The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Former Bridgeport schools chief in hunt for Chicago mayor job
Former Bridgeport Schools Superintendent Paul Vallas is headed for a runoff election for mayor of Chicago.
Vallas, who won the backing of the police union and ran a mayoral campaign focused on public safety, led the Bridgeport schools between 2011 and 2013. He was ousted after a Connecticut judge ruled he was not qualified for the position amid a lawsuit filed by an activist who claimed Vallas did not take a school leadership course required by the state.
Prior to serving as a Bridgeport’s superintendent, Vallas was the superintendent of the Recovery School District of Louisiana and chief executive officer of Philadelphia’s public schools.
Vallas will face Brandon Johnson in the Chicago runoff election after voters on Tuesday denied Mayor Lori Lightfoot a second term.
Vallas’ short time leading the Bridgeport public schools began in July 2011, after the state took over the district and appointed members of a new Board of Education. The members of the new board hired Vallas as interim superintendent in December of that year.
Prior to coming to Bridgeport, Vallas worked with the Inter-American Development Bank to rebuild Haiti’s school system and served as superintendent of the Recovery School District of Louisiana. In the mid-2000s, Vallas served as chief executive officer of Philadelphia schools, overseeing a district that became a large-scale experiment in privatization. Prior to that, he served as chief executive officer of the Chicago public school system, winning praise from President Bill Clinton for raising test scores.
Vallas’ tenure in Bridgeport was rocky. In 2012, the state Supreme Court overruled Connecticut’s control of the district. Critics also claimed he was trying to privatize the district by promoting charter schools.
In April 2013, former state judge and Bridgeport activist Carmen Lopez filed a lawsuit, alleging Vallas was unqualified to serve as superintendent. At the time, school superintendents were required to complete a 13-month leadership course only available through the University of Connecticut. To get around that requirement, the legislature passed a law that allowed Vallas to take a leadership course from any public or private college in Connecticut.
Vallas ended up taking what amounted to an independent study. The actual course included three meetings, several phone calls and six papers over the course of 10 weeks, according to court records from the lawsuit. Vallas later testified “that the work, although done over the course of 10 weeks while fulfilling his employment as acting superintendent, could have been completed in a week.”
In June 2013, state judge Barbara Bellis ruled that Vallas was not qualified to be the superintendent.
“The evidence was overwhelming that from the start, efforts were made to accommodate the appointment of Vallas as superintendent of the Bridgeport Public School system at every level,” the judge ruled. “The court orders that Paul Vallas be removed from his office.”
Vallas has since moved to Chicago where he lost his bid for mayor in 2019.
Vallas and Johnson, a Cook County commissioner endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, advanced to the April 4 runoff after none of the nine candidates was able to secure over 50 percent of the vote to win outright.
At his victory party, Vallas noted that Lightfoot had called to congratulate him and asked the crowd to give her a round of applause. In a nod to his campaign promise to combat crime, he said that, if elected, he would work to address public safety issues.
“We will have a safe Chicago. We will make Chicago the safest city in America,” Vallas said.
Johnson on Tuesday night noted the improbability that he would make the runoff, considering his low name recognition at the start of the race.
“A few months ago they said they didn’t know who I was. Well, if you didn’t know, now you know,” Johnson said. He thanked the unions that supported him and gave a special shout-out to his wife, telling the crowd, “Chicago, a Black woman will still be in charge.”
There are clear contrasts between Vallas and Johnson.
Vallas served as an adviser to the Fraternal Order of Police during its negotiations with Lightfoot’s administration. He has called for adding hundreds of police officers to patrol the city, saying crime is out of control and morale among officers sunk to a new low during Lightfoot’s tenure.
Vallas’ opponents have criticized him as too conservative to lead the Democratic stronghold. Lightfoot blasted him for welcoming support from the police union’s controversial leader, who defended the Jan. 6 insurrectionists at the Capitol and equated Lightfoot’s vaccine mandate for city workers to the Holocaust.
Johnson received about $1 million from the Chicago Teachers Union for his campaign and had support from several other progressive organizations, including United Working Families. The
former teacher and union organizer has argued that the answer to addressing crime is not more money for police but more investment in mental health care, education, jobs and affordable housing, and he was accused by rivals such as Lightfoot of wanting to defund the police.
Johnson has avoided the word “defund” during the race, and his campaign says he does not want to cut the number of police officers. But in a 2020 radio interview, Johnson said defunding is not just a slogan but “an actual real political goal,” and he sponsored a nonbinding resolution on the county board to redirect money from policing and jails to social services.
Race also was a factor as candidates courted votes in the highly segregated city, which is closely divided in population among Black, Hispanic and white residents. Vallas was the only white candidate in the field. Lightfoot, Johnson and
five other candidates are Black, though Lightfoot argued she was the only Black candidate who could win. U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia was the only Latino in the race.
Lightfoot accused Vallas of using “the ultimate dog whistle” by saying his campaign is about “taking back our city,” and of cozying up to the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, whom she calls a racist. A recent Chicago Tribune story also found Vallas’ Twitter account had liked racist tweets and tweets that mocked Lightfoot’s appearance and referred to her as masculine.
Vallas denied his comments were related to race and says his police union endorsement is from rank-and-file officers. He also said he wasn’t responsible for the liked tweets, which he called “abhorrent,” and suggested someone had improperly accessed his account.