As ads bombard voters in the Chicago School Board race, calls to limit campaign contributions are growing

Organizations and several state lawmakers allied with the Chicago Teachers Union are calling for curbs on campaign spending as big money – some from billionaires – is used to bombard voters with text messages and fliers about the city’s first-ever school board elections.

Elected officials said Monday they plan to work on campaign finance legislation in Springfield. These efforts will face difficulties, however, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s position that limiting election spending poses a challenge to free speech.

The complaints come in response to millions of dollars raised and spent by super PACs, or political action committees, supporting candidates opposed to Candidates endorsed by CTU. Unlike regular PACs, these super PACs have no donation limits and should not be coordinated with individual campaigns. Significant contributions to these funds have been made by wealthy individuals and several billionaires, some of whom do not live in Chicago or Illinois.

The teachers union and its affiliated PACs spent almost the same amount as opposing groups last month but argued they had a greater stake in the school system’s future.

“I sat there and fought to make sure that our children had… a proper education,” Jeri Hayes, a mother of five CPS students, told reporters at a news conference. “I have never seen a billionaire’s child in Chicago public schools. So how can I expect a billionaire to understand what we are going through and what our children are going through?”

About a dozen elected officials attended a news conference outside a Michigan Avenue high-rise that houses the Illinois Charter School Network, which advocates for publicly funded and privately operated schools. Some supporters held fake checks issued by “The Waltons” and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to “INCS and their privatization candidates.”

Jim Walton, the billionaire heir to the Walmart family fortune, donated $400,000 to the INCS super PAC on Oct. 3 using his Arkansas address, election records show. He donated $350,000 to the group at the beginning of the year and has donated more than $2.3 million to INCS since 2016. Hastings, who lives in California, donated $100,000 in July.

According to the data, INCS and Urban Center Action – the second super PAC coordinating the discussed expenses – earned a total of $3.6 million at the end of September. At this point 31 candidates raised a total of $1.3 million in cash contributions.

Since July, INCS has been raising funds from three people: Hastings; another $100,000 from Chicago-based Craig Duchossois, president of his family’s investment firm; and $500,000 from Chicago philanthropist Helen Zell, widow of real estate tycoon Sam Zell. The co-creators of Urban Center are mainly wealthy business executives from Chicago.

Since July, both groups have spent at least $2.7 million on school board elections, the vast majority of it – more than $2 million – in the last four weeks.

INCS and Urban Center Action responded on Monday that the teachers union was trying to buy the election. Urban Center Action said the union and its president, Stacy Davis Gates, “have enjoyed the freedom to control our communities for too long. No more!”

A Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ analysis shows that since Oct. 1, CTU and its affiliated PACs have spent about $1.9 million. The vast majority of CTU’s political funding came from contributions of less than $150, usually a portion of union dues that teachers choose to send to the political fund. The union has donated six-figure sums to the United Working Families PAC and Our Schools PAC, which spend on the same candidates.

State Sen. Robert Martwick (R-Chicago), who sponsored the school board bill, said lawmakers were considering some campaign finance restrictions because both Democratic and Republican lawmakers were concerned about the influence of outside money.

“Everyone knew that if a school district as important as Chicago Public Schools was corrupted with outside money, it wouldn’t lead to good results, and that’s what we’re dealing with here,” he said.

But Martwick said he and others decided that creating Chicago’s first-ever elected school board was revolutionary and complicated enough to fit into one bill. They decided to try to address issues in future bills, including campaign financing, the ability of foreigners to vote and whether board members should be paid, he said.

None of these items have been resolved yet.

Progressive activists are pushing three solutions in Springfield. These include limiting contributions from out-of-state individuals. They want campaign ads to disclose the top five donors to each super PAC. They also want some public financing of political campaigns. It’s likely that these attempts to cut spending will face legal battles.

Some lawmakers were particularly upset about the money injection. U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez, R-Ill., said her first experience as a politician was knocking on doors to collect petitions in support of an elected school board. While she was a member of the Illinois Legislature, she was the lead sponsor of this bill in the House of Representatives.

“Billionaires… who want to privatize education tell them they have the best interests of our communities in mind. And we say it’s a lie,” she added

In return, the INCS super PAC called the attacks “lies.” The group found that candidates endorsing it have greater grassroots support than CTU-affiliated candidates.

“To be clear, INCS Action supports independent, student-centered Democratic candidates who believe that all children in our city deserve access to high-quality public schools regardless of zip code and will put students above politics,” the group said in a statement statement. “It is clear that other residents of our city also support this simple concept.”