Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot selected Pedro Martinez, Superintendent of the San Antonio School District, as the Windy City’s public schools.
Martinez is a “reformer.” In San Antonio, he was known for his obsession with data and commitment to opening charter schools. He is a graduate of the tattered Broad Superintendents Academy. He is chairman of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change. Chiefs for Change brings together superintendents who share the test-and-punish ideas of the failed corporate reform movement (closing low-scoring schools, opening charter schools, relying on high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, collecting data about everything, distrust of unions, etc.).
Martinez is a graduate of the Chicago Public Schools. He holds an M.B.A. from DePaul University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And, of course, he is a graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy. He worked for Arne Duncan as Chief Financial Officer when Arne was Superintendent in Chicago. He was “Superintendent-in-Residence” for the Nevada Department of Education. Prior to that, he was superintendent for the 64,000-student Washoe County School District, covering the Reno, Nevada area.
Like Arne, Martinez was never a teacher or principal.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Good morning,
Does the Superintendent of the San Antonio School District go by the name of Pedro Martinez? Thank you.
Bhaskar
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Yes
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So much for Lori Lightfoot in doing anything right.
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or having “vision”
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Shame on Mayor Lightfoot. After the struggles from the pandemic, public schools should be focusing community based schools with family support. Instead, the people of Chicago should buckle up for havoc that Martinez will inflict. In San Antonio he fired a number of teachers and turned many of the schools into charters. He worked well with developers that sought to gentrify the city’s poor neighborhoods.
The people of San Antonio are not the people of Chicago. The San Antonio Schools are over 89% Latino. Latino parents are generally accepting of anything the schools do. Latino parents respect schools and teachers and rarely challenge decisions. Chicago is a very different community as Martinez will discover. I hope there is strong leadership in the CTU. They will need it to spar with this Chief of Chaos.
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My husband has an MBA from Wharton so we receive their alumni publications. The current issue has three ventures in education including, I kid you not, a virtual summer camp and a tutoring project that received a big grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Two of the three alumni profiled were Latino. It seems to me that many of the so-called reformers are ambitious people of color that do not have the social connections to work at the big firms so they find their way into the commodification of education where they can sometimes access public funds or grant money from foundations.
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I think it’s more likely that corporate reformers like Gates put people of color in front of their projects so as to maintain the myth that privatization is led by African Americans and Latinos. When the public sector is replaced by private entities, it’s people of color who lose the most.
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an important distinction
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The Florida Education Association (affiliate of AFT and NEA) had a podcast episode where they played a recording of one of the heads of Step for Students, the company that runs the voucher tax credit scheme, who told conference goers in another state to use pictures of minorities to promote similar programs.
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Not surprising.
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Arnie is responsible for the out-migration of people leaving Chicago as much as Rahm and the rest.
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Here’s some info gleaned from two Chalkbeat Chicago articles published over the last three days:
“He came up through finance and does not have experience as a classroom educator.”
This might help a little? 😉 —
“Three of his sisters now teach in Chicago Public Schools, and more nieces and nephews than relatives can count are current students across Chicago, said sister Maria Martinez.”
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The San Antonio business community promised to expand charters and raised millions of dollars to expedite the expansion.
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“Rodriguez is a graduate of the Chicago Public Schools”
Maybe that will make a difference and make him less reflexively anti-public school than the rest of the ed reform echo chamber he belongs to. I hope so, for the sake of the students who attend Chicago Public Schools. If he doesn’t value public schools he won’t “improve” them.
I think some of the real hostility towards public schools we saw in the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations was due to the fact that so few of the people they hired attended public schools or sent their children and grandchildren to them. It’s easier to accept the ed reform depiction of all public schools as “failing” if you’ve never been inside one or involved in one.
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The new Chicago superintendent is Pedro Martinez, not Rodriguez. Sorry for the error.
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And our new Education Secretary graduated from public schools and universities too!
How is this working out for us???
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These guys fixate on data. Where has data led to improved education? I haven’t seen it in our district. It’s all a show.
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Data also serve as a pretext to privatize,
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Yet another example. Evidence of success for corporate deformers is more implementation of their preferred policies, not progress on equity.
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I smell trouble!
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“I think it’s more likely that corporate reformers like Gates put people of color in front of their projects so as to maintain the myth that privatization is led by African Americans and Latinos. When the public sector is replaced by private entities, it’s people of color who lose the most.”
–Diane Ravitch
Amen. Amen! Amen!!
It seems much prattling goes on these days about needing to have “courageous conversations” about racism, white frugality, CRT, or whatever.
Well, Diane here points to what needs to be one heck of a courageous conversation with and/or about “people of color.” And if it takes colorless people to make it happen, then so be it.
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