The Chicago Teachers Union is publicly urging financier Michael Sacks, who chaired Chicago’s Democratic National Convention host committee in 2024, to keep his wallet out of the race.
“We owe Chicago’s voters a school board election that belongs to Chicago’s voters. Not to Wall Street. Not to Silicon Valley,” union President Stacy Davis Gates wrote in a pointed May letter to Sacks that was posted publicly.
Sacks, who hasn’t yet donated this cycle, says he has no intention of staying out. In response, he called the union-backed candidate for school-board president “entirely unqualified.”
“The idea that some people can engage in politics and others cannot is ridiculous,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Chicago is following a national trend. Local school-board elections, once low-budget affairs, have increasingly become nationalized, with millions of dollars flowing in, said Michael Hartney, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who specializes in education politics.
Chicago’s district faces a $730 million deficit and years of shrinking enrollment.
The union was the top spender in the first phase of the shift to an elected board in 2024, records show. A CTU spokesperson said they were countering spending from opponents who favored school closures and privatization, among other measures.