Jitu Brown still remembers how gutted he was by the school board’s vote. 

“We were shook,” Brown said. At first, he and other activists tried to frame the 2013 decision to close 50 public schools as if it wasn’t a monumental loss, but “it was like, no, this is going to devastate our neighborhoods.”

Brown attended public schools in the 1980s on the far South Side of Chicago, which at the time proudly exuded Black culture and power. The streets were lined with Black-owned business and cultural institutions.   

“As a child, I had a sense, without anybody standing on a soapbox and giving me a political speech, that I belonged,” he recalled. Now, he says, much of what created that feeling no longer exists — as school closures, the destruction of public housing and creeping gentrification have slowly displaced Black Chicagoans and hollowed out their neighborhoods.   

For Brown, the loss of 50 schools revealed the appointed school board and school CEO had little incentive to listen to the community or act in its best interests. He and other activists realized the problem was structural: “We’re fighting somebody else’s vision. That’s what’s happening in Cleveland now.” That realization fueled a years-long struggle over who should govern public schools in the city. And the activists won. 

In Cleveland, where an appointed school board also unanimously voted to close 18 schools last year, a similar debate is brewing. 

The teachers’ union criticized the board for rubber stamping the district’s closure plan. A small but vocal group of parents and community members is considering a campaign on the issue. And a few Cleveland City Council members have said they’d like to see an elected board. But the head of the school board has pushed back, saying members have worked hard to listen to community feedback while also making necessary decisions to keep the district afloat and increase academic opportunities for students.

The road to Chicago’s elected board

By the time it voted to close 50 schools in 2013, Chicago’s school board had been under mayoral control for 30 years.

In his 20s, Brown joined the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), a Black community development group that the Rev. Jesse Jackson helped found. It was organizing public school parents on the South Side of the city. 

Soon after, a 1995 state law handed the power to appoint the six members of the board and the district’s CEO to Mayor Richard Daley. 

Under Daley, the district began rapidly opening charter schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides while closing a handful of public schools every year.

In response, Brown and KOCO began to train parents and grandparents to get more involved with their neighborhood schools. KOCO also slowly made contact with parents and community groups from across the city. They supported the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike — walking the picket line alongside students, parents and teachers. 

When the board voted in 2013, it wasn’t swayed by these protests. The morning of the vote, parents, some with toddlers in tow, educators and activists — 43 of them — lined up to beg for their schools. They spoke for more than two hours. 

Then, the monthslong process ended with a 90-second vote. The names of the schools, each represented by numbers on the board’s agenda, weren’t even listed. 

“We just felt like: whatever they say, they’re going to take from us, that’s what it is,” said Tricey Robinson, a parent whose school closed. “We had already accepted it.”

The vote prompted Brown to swear off attending school board meetings. 

It wasn’t an easy decision. He had invested a lot of energy in trying to get the board to listen — giving dozens of public comments, convincing others to help pack the central office and getting arrested at meetings. But, for him, it was just no longer worth it. 

Brown didn’t attend the first board meeting of the following school year. Instead, he, along with hundreds of parents and students, organized a rally for an elected board and an end to school closings. 

Alongside parents and teachers, he began to develop a shared vision for Chicago’s public schools: a district with “sustainable community schools” in every neighborhood. 

The idea was that instead of closing neighborhood schools with lower enrollment they could use the extra space to provide wraparound services to meet students’ needs outside of the school day. 

The next year, the group organized a nonbinding referendum, a tool used in Illinois to communicate how voters feel about an issue. It passed across the city.

The following year, Brown and 11 others went on hunger strike to save a neighborhood high school. They didn’t eat for 34 days and made national news before CPS agreed to reopen the school. Today, that school is one of 36 “sustainable community schools” throughout the district. 

By 2018 all the candidates vying to replace Mayor Rahm Emanuel supported an elected board. When his successor, Lori Lightfoot reneged support for an elected board, the teachers’ union made it an issue in a 14-day strike. That spring, the state lawmakers took on the issue.

In all, it took eight years, two mayoral elections, a handful of failed bills and a hunger strike before state lawmakers changed the law in 2021. That law first enacted a hybrid board and then an elected school board by 2027. It also created a moratorium on school closures. 

More than a decade opposing the school closures, Brown would attend his first school board meeting in a decade – this time as an elected school board member.

‘We can’t decide how our children learn’: Some Clevelanders are considering an elected board 

Cleveland’s mayoral control of its school district followed Chicago’s by two years. By the time the Ohio legislature took action in 1997, the board and the district had been troubled for years.

It faced fiscal emergency and had been found responsible for maintaining school segregation in a 1976 civil rights case, Reed v. Rhodes. That case came after Black mothers and community leaders began protesting the district’s discriminatory relay policy, under which Black children only attended half a day of school. A federal judge ruled on the case and placed the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) under a consent decree that included desegregation bussing until 1998. 

