By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
Everyone once in a while there’s some news that makes you think everything’s not so bad in Chicago politics.
A recent example was Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez’s refusal to borrow money to plug the district’s gaping 2025 budget deficit. Martinez publicly stood up to Mayor Brandon Johnson’s call for more debt and instead pushed for some $300 million in budget cuts. It’s rare to see any kind of fiscal restraint from city officials, so Martinez’s action shouldn’t go ignored. The Sun-Times called it an “unprecedented rebuke” and everything else equal, Martinez did the right thing.
But if you’ve been around long enough, you also know not to be fooled by a single sensible action of a politician or official. Martinez might have done the right thing for CPS’ budget on that occasion, but he hasn’t been doing the right thing when it comes to student outcomes. He often says the city’s children are doing well when they’re not, and for that reason alone he deserves to be condemned.
Take his recent comment on WTTW that Chicago’s “high schools couldn’t be stronger.” It’s a claim that’s just not true.
In 2023, only 11% of black Chicago juniors in the entire school district scored proficient in reading on the SAT and only 8% scored proficient in math. For Hispanics, it was only a few percentage points better. The reality is most CPS kids can’t read at grade level, many of them years behind, as we wrote about in detail here. That, despite a $30,000 per student spend.
And here is the real hypocrisy. The district typically graduates nearly 80% of black students despite their reading proficiency levels being mired in the low teens. That process has continued under Martinez.
More recently, Martinez bragged once again about student outcomes to CPS officials in an internal letter:
“Thanks in large part to your support, our students have made incredible gains in the past two school years. When it comes to academic recovery since the pandemic, research shows our elementary school students ranking #1 in the nation for reading, and #3 in math and reading combined. Our youngest learners are also growing by leaps and bounds in literacy, and our graduation rate has never been higher, with CPS graduates consistently earning more than $2 billion in scholarship offers each year.”
“Growing by leaps and bounds?” The new 2024 numbers show that just 23% of black 3rd- through 8th-grade students can read at grade level. It’s 25% for Hispanic students. Math results are worse.
Sure, improvement is always good. But it’s difficult to celebrate “growth” when all the district is doing is getting back to pre-pandemic levels – levels which were dismal to begin with.
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There are few schools that better highlight CPS’ failures than Martinez’s own alma mater, Juarez Community Academy High School, one of the most prominent traditional high schools for Hispanics in Chicago.
There, just 5% of students are proficient in reading and just 1% are proficient in math.
Martinez should be shouting those results from the rooftops and proposing dramatic changes. At the very least, he should hold himself accountable.
But he’s not.
Read more from Wirepoints:
- Mayor Johnson’s spending decisions, falling revenues mean Chicagoans likely to get hit with 2025 property tax hike
- Kids Can’t Read
- It’s not racist to call Chicago the nation’s murder capital. The Chicago Sun-Times has 617 reasons to call it that.
- Chicago’s 2025 budget fiascos. First up, Chicago Public Schools.
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
About thirty years ago, I read an article in what then still The Atlantic Monthly, where the author stated something to the effect of, “In the future, society will be divided into two classes–those whom can read and write, and the functionally illiterate. Looks like ChiTown is going for full illiteracy. Very sad. Gotta keep them (d)emocrat voters stupid and well fed.
As someone with insider knowledge, it’s interesting to read recent reports about a possible Martinez ouster along with this article because they all leave out mention of the person who leads the academic programs that are producing these poor results. You are right, the buck stops with the person at the top. Martinez’s biggest mistake was his handpick for the second in command in the district. Under Bogdana Chkombouva’s tenure as Chief of Networks and now as Chief Education Officer the central office staffing levels ballooned to levels of excess that are contributing to this financial calamity. Chkombouva scoffs at… Read more »
But isn’t providing payroll slots for the connected the normal Chicago way?
Great insider info comment. The city & CPS both went on crazy hiring sprees with all the fed COVID $bucks that’s now a big part of gigantic budget deficits for city & CPS. Who knows how many of all those thousands of new hires are patronage hires, somebodies relative, etc? Just a thought– does Shakman still apply to City of Chicago or CPS? I believe JB got Shakman vacated for state back in 2022 so maybe State of Ill was also able to use all those COVID $bucks to patronage hire after 2022 as well?…….and now good luck to Chicago… Read more »
The Illinois unions OWN Gov Pillsbury, and the Teacher Unions have destroyed public-govt-edumacashun nation wide. Perhaps if the Students started paying union dues things would change.
Interesting comment but pretty typical of nearly every school these days. They are filling the jobs with cronies but not teaching them to learn. That’s all of education. Here’s Bogdana from 2022 saying, on the official CPS Twitter account: “Social emotional learning goes hand in hand with academic progress. I want all children to experience the joy of learning ” Chief Education Officer Bogdana Chkoumbova. https://x.com/ChiPubSchools/status/1557405300168212480 As I’ve repeatedly said, over and over, kids can’t read or write because they aren’t teaching them to read or write. The schools have become globohomo madrassases teaching Social Emotional Learning aka critical consciousness… Read more »
To answer your headline, yes he does deserve praise. In pushing back he risked his job, as we saw by reports that Johnson then began looking to push him out. Your point on performance is well taken, but consider he has a CTU mayor and CTU president to contend with.
Martínez can’t be the only one to blame for dismal outcomes
No he’s not the only to blame. He inherited the problems. But as the leader now, he should expose how bad things are and then champion to change them and improve them. Instead, he covers the failures up with “record graduation rates” and outcomes growing by “leaps and bounds.”
Martinez is feckless for sure, but he’s merely a symptom of the larger, festering dumpster fire that is the education-industrial complex today. As the insight comment above said, his Chief Education Officer is a complete goof, who in her own words said, ““Social emotional learning goes hand in hand with academic progress. I want all children to experience the joy of learning.” Note that she measures academic progress in terms of SEL, not in terms of academics. All of education is like this. CPS could interview 100 of the ‘best’ candidates throughout the country and all 100 would say the… Read more »
Participation awards don’t count, not in the real world.
We all said “well, wait until they get into the real world!” And here we are now, where misgendering is a fireable offense and all the other snowflake things we thought would fade away have become law. In fact, these people are now the interns at the White House and have outsized influence on national policy. A nation run by theater kids as some like to say.
What Johnson wants to do is reckless. He wants to spend money CPS doesn’t have, borrow 300M to get CPS through a short transitory period, and then go beg Springfield for billions to cover the shortfall even though Springfield has completely rebuffed CPS so far. I can see praise for Martinez for avoiding recklessness and disaster but only so much. It is difficult read the puffery about student scores with the incredible absentee rate the schools experience. Even the best teachers can’t make progress with students who don’t show up. One of my law school professors, the former head of… Read more »