A battle is unfolding over who will control public schools in one of America’s most highly-populated cities, as early voting kicks off at Chicago on Thursday in a pivotal election that includes the Windy City’s first-ever school board race. 

Chicago has long been an outlier when it comes to control of the city’s public school system, as it was up to the mayor to appoint school board members. A 2021 state law mandated the transition to an elected school board for Chicago Public Schools, while also tripling the board’s size to 21 members from seven members. This year, voters will elect ten members of the board, while the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, appoints the other 11 members — by 2026, all members will be elected.

The Chicago Teachers Union, which endorsed ten of the more than 30 school board candidates running — one in each district — has funneled $175,000 into the race and appears poised to spend up to one million dollars in the coming weeks, the Illinois Policy Institute notes. The union could additionally benefit from the mayor’s appointing of the other eleven members — as the mayor worked for the Chicago Teachers Union before he was elected. 

The union “ran him [Brandon Johnson] for mayor, poured millions of dollars into his campaign,” an editor at Illinois Policy Institute who is tracking the school board race, Dylan Sharkey, tells the New York Sun. Between the teachers union endorsing a candidate in each district, and the mayor appointing the other seats, the union is “gunning for total control of Chicago’s School Board,” he says. 

Recent polling commissioned by the institute shows that only 36 percent of likely Chicago voters approve of the Chicago Teachers Union, while 46 percent have an unfavorable opinion. The polling indicates that the union’s leader is even less popular — only 17 percent of those surveyed had a favorable opinion of its president, Stacy Davis Gates. That polling could suggest that voters will pushback on the union-endorsed candidates in the upcoming election. 

“This is a rare chance for all Chicagoans to vote in a race where there are zero incumbents. At any level of government there’s a dynamic of the freshmen incoming officials or more established politicians,” Mr. Sharkey says. “This will be a clean slate, and it could not have come at a more pivotal time. Proficiency in Chicago Public Schools is still below what it was pre-Covid for reading and math. We think of the pandemic as over, but for a lot of kids in elementary school, they still feel the effects of that learning loss every single day.”

Meanwhile, there has been a big school choice push in the city, and one report even indicated that two groups supporting school choice and opposing the Chicago Teachers Union have amassed a whopping $3.6 million in donations as the groups seek to influence the school board race. 

“The Chicago Teachers Union, one of their efforts was killing Chicago’s — and Illinois’, frankly — only school choice program,” Mr. Sharkey says, noting that “the Invest in Kids tax credit scholarship program was helping 10,000 kids across the state, 5,000 in Chicago, all from low income families, go to a school that best fit their needs. And there is some pushback now from various families across the city, and more so I think people are just dissatisfied with Johnson’s priorities overall.”

The Chicago Teachers Union, which has been engaged in months-long contract negotiations, came under fire earlier this year when a leaked document exposed the union’s demands that are estimated to cost billions of dollars if approved— including extreme wage hikes, using schools as temporary shelters for homeless families, and demanding coverage for abortions and weight-less drugs, as the Sun previously reported. 

The Sun reached out to the Chicago Teachers Union and Mr. Johnson’s office for comment.