Chicago is the only city in the entire state of Illinois that doesn’t allow its citizens to elect their school board.
We can vote for the guys who filter our water.
Our ballot is often filled with dozens of names of people running for one kind of judge or another.
When I go sit at the voting machine and the judge list comes up I can either skip them or bring an endorsement list with me from one group or another. Many Chicago voters choose on the basis of the ethnicity of the candidates’ last names. There are an amazing number of lawyers wanting to become judges that suddenly discover some Irish heritage, formerly unknown, and add that name to the end of theirs.
Mayor Daley the younger got the legislature to pass a law giving him the power to appoint the members of the school board. It was another one of those reforms that was supposed to fix everything wrong with the schools and ended up fixing nothing. But it got lots of editorial support. That’s because people who sit on newspaper editorial boards pretty much have the solution to whatever ails schools.
Right?
The mayoral appointed school board then chose the CEO. In Chicago that gave us Paul Vallas, Arne Duncan, the clueless Ron Huberman and now JC Brizard. Brizard was chosen by Rahm’s board after he got chased out of Rochester, New York.
It is a sorry record for mayoral control in Chicago. So, naturally it was copied in places like New York and LA. Where is also doesn’t work.
For Chicago to go back to an elected board, the legislature has to change the law.
To help them do that, several efforts are taking place.
One multi-community coalition is organizing to put an advisory referendum on the ballot in November in a couple of hundred precincts around the city which calls for an elected school board.
It only requires us to gather about 60 signatures in each of the precincts. And if my experience last night suggests anything, it will be a piece of cake.
At 6:30 about 25 of us gathered at the monument in Logan Square. I paired up with Kate, clip board, voter list and petitions in hand, we went off for 90 minutes of door knocking.
Lots of folks weren’t home, of course,
But our success rate among those that were home?
100%.
Some of my neighbors were incredulous that the mayor got to choose his billion dollar buddies, who don’t send their own kids to CPS, to be school board members.
Those that already knew? They didn’t like it.
I’ve walked precincts, knocking on doors in Chicago for thirty years.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
Fred Klonsky 
Do it quick, and do it before ALEC-aeda brings the new-fanged notion of Governor-appointed Emergency Managers to your state, like we have in Michigan, or before they up and create a Shadow Board of Education to lord it over the few remaining educators on the original board.