Chicago Tribune Editorial: Jessica Biggs for Chicago school board president

This story was originally published by Chicago Tribune.

The Editorial Board | Chicago Tribune | September 27, 2026, 5:00am

Editor’s note: The Tribune Editorial Board has begun its endorsements for the upcoming November elections. We start here with the race for Chicago Board of Education president; our endorsements in the other contested district races for the school board are slated to follow Monday and Tuesday. These are novel endorsements; voters in Chicago are electing a school board for the first time.

The Tribune’s endorsements in other federal, state and local races will begin Oct. 4. The Tribune plans to endorse statewide for the Illinois statehouse; the Tribune-owned Daily Herald’s editorial board will publish its own separate endorsements in some races, as is its past practice. 

For the first time in its history, Chicago will elect a school board president in November.

We believe the November vote for school board president is second in importance only to the mayoral election early next year in terms of charting a necessary new direction for the city. The president will set the agenda for the fully elected 21-member board and play an outsize role in reforming a district both overstaffed and doing a poor job of educating students.

Before we discuss the four candidates running for the job, let’s quickly inventory the current status of Chicago Public Schools and how we arrived at this difficult place. The Chicago Teachers Union, representing more than 30,000 CPS employees, effectively has captured governance of the nation’s third-largest public school system by the number of students. Over the past decade, this labor union has evolved into a far-left political organization. Chicago’s mayor is Brandon Johnson, a former CTU organizer who rode substantial financial and organizational support from the union to win the office in 2023.

Thereafter, City Hall’s fifth floor has done everything possible to push CTU’s agenda through CPS and the school board. There have been hiccups that Johnson and his close ally, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, didn’t anticipate over the past three years — most notably the refusal of former CPS CEO Pedro Martinez to take on a slug of high-cost debt to meet the union’s salary demands and plug budget holes, which ultimately cost Martinez his job.

But don’t be fooled by those speed bumps. Johnson and his handpicked board members helped Davis Gates and CTU muscle through an unaffordable five-year, $1.6 billion labor pact that will see the average CPS teacher salary reach six figures by the end of the contract in 2028. They also won agreement from the board and the General Assembly in Springfield to forbid the closure of any public school through the current school year despite one in three CPS schools being enrolled at less than 50% capacity.

The nadir for the current board came July 30 when Johnson appointees and a few elected board members backed by CTU temporarily staved off layoffs and unpaid furlough days — due in no small part to that unaffordable contract — by approving a budget for the current school year with a $150 million hole, expecting that state lawmakers and Gov. JB Pritzker would somehow provide that funding during their fall veto session in November. There’s no sign that will happen, and the gambit prompted S&P Global Ratings to slap a negative watch on CPS’ credit rating, already junk-rated.

Naturally, CTU has made an endorsement in the race for school board president. As in the 2023 mayoral election, the union is putting forward one of its own.

Former CTU political director Hilario Dominguez, 33, is the union’s candidate.

Dominguez faces prominent Chicago attorney Victor Henderson, former school board member and consultant Sendhil Revuluri and current elected board member Jessica Biggs.

Biggs, 43, who has performed well in her almost two years on the board and is endorsed by an ideologically diverse array of groups and individuals, is our pick for the role.

A native of west suburban Wheaton, Biggs worked as a special education teacher in California before moving to Boston to get her master’s in school leadership at Harvard University. She served as a resident principal in a CPS middle school before becoming principal in 2012 of Burke Elementary in Washington Park on Chicago’s South Side. CPS removed her from that position but not before Burke had significantly improved its results under her leadership, morphing from a school slated for possible closure to an institution that accepted students from other closed schools.

Biggs went on to run the Southwest Organizing Project, which links students at neighborhood schools to mental-health and other services. In 2024, she was elected to the school board during the city’s first-ever school board elections, which established a hybrid board made up of 11 mayoral appointees and 10 elected members — an interim step before the fully elected board.

We think her performance to date on the board should give Chicagoans confidence Biggs is ready to be president.

Biggs emerged as a leader on the board among five other elected members not endorsed in 2024 by CTU and a sixth whom CTU backed but ended up aligning with Biggs and the five others on most votes. She also won respect from some mayorally appointed board members and was picked to chair the search for a new CEO to succeed Martinez, an effort that went well until media leaks of the finalists led to candidate withdrawals and interim CEO Macquline King was given the permanent role.

Most recently, she opposed the foolish fiscal 2027 budget that, as she said to us, “assumed phantom revenue from the state.”

She has been an adult in a room full of many activists posing as board members. And she has taken firm, principled positions without being disagreeable, an attribute she will need if she becomes president.

Her candidacy is endorsed by the Service Employees International Union, which represents many non-teaching CPS employees, and the Chicago Federation of Labor.

On the left, she’s backed by Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle (notably a former Chicago public schoolteacher). But she also has centrist support from Northwest Side Ald. Samantha Nugent, 39th, and Southwest Side Ald. Matt O’Shea, 19th.

The respected former CPS CEO Janice Jackson is Biggs’ most important backer. Jackson ran the district in 2018 when Biggs was fired as principal of Burke after a CPS inspector general report found students at Burke had been mislabeled as “tardy” when they should have been marked down as half-day absences.

In a recent Chalkbeat/WBEZ report, Jackson stood by the decision to fire Biggs back then, even though there was no finding by the IG that Biggs or others intentionally tried to “cheat” in order to lift the school’s standing within the CPS bureaucracy. “She came back to serve (when she won election to the board), and did the same thing she did when she was a principal, which was to look out for the kids and the families she was entrusted with,” Jackson reportedly said.

Biggs has acknowledged some oversight lapses, but the bottom line is Burke ended up better off for Biggs having led the school. We don’t think voters should hold this episode against her.

The platform of Dominguez, until recently CTU’s political director, unsurprisingly features more berating of state lawmakers to rain hundreds of millions on CPS, essentially the one play in CTU’s playbook when it comes to addressing CPS’ financial woes. All candidates for president support lobbying the state for more funding, but only Dominguez refuses to consider consolidating any schools or taking other meaningful budget-cutting steps that might mean fewer CTU members.

Dominguez initially agreed to meet with the editorial board alongside the other candidates, but told us with just 34 minutes’ notice that he would be a no-show and offered no reason. If Dominguez can’t muster the courage to face the Tribune editorial board, how would he perform in a role that surely will bring higher-pressure moments than that?

CTU’s collective-bargaining contract expires in two years. The board president will be on the front lines of those negotiations, and we’ve already seen how such talks go when leaders who are supposed to represent taxpayers are in the tank for the union.

Asked in our questionnaire whether CTU currently has too much power in shaping district policy, Dominguez replied simply, “No.” But he went on to say, “I have disagreed with people who supported me before, and I will again.”

Where have we heard this line before from a former CTU employee seeking high office? During his run for mayor in 2023, Brandon Johnson famously said of worries about his potential fealty to CTU, “Who better to deliver bad news to a friend than a friend?”

Chicagoans know now the emptiness of those words. There’s no reason they should believe a similar message from this latest acolyte of Davis Gates as she girds for yet another contract negotiation.

As for Henderson and Revuluri, the others running for board president, neither has a chance against the CTU machine and neither to our minds is as well-suited to the job as Biggs.

Revuluri, 50, currently a consultant and formerly managing director with Chicago equity options trading firm and financial services holding company Peak6 Investments, struck us as smart, thoughtful and well-versed in the issues. Serving as Chicago school board vice president for three years under Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Revuluri has relevant experience. But he didn’t have to navigate the complex board politics Biggs has managed. We would have preferred to see him run for one of the district seats.

Henderson, 65, is an accomplished trial attorney, a former certified public accountant and would doubtless not be anyone’s patsy. But in our discussion with the three candidates present, this self-declared outsider seemed least open to the obvious need for school consolidation in a district that just saw a year-over-year decline in students of more than 11,000. CPS reported late last week that it’s now serving slightly more than 300,000 students. When Mayor Rahm Emanuel enraged CTU by closing 50 schools in 2013, CPS enrolled more than 400,000 students.

Consolidation is unavoidable.

A thoughtful approach will be needed to right-size this bloated district, and we appreciated Biggs’ statement to us that those CPS families on the losing end of such decisions must see “a vision for what communities get that is better than what is currently.” Exactly.

But employing thousands more than before the Emanuel administration’s cuts in 2013, as a much smaller CPS today is doing, explains why CPS faces yearly budget deficits well into the hundreds of millions.

We endorse Jessica Biggs to be Chicago’s first-ever elected school board president.