How the election for president of the Board of Education will affect schools in Chicago
Chicago is headed toward a first-ever, citywide election for president of the Chicago Board of Education in November 2026 — the capstone of a phased transition from a seven-member, mayor-appointed board to a 21-member, fully elected one. Ten district seats were elected in 2024; the mayor still appoints 11 (including the president) during the hybrid period. In 2026, voters will elect and, separately, the office will set agendas for the fourth-largest district in the United States. Sendhil Revuluri, the first declared candidate said: “Instead of pitting schools against one another or chasing what’s politically popular, we need to focus on what is effective.” His entire speech won’t be quoted for two reasons. The first reason is that we don’t want to make Kamala Harris look like Daniel Webster by comparison. The other reason is that there is something in the U.S. Constitution that forbids cruel and unusual punishment. It should be quite an election.
That new race won’t unfold in a vacuum. It will turn on four stubborn realities: Lagging literacy, a decades-long pendulum swing on social promotion, a board majority that has explicitly prioritized equity over competition, and the altered landscape for low-income families after the end of Invest in Kids tax-credit scholarships.
CPS doesn’t publish a single “literacy rate” in the adult-literacy sense; the standard measure is grade-level proficiency in English Language Arts (ELA) on state exams. On the Illinois Assessment of Readiness (IAR), given in grades 3–8, fewer than one in three CPS students met or exceeded ELA standards in 2024. On the high school side, roughly one in four CPS 11th-graders met the state’s SAT + ELA benchmark in recent cohorts. These figures reflect a partial recovery from pandemic lows, but they still trail 2019 levels.
The headline is stark but incomplete. CPS reading performance differs greatly between magnet programs (Whitney Young, Walter Payton, etc.) that post suburban-level reading results, while many neighborhood schools sit far below the benchmark. The next board president will inherit and be judged by a multi-year plan for early literacy (K–2 phonics, Tier-2/3 interventions, and expanded tutoring) and for middle-/high-school reading across the curriculum. Whether campaigns lean into reading or whole-child support will tell voters a great deal about their theory of change. If you’ve watched CPS since the 1990s, you’ve seen one of the country’s most visible experiments with “ending social promotion.” In 1996, under CEO Paul Vallas, Chicago tied promotion in grades 3, 6, and 8 to standardized test scores, with mandatory summer school and re-testing for students below the line. The approach, rolled out alongside school probation and reconstitution, produced in the late 1990s and drew national attention.
What did it achieve? The Consortium on Chicago School Research followed these cohorts for years. Their 2004 studies found marginal benefit from retention (holding back or flunking students) compared with similarly low-scoring peers who were promoted, and increased dropout risk for students retained multiple times. I don’t see why people are upset about dropout rates. If you show up with no desire to improve yourself then don’t hinder the environment for those who are. A marginal improvement is also better than no improvement.
Those findings drove a policy pivot. Through the 2000s and 2010s, CPS softened promotion gates, blended in grades/attendance, and emphasized interventions over retention. (Also called dumbing down). By the mid-2010s, districtwide retention had fallen to very low single digits, and during COVID it effectively disappeared. Critics call today’s practice “de facto social promotion;" proponents argue retention is a blunt instrument that worsens inequities and that targeted supports are more humane and effective. The 2026 presidential field will likely split on this: Restore firmer gates (with robust summer pathways) versus continue today’s supports-first posture, particularly in early reading.
Since 2021, board resolutions and strategy memos have made equity the district’s operating principle. In January 2024, the board signaled a shift “away from a system that emphasizes school choice” and toward neighborhood schools, framing selective/charter expansion as part of a competitive culture that has not closed opportunity gaps. The forthcoming accountability model deemphasizes rank-ordering schools by test outcomes and elevates growth, climate, and access to programs; critics call it a retreat from transparency; supporters call it overdue.
Equity in practice means weighted funding for struggling students/schools, more early-literacy dollars where proficiency lags, targeted bilingual and special-education investments, and admissions policies (e.g., socioeconomic tiers) designed to keep schools’ socio-economically diverse. The new president will be pressed to say whether equity implies redistributing seats and funds away from high-demand programs or growing overall capacity while maintaining tier safeguards.
