Chicago school board presidential candidate Sendhil Revuluri says current board is failing to center student success

For the first time this fall, Chicago voters are set to elect the president of the Board of Education.

Four candidates are pursuing the job of running the board in charge of the nation's third-largest school district — Jessica Biggs, a former Chicago Public Schools principal and current Board of Education member; Hilario Dominguez, former political director for the Chicago Teachers Union; Victor Henderson, a trial lawyer; and Sendhil Revuluri, who served as the board's vice president in its previous smaller format.

Revuluri was appointed to the board by Mayor Lori Lightfoot in 2019, back when the mayor appointed the entire membership of the board. He served until 2023, when Mayor Brandon Johnson took over.

Revuluri is a former math teacher who went on to serve as managing director of strategic investment at PEAK6 Capital Management. He also previously served as a parent member of the local school council at Suder Montessori Magnet Elementary School, and worked in the CPS Office of High School Teaching and Learning.

Now, he is running for Board of Education president because, in his words, "we need to put our students at the center of everything we're doing.

"That means accepting reality, honestly, and it means making the hard choices that are best for our students' interests, not for special interests," said Revuluri.

Revuluri's platform calls for student learning "above all else," community engagement that brings everyday Chicagoans to the table, and "reality-based" budgeting.

When asked if "reality-based" budgeting might involve closing schools with very low enrollment for fiscal reasons, Revuluri replied: "We have to do everything we can within the board's authority to accept what's happening, and that means knowing the revenue we get, and knowing that yelling at the state legislature is not getting us more. What we have control over his how we spend those resources, and yes, we do need to right-size our district to ensure that our students' futures are getting the investment that they need."

In July, the Chicago Board of Education approved a $10 billion budget, which relies on $150 million in state funding coming from Springfield. But Illinois lawmakers have not approved that $150 million, and district leaders have warned the Board of Education that it will be a "disaster" if Springfield does not cough it up to balance the CPS budget.

But realistically, Revuluri said, the state is not likely to cough up those funds.

"It's probably not going to, and that assumption of phantom revenue was just the latest problem in a very problematic budget process," he said. "That budget did not start with what's best for our kids. It started with, how can we avoid change, and cater to special interests that are backing many of the other candidates for this position?"

However, Revuluri added, CPS leadership has been planning ahead, and developed a budget that did not rely on "phantom revenue."

"And so they will have a plan, but it's likely to be quite disruptive to students, to their families, and to our educators," he said.

As to the CPS budget that was passed with an expectation of $150 million from the state, Revuluri said, "It's irresponsible, it's incompetent, and it's frankly make-believe."

Revuluri emphasized that the purpose of the Board of Education is to ensure that CPS is successful in educating kids.

"It's not the board's job to prescribe curriculum. It's not the board's job to micromanage, whatever you might have thought from the last 20 months, when this board has done a lot of that," he said. "The board has to create the conditions for improvement, and that starts with the commitment, the integrity, and the focus to put our students' learning at the center."

Revuluri said the current Board of Education has failed to focus on whether students are making progress.

"I put that at the feet of the current membership," he said. "Any one of them could have asked questions about how our students are progressing. Are they reading effectively at grade level? Are we making progress towards that most important goal? But they haven't. For 20 months, they've spent their time on all kinds of other things, and they haven't focused on student learning. Once we do that, then we can actually hold district leadership accountable for making progress."

Revuluri said one of his first actions as board president would be to ensure a "clear, public, and focused CEO evaluation process — something that this board has lacked, again, for 20 months."

He reiterated again and again that the board needs to be focused on student success.

"That's why we have public schools," Revuluri said.