Brandon Johnson’s Other Chicago Mess

Nobody places the race card with more panache than our Mayor. “Let’s call it like it is,” Mr. Johnson said this week. “You put a black man in charge of a city, all of a sudden everybody wants to be an accountant.”

Brandon Johnson’s Other Chicago Mess

The school board votes down his payday loan for pension costs.

By The Editorial Board, WSJ

Sept. 7, 2025 4:32 pm ET

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is under a national spotlight for his city’s crime problem, but don’t sleep on the rest of his misgovernance. Last week the city’s Board of Education rejected a short-term high-interest loan Mr. Johnson was pushing to have Chicago Public Schools (CPS) go into more debt so that the mayor would have an easier time balancing his own books.

The school board voted 12-7 against the mayor’s idea to use expensive borrowing to make a $175 million pension payment. Mr. Johnson’s allies in the Chicago Teachers Union also used the debate to call attention to CPS’s financial straits in hopes that Governor JB Pritzker might shovel more money their way.

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.”

Mr. Johnson and the teachers union might want Mr. Pritzker and state lawmakers in Springfield to bail them out of their fiscal morass, but Illinois is in bad shape, too, with a $144 billion hole in its five pension systems, according to the Illinois Policy Institute. Chicago has overspent for years, and its school enrollment is declining, and responsible political leaders would face the problem squarely.

But America’s worst mayor is busy arguing that his predecessors increased school borrowing more, and so his critics are racist. “Let’s call it like it is,” Mr. Johnson said this week. “You put a black man in charge of a city, all of a sudden everybody wants to be an accountant.”