Editorial: The heartbeat of a Chicago public school is a teacher and a student. Not a building

The Editorial Board, Chicago Tribune on Aug 6, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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“The days of school closures, consolidation and privatization have ended, officially, under the Johnson administration,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said on Monday. “And to anyone, billionaire or not, that believes that you can take us back to a model of torment and torture, you got another thing coming.”

Johnson was reacting to the official entry into the mayoral race of Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, a well-funded rival who will run to Johnson’s right (not much room to the left) and who Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union would sorely like to tie not just to the billionaire Michael Sacks but to former Mayor Rahm Emanuel (who presided over the closing or consolidation of some 50 underutilized schools in 2013).

So, sure, you’d expect some incumbent defensiveness and elevated mayoral rhetoric.

Still, the phrase was jarring.

Johnson was trying to link school closings and consolidation to privatization, which is mostly a different issue in education. But even those people who dislike the very existence of private schools in big cities would be hard-pressed to make the case that the entire sector collectively makes up a torture chamber. Come on, Mr. Mayor!

Do you really believe that closing a school such as the Frederick Douglass Academy High School, built for more than 1,000 students and currently serving less than 30 young people, would be a return to “a model of torture and torment”? Do you really believe that is a helpful thing to say or even remotely fair to those within and alongside the Emanuel administration who worked hard to take care of students asked to attend a different school during 2013? Even those who think Emanuel went too far too fast surely would not use such words.

The Chicago Public Schools system has some 360 schools. Is the mayor really arguing that every last one of that 360 can never, ever be closed or consolidated with another?

On pain of afflicting “torment and torture.” Seriously?

This is truly an absurd position. Populations within a healthy city shift and schools have to be able to open and close to reflect where kids are actually living. When a neighborhood is growing in terms of kids, schools have to be able to expand and more schools have to be built. When a neighborhood is contracting, it’s still important to serve the remaining kids, but not in a building designed to house 33 times as many students. That’s not only a waste of resources, it’s unfair to the kids, denying them the community that high schoolers need.

So not only is it far from torment and torture to have those kids join another school with more exciting options for them, it’s sound educational policy.

Of all the political dysfunction surrounding Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union, the obsession with buildings is perhaps the most bizarre of all.

As a teachers union surely knows, the souls of schools are made up of teachers and students. As kids, we often remember those who excelled at their jobs in the classroom and thus made a profound difference to our lives.

It’s true that schools often have storied places within communities, but few of us go to the same school throughout our entire childhood. Most of us go to progressively larger institutions, which is the precise opposite of what has happened to those 30 kids at Douglass.

Moreover, few of us have deeply fond memories of the bricks and mortar aspects of our education. The building is just a backdrop and usually a prosaic one, at that. What we remember are the educators we found in the classrooms we attended and what they did for us and how they believed in us. We typically recall our peers, too, and how and what we learned from them.

We believe that every kid in CPS deserves a quality education from skilled and caring educators and we know that many exist within the system. But by declaring that combining two schools represents cruel and unusual punishment, the mayor puts the emphasis in the wrong place.

Educators matter. Student achievement matters. Buildings are just a means to an end.

And if schools are to be living organisms filled with life, as we believe they should be, then sometimes some of them have to be joined up with stronger partners.

That’s not torment. In many cases, it can mean freedom to fly out of a school window and far beyond.

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