Last night, Brandon Johnson, a progressive organizer and former public school teacher, beat out Paul Vallas, a former Chicago Public Schools executive with a tough-on-crime platform and a long-held affinity for charter schools, to be the next mayor of Chicago. The two men clashed over how to police the city and how to educate its children.
Education is a dominant issue in Chicago, where the public school system faces a dramatic enrollment decline. From 2019 to 2022, nearly 37,000 students—10 percent of the district's population—fled the school system. This decline is likely due to lengthy COVID-related school closures, which kept Chicago public schools sporadically shuttered as late as January 2022.