Go deeper: A timeline of mayoral control of Cleveland public schools.

When the board came under mayoral control, the Cleveland Teachers Union and NAACP opposed the change, stating it would be “undemocratic.” But by 2002, when the city held a referendum to cement the change, voters overwhelmingly supported it. 

Lately, there have been cracks in that consensus. Signal Cleveland spoke with dozens of parents and teachers, many of whom expressed the feeling that the board voted on the closures without listening to them.  

“We talked to them until we were blue in the face,” said Joscelyn Dye, a parent. “And they still didn’t listen.”

Another said she wished the board members had explained why they voted to close her school. Another said the unanimity of the vote felt like being “dismissed.” 

In the leadup to the closures, Cleveland Teachers Union President Shari Obrenski wasn’t shy in criticizing the district, calling it out for a lack of specificity in planning and a lack of responsiveness to the community. Still, the union isn’t proactively throwing its weight behind the issue. 

“If the people of Cleveland decide that they want to revisit this issue, we will support that,” she said. “But don’t expect us to be the ones out front again.” 

That’s not how the Chicago Teachers Union approached the issue. Their union, which at nearly 30,000 members dwarfs Cleveland’s 4,300 membership, worked with activists and made an elected board a key issue after the closures.

There is burgeoning political support for an elected school board in Cleveland from city council members like Richard Starr and Michael Polensek.

Starr graduated from East Technical High School in 2007 under the district’s appointed board. He was prom king, class president and the quarterback of the football team. 

Although he loved his school, when he got to college he wasn’t ready for the academic rigor of college despite getting As and Bs in high school. 

“I had to work overtime to get good grades because I was so far behind,” he recalled.

Starr believes that appointed school boards have mismanaged the district for too long. He said the board has known for years that enrollment was falling but kicked the can down the road. He also criticized the district’s current executives for “making it rich off our kids” referring to salaries and the student-to-administrator ratio highlighted in a recent state audit. 

“The thing is, about having an elected school board, is the people of Cleveland have input on who’s elected to that position, and also they have an accountability mechanism,” he said. Still, he wants to talk more with constituents before taking action. 

Sara Elaqad, who currently chairs the CMSD school board, pushed back on some of these points. Though the mayor does pick school board members, she noted, he does so from a list nominated by a committee of parents, city council members, teachers, principals and local community and business leaders — meaning the community has a say in who sits on the board. 

Board members, she said, made community engagement a central tenet of how they developed and evaluated the closure plan. A plan, she said, was built around helping the district achieve its third grade reading level, algebra proficiency and college readiness goals. 

“I feel pretty confident that we did everything that we could do,” she said, pointing to the many meetings held before the district unveiled the recommendation as well as at each impacted school once the plan was announced. She also said board members often field questions and concerns from the community.

In her view, discussing the individual closures until the district had vetted the entire plan to make sure it worked for logistics like transportation was impossible because those logistics have to work for families. 

Most of the feedback Elaqad has heard is around two things: residents’ individual preferences for their schools and the potential harms of implementing the plan.

She said the latter is what the board will focus on in the coming months because they want to make sure, first and foremost, students are learning and feel like they belong at their new schools.

“There’s no way that we can incorporate every preference for everyone’s individual school,” she said. “And I understand that feels hard for people, like it would feel hard for me.” 

Some teachers and parents are starting to take action. In late December, a dozen or so parents, teachers and community members met to discuss what it might take. 

They debated different routes: a petition with signatures to prompt a citywide referendum, suing the school district or changing state law. (The state law that established mayoral control includes a section on how to reverse it with a citywide vote.) 

The group was brought together by Sarah Hodge, a teacher and parent, and Polly Karr, a parent who runs a blog focused on the district’s decisions and spending. The two women took different paths to arrive at their conviction, but they’re united in their belief that the current board isn’t accountable to students, families and taxpayers.  

Hodge teaches history at Collinwood High School, which is slated to close next year. She attended Cleveland schools. This isn’t the first or even the second school closure she’s experienced. 

When she was a junior in high school, Cleveland’s then-elected school board voted to close her school, John Adams. (The school was rebuilt 11 years later, in 2006). She ended up at East Tech.

“It was very traumatic for me, because that was my senior year,” she said. “I know exactly what the kids at Collinwood were going through, because I went through it.” 

Two years later, she returned to the classroom, this time as a student teacher. By that time, Cleveland schools were under mayoral control and also in fiscal emergency, and Hodge could tell. 

“The kids lost out, like, immediately,” she recalled. “It was like, all of a sudden, everything was cut. All of a sudden, you’re going to different schools.”

She became a full-time teacher in 2000, teaching first at an elementary school before returning to East Tech. She then taught at Martin Luther King Jr. High School and, when it closed in 2019, briefly moved to Glenville High School before arriving at Collinwood. 

Over the years, she said she’s watched the erosion of parent and student involvement in school governance such as once-robust parent-teacher associations fell to the wayside. She thinks this slow dissolution has led to an unaccountable system — one that could be remedied by an elected board.

“What they’re saying is that we can’t decide how our children learn,” she said. “Somebody else will always tell us, and that’s not right.”

Karr, for her part, didn’t grow up in Cleveland. She and her wife were wooed to the city from the suburbs by its many speciality school options.

Like Hodge, Karr feels the current board has already made its mind up before it votes on anything. She points to their unity on even the most controversial decisions, like closing schools and cutting instructional minutes. 

“It’s a done deal when they sit down in front of us and talk about stuff,” she said. “And so public comment feels silly, but at least you’re saying things out in the air.” 

She hasn’t always been so heavily invested in the inner workings of the district. Karr attended her first school board meeting in 2024 after the district moved to cut instructional minutes from her sons’ elementary school. A few days later, it put out a short video about an upcoming lunar eclipse — a video with incorrect science. 

For Karr, it lit a fuse. She filed a public records request for the salaries of the district’s communication staffers and the script for the video. After that she was hooked on filing records, she wanted to know how things worked in the district and how much they cost. A couple months later, she started a blog to share with everyone what she was learning. 

In the last two years, the blog has also grown into a Facebook group with a few thousand members where Karr and others share frustrations, observations and criticisms of the district. They also highlight student and teacher accomplishments. 

Organically, the group has become a place for parents to turn with questions or for help navigating the district. Since the the board voted to close and consolidate schools, the group has grown, with posts regularly racking up dozens and sometimes hundreds of comments. 

The question that remains is if online energy translates into offline action. 

‘That is our choice’: The pitfalls and promises of electing your school board 

Do elected school boards listen more to communities, lead to better student outcomes, better watchdogging of strained budgets and more stable enrollment? That’s a different question. 

The research is mixed. In general, it shows that urban public schools with elected school boards and those with appointed boards don’t necessarily have significant differences in student achievement. In Cleveland, mayoral control has also been credited as part of the district’s transformation since 2000. 

Throughout the country, including Chicago, elected boards also experience all the pitfalls of politics. Special interest groups ranging from teachers’ unions to Moms for Liberty can spend heavily in board elections. In some places, including in Ohio, those elections have also become flashpoints for culture war issues that have little to do with teaching or learning. 

In addition, nationally, voters tend to not turn out for school board elections at the same rates they do for other municipal elections. Some research has shown that the people most likely to vote in and run for school board elections are typically whiter and wealthier than the districts they serve. 

Then there’s the reality that urban school districts are big ships.They turn slowly. They’re trying to teach children who don’t always get their basic needs met. They’re often starved for resources as state spending on public education hasn’t kept up with rising costs. 

Even Brown and some of his allies in Chicago, like Karen Zaccor, who was heavily involved in campaigning for the elected board, acknowledge that the transformational change they’d hoped for has been harder to realize in practice. Chicago is far from being a “sustainable community school” district. 

“Much of the stuff that gets brought before us is really not what we imagined,” said Zaccor, who also now sits on the board. 

They’ve had to spend lots of time on budgets and issues like charter school closures — those have been some of the hardest votes for Brown. They required him to weigh his belief that charters sabotage neighborhood schools against how sudden closures might hurt students. (In the end, he voted to use district funds to keep some charter schools afloat until they could be transitioned into district-run schools next year.) 

Brown has also had to contend with being a former outsider now pushing for changes from within — changes that to him feel existential but for some of the board members are just another vote on the agenda. 

But Brown and his allies on the board have slowly made progress. Last year, the district opened 16 more sustainable community schools and, despite attacks on DEI-related initiatives by the federal government, also unveiled a Black Student Success Plan. Brown will chair a committee charged with its implementation. 

Brown also spends a lot of time in the slice of the district he represents. He tours schools, meets with parents and teachers and is generally accessible to the community.

Elected school boards might face all the pitfalls of politics. Brown, for example, is sure, should he run again, charter groups would dump money into the campaign coffers of his opponent. But, in his eyes, an elected board also creates greater possibilities for accountability, especially when paired with organized communities.  

“As long as our children are in public schools, we need to be there,” he said. “If we don’t have the power to shape it, it’s not in our best interest. That truth has been sort of, like, seared into my consciousness.” 

In Cleveland, Hodge and Karr feel the same way: An elected board might be imperfect, but it could offer a chance to shape their children’s future. 

“Fundamentally, deep inside my soul, I believe you cannot educate a child and be like, I’m gonna leave the parent out,” Hodge said. “If we choose to have terrible schools, that is our choice. If we choose to have wonderful schools, that is our choice.”