August 26, 2026
An Open Letter to the Chicago Board of Education:
One of the greatest sources of Chicago’s political dysfunction is the hyper-local role that members of our City Council play in government operations. It is the Chicago way. But it no longer serves the city well, and would be a terrible model to insinuate into the workings of the Chicago Board of Education, as appears to be happening with the controversy around the Chicago High School for the Arts, or ChiArts.
On the City front: got a complaint about a local business? Want your street resurfaced? Call your alder. This historical practice makes alders more like constituent-service ombudsmen for their individual wards and minimizes their roles as legislators making policy for the benefit of the city as a whole. Some alders will propose over a hundred ordinances a year relating to the management of their wards – on everything from bike lanes to honorary street names to business licenses – while not sponsoring a single ordinance that impacts all of Chicago.
Not for nothing have Chicago’s 50 alders often been referred to as mini-mayors. This level of local involvement comes at a cost – the Council struggles to make decisions with the welfare of all Chicagoans in mind. Take the street-paving example: too often, streets are chosen for resurfacing not based on a citywide assessment of where needs are highest, but simply on who complains the loudest to their alder.
Whether the Chicago Board of Education embraces this deeply acculturated and hyper-political model now hangs in the balance. The Board’s first elected members were sworn in in January 2025, and elections will be held in November to complete the transition to a fully elected Board. But although elected Board members representing specific districts might be tempted to engage in hyper-localism, the Board has thus far largely avoided following the bad example set by the City Council. Board deliberations have focused on the big-picture issues that matter to the District at large, such as passing the annual budget, choosing a permanent CEO, and ratifying collective bargaining contracts. Though Board members frequently debate staffing, funding, and resourcing, they do so at the citywide level. They rarely, if ever, have debated how resources should be allocated school by school.
The Board has exhibited confusion on many areas of good governance, and it doesn’t always get the big-picture questions right – it recently made the shocking mistake of passing a budget that depends on imaginary revenue. But it has not yet succumbed to the temptation to focus its energy on granular details in the way that the City Council does. But now that precedent is at risk.
On August 27th, the Board will consider a resolution that would add additional funding to Chicago Arts High School (often known as ChiArts) to sustain its conservatory model for one year. ChiArts used to function as a contract school, but was transitioned to District control after it threatened to close last year. As a contract school, ChiArts operated an arts conservatory that employed as many as 70 teaching artists and cost far more than a neighborhood school of similar size. Outside philanthropy covered that additional cost, but it has dried up with the expiration of the contract school.
The proposal before the Board would provide ChiArts with the $5.5 million it needs to maintain its original structure for the 2026-2027 school year. But it would do so by siphoning funding away from District-wide arts education programs. This is the worst kind of Chicago parochialism – favoring one small but vocal group over the needs of the many. Passing this proposal would provide a better arts experience for the 500 or so students enrolled in ChiArts, but it would fund that experience by vastly reducing the resources available to the 315,000 students enrolled throughout other public schools in Chicago.
CPS already has extremely limited resources. If it adopts a precedent of allocating funding based on the parochial interests of Board members rather than through a standardized and accountable system, it will open itself up to factional politics and zero-sum competition between schools for Board attention and funding. It is all too easy to imagine a world in which Board members logroll each other’s funding proposals for their favorite programs, allowing a select handful of public schools to obtain disproportionate funds at the expense of all the rest. And let’s not forget that aldermanic privilege has long been a major source of Chicago’s earned reputation for corruption. Replicating that system within the Board of Education would be exceedingly dangerous for government accountability and public trust.
The Board should see this proposal for what it is – a gateway into hyper-local governance practices. There is no sense in favoring the needs of one school over the needs of all students served by CPS. We call on all members of the Board of Education to vote no on the ChiArts resolution.
Sincerely,
Joe Ferguson
President