By the way, Mr. Johnson’s appointees control the board 11-10. Its previous members resigned en masse in October, amid a showdown with the now-fired Chicago Public Schools Chief Pedro Martinez, who opposed the mayor’s last high-risk borrowing plan. That proposal failed, but Mr. Johnson stacked the board with new members whom he expected to get with the progressive program. Instead, the board has reached the same conclusion about Mr. Johnson’s reckless borrowing, and all the new board members elected by voters last fall voted no.
Everyone in Chicago knows his loan gambit would have made the fiscal problem worse for CPS, which is already under a pile of debt. When Mr. Johnson first floated the idea of short-term borrowing last year, an internal schools memo reported by Chalkbeat Chicago noted that taking out more loans would doom its already lousy bond rating.
“This could be thought of as putting your credit card payments that you can no longer afford on your mortgage payments,” the memo said. “It allows cash to be freed up for other expenses, but it seeds a costly legacy of future amounts of larger debt to be paid back and it does not solve the issue of being fiscally responsible.”