appealing, it seems to work pretty well in smaller districts where particularly engaged community residents provide oversight, often in obscurity and for little or no money.
“Quick, if you live outside Chicago — who’s your school board president?” asked a Tribune editorial in 2011. “No clue, right?”
________
Columns are opinion content that reflect the views of the writers.
________
The campaigns in smaller districts are usually fairly quiet because the stakes are usually fairly low. But in Chicago, the stakes are always very high, the battles intense, the feelings raw. And the city’s mayor, who has appointed nearly every member of the Chicago Board of Education since its founding in 1872, is ultimately responsible for the results in the classroom.
Would it be better to cede that responsibility to a panel of informed, involved, objective, serious citizens, a sort of super-PTA? Maybe! But that’s not what’s happened in Los Angeles, where school board races have turned into ideological proxy fights, with each amounting to “another descent into the gutter” as LA Times columnist Steve Lopez put it last year.
“It would be nice to get through one school board election without vile, smarmy personal attacks, distortions and outright lies,” he wrote. “I find this kind of manure particularly odious in school board elections, when adults should be setting a better example for the kids.”
In the 2020 primary and general election cycle for just four seats in Los Angeles, the campaigns spent about $1.2 million to promote their candidates. But outside groups — largely dueling supporters of the charter school movement and of supporters of unionized teachers who tend to oppose charter schools — spent roughly $16.5 million, nearly 14 times that amount, to bombard the voters with propaganda.
The resulting board in LA now has a narrow advantage for charter proponents. But such a result would be far from guaranteed in Chicago, where the Chicago Teachers Union has in recent years demonstrated that it has considerable muscle to flex.
All that we could be sure of would be periodic epic mud fights between people from all over the country with competing philosophical interests in education policy and hopes of influencing how we run our schools. In the naive hope of giving interested local parents a “seat at the table” we would, like Los Angeles, give special interests from coast to coast a lever to yank on without definitive proof that students are better off when school boards are elected.
If such elections are held in off years, turnout will likely be low — fewer than 9% of eligible voters participated in a 2019 special school board election in Los Angeles. And if they’re held at the same time as other major elections — to counter the low turnout problem, Los Angeles held school board elections to coincide with the presidential election last November — average voters are less likely to have focused enough on the down-ballot school races to cast truly informed votes.
No thanks.
The appeal of direct democracy reaches its limit here for me. I’d rather delegate the responsibility for schools to the mayor — as we do responsibility for law enforcement, fire protection and other vital matters — and vote accordingly every four years.
Twitter @EricZorn
Get the week’s best columns, reports, tips, referrals and tirades from columnist Eric Zorn in the Change of Subject newsletter. Sign up here.