A perennial question in Chicago debates: How do low-income Catholic high schools compare academically with low-income CPS high schools? At the national level, Catholic schools consistently outscore public schools on NAEP in reading and math; in 2024 national reporting, Catholic school averages were notably higher at grades 4 and 8. NAEP doesn’t publish district-level Catholic results for Chicago, so we can’t directly say “Catholic beats CPS in Chicago” from NAEP alone; however, it’s not even close when it comes at the local level, evidence is spottier, undoubtedly at the behest of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).
Cristo Rey schools (including Chicago’s Pilsen campus) are designed for low-income students and report rates those of demographically similar peers nationally an important long-run outcome even if SAT averages are modest. (Cristo Rey Chicago self-reports average SATs around ~1060–1070. Providence St. Mel, serving primarily black students on the West Side, is regularly cited for high graduation/college-going and strong SAT scores by private-school sources with St. Leo and Our Lady of Tepeyac boasting similar success, though public, audited score series are limited. For peer-reviewed, Chicago-specific standardized-test studies are surprisingly thin in the last decade. Most rigorous Chicago work compares policies (retention, accountability) within CPS, not CPS vs. Catholic schools.
Bottom line: National Catholic-school advantages on NAEP are real; Chicago-specific test comparisons at the school level are not systematically published. Gee, I wonder why that is the case? What we can say is that several low-income Catholic models (Cristo Rey, Providence St. Mel, Our Lady of Tepeyac, St. Leo) demonstrate strong and persistent college outcomes for the populations they serve.
Illinois’ Invest in Kids (2017–2023) granted a 75 percent state tax credit to donors who funded private-school scholarships via SGOs. The program sunset on December 31, 2023; the Illinois Department of Revenue has made clear that contributions after that date are not credit-eligible, and even funds contributed before the deadline had to be distributed by that time.
Why this matters in a CPS presidential election
Constituency: Thousands of Chicago families, disproportionately low-income, often in Catholic or other private schools benefited. A candidate who backs revival (state or federal hybrid) will likely mobilize that base; an opponent will argue public dollars and political energy belong in neighborhood public schools. How they can make that argument despite the mountains of evidence against it?
With ELA proficiency in only one-third CPS elementary grades, choice advocates will claim scholarships provide lifelines while CPS reforms mature; equity-first candidates will counter the district must not subsidize students who exit CPS while rebuilding neighborhood schools. Their mission statement will be to raise reading proficiency fast, restore clear promotion standards (with humane, well-funded summer pathways), publish school-level data plainly, and re-center instruction. The Equity mission statement will target resources where gaps are largest and claim to keep transparent outcomes and parental options (including charter growth and scholarship advocacy) on the table.
Case to voters: CPS has had years of “equity process;" now deliver reading results — especially in K–3 — before reshaping selective programs. Double-down on neighborhood schools, scale wraparound supports, and redesign admissions/accountability to counter historic sorting by zip code.
Social promotion: Keep retention rare; emphasize tutoring, and on-track indicators over test score gaps; weighted funding, coherent feeder patterns and early literacy is the path to durable improvement. The 2026 at-large CPS presidential race will be the sharpest referendum Chicago has ever held on how to improve literacy and for whom.
Voters will pick not just a presiding officer, but a theory of change. One side will argue CPS must re-assert expectations, measure reading plainly, and embrace pluralism (charters, scholarships, selective programs) while targeting funds by need. The other will argue the only durable path is to rebuild neighborhood schools and hold the system accountable through growth and support, not single cut scores.
Both camps now have ample Chicago-specific evidence to cite: The retention studies from the Vallas era, the post-COVID literacy slide, the equity resolutions, and the changed scholarship landscape. The next board president will have to translate campaign rhetoric into measurable gains in reading while managing trade-offs Chicago has wrestled with for three decades. If they can move IAR ELA proficiency up materially while maintaining fairness and transparency, they won’t just win an election, they’ll reset the city’s school narrative for a generation.
