Entire Chicago Board of Education quits

"The Free Stamp," Claes Oldenburg, Willard Park, Cleveland.

     The administration of every Chicago mayor ends up expressed in shorthand. Years pass, extraneous details evaporate, and the story concentrates, becoming a reduction of its basic elements. Richard J. Daley, The Boss.

     With his son, Richard M. Daley, it's either the Bean and the 1996 Democratic National Convention — if you like him — or the midnight destruction of Meigs Field and the disastrous parking meter deal, if you don't. Rahm Emanuel is either the River Walk (pro) and Laquan McDonald (con). Harold Washington is the First Black Mayor and, if you want to go into details, Council Wars paralysis — there is really nothing else to talk about. Jane Byrne was Chicago's first woman mayor. Her train wreck of a single term was marked by three strikes in three months:  the transit workers, public school teachers and firefighters. Boom boom boom. 

      And now Brandon Johnson has his albatross — the entire Chicago Board of Education resigned Friday, en masse, effective later in the year. Don't underestimate the importance of that "entire." All of 'em. Seven of seven. If only five members quit, it wouldn't have been quite the same. Instead, we can really get our backs into it: "Johnson's ennnntiiiiiiiire school board quit. Hook. Line. And sinker. The whole ball of wax."

      That's never happened before, and there's something about a new problem that catches the attention, lodges in mind. "Unsatisfied with screwing up in the traditional manner, Brandon Johnson explored new subcellars of blundering..."

      Johnson was having a hard time already, besieged and bewildered. He demanded his CPS CEO Pedro Martinez quit. Martinez said, "No." 

    And these are Johnson's people. He picked the seven last July. This is some next level dysfunction.

      Johnson wants a high-interest loan to kick CPS budgetary woes down the road — worked for every other mayor. Martinez said no, Chicago will only go broke faster, and right now it's Wile E. Coyote hurtling toward the canyon floor. 

    Nor can I explain how the board went from Johnson appointees, new to their jobs, going over the employee handbook, beholden to the mayor, to the Rebellious Seven, walking out the door rather than do his bidding. Maybe they looked at the books and decided to take their jobs seriously. That's not the Chicago Way. But I suppose it can happen. It just did.

    Sure, you could say the mayor wins. On Monday he'll announce a new and, one assumes, properly pliant school board, having rounded up more dependable puppets with stronger strings. But what kind of authority will this board have? The pawn is the lowest piece on the chess board. Brush seven off the board and replace them with — oh I don't know — subpawns, and the game, well, is off into uncharted territory.

     Such an unprecedented mass resignation has to be an embarrassing slap in the face to a mayor whose whole term has been a continual Stations of the Cross punishment and humiliation. Remember, the board bailing out are already his own team of hand-picked progressives. "In October 2024, Brandon Johnson's entire school board quit." Roll the presses on the history books now. There's your epitaph right there. "The board was expected to be Johnson's rubber stamp," the Sun-Times wrote. Guess not.