To help inform voters on who’s running for Chicago’s elected school board, the baiduhai education team posed a series of questions to the candidates in each district. These questions ranged from basic information on their background and campaign platform to their stance on several issues facing Chicago Public Schools.
See the answers from Margaret “Maggie” Cullerton Hooper, candidate for elected school board in the 2nd District, below.
About the Candidate
Name: Margaret “Maggie” Cullerton Hooper
Age: 43
Neighborhood: Albany Park
School District: 2
Education: St. Ignatius College Prep; majors in literature, political science, fine arts and a minor in physics, DePaul University
Current Job: Senior consultant at the Alliance for Black Equality PAC
Previous Political Experience: None.
Questions and Answers
In the interest of transparency, the candidate’s responses shown here are published as written and have not been edited by the Tribune.
Did you attend Chicago Public Schools or is anyone in your immediate family a CPS student? Yes, an immediate family member.
Have you worked at Chicago Public Schools or another school? What is your background in education?
More Top Picks Does Vision Therapy Work What The Research Really Says
I am the only candidate running in District 2 with children currently enrolled in a Chicago Public School. I have served on the Hibbard Elementary LSC for 8 years, as a community representative, parent representative, and chair. As a member of my LSC I have led a principal selection process and have assessed and approved 8 school budgets.
I am a woman with disabilities, I have a child with disabilities, and I work as a volunteer advocate for families of children with disabilities across CPS – helping them understand their rights, joining them for IEP meetings to advocate on behalf of their children, and using every opportunity available to move disability justice forward in Chicago Public Schools.
I am also a trained parent organizer with Raise Your Hand for IL, I lobbied for an equitable ERSB map, and I have testified at board meetings and committee meetings on numerous pieces of legislation. These experiences have allowed me to build a robust network of relationships with parents, teachers, staff and administrators at CPS schools across the city and partnerships with elected leaders at the city, state, and federal levels.
Professionally, I worked in partnership with the arts education team in my role as the Deputy Commissioner, Partnerships at the Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events. When I was promoted as the Chief Philanthropy & Partnerships Officer for the entire city of Chicago, I worked closely with teams across CPS to develop policy, execute programs, and build critical partnerships with organizations including Kids First Fund, the Crime Lab, and the Education Lab.
Why are you running for a seat on the Chicago Board of Education?
I’m running because I am a mom, an advocate, and a public servant. I know that I am the best candidate to represent District 2 on Chicago’s Elected School Board.
As I’ve shared, I am the only candidate running in District 2 who has children currently enrolled in CPS. What sets my candidacy apart even further is decades of advocacy in Chicago’s nonprofit & government sectors, my record of successful policy development & implementation, and my extensive experience managing multi-million dollar municipal budgets.
I am running because I am a person with disabilities, parenting a child with disabilities, and have been on the ground, in our schools, fighting for our kids – I will bring experience to public education that has never been valued by our leaders. There has never been a person with disabilities sitting on the Chicago