For two decades, the Chicago Teachers Union campaigned for an elected school board, seeking to wrest control of Chicago Public Schools away from City Hall.

Now, with the CTU’s handpicked candidate for school board president soundly rejected by voters in Tuesday’s election, the CTU got the independence it long wanted for CPS — except, as it turns out, the new board is unexpectedly independent from CTU, too.

The newly elected president, Jessica Biggs, refrained from framing her candidacy in opposition to the CTU’s expansive agenda. But she did make clear that the closing of at least some CPS schools — a nonstarter idea for the CTU — needs to be considered for a system in which enrollment of just over 300,000 students is down by nearly a third in the last quarter century.

A sitting board member since 2025, Biggs this year voted against the current CPS budget, in part because she disagreed with the decision to assume $150 million in new funding from the state, which is unlikely to materialize in this year.

CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, alongside her political protege Mayor Brandon Johnson, has argued that the state “owes” big money to CPS — as much as $1 billion, they have claimed. But neither Gates nor Johnson has made any progress in securing anything more than a few words of support from beleaguered House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch and a studied silence on the question from Gov. JB........

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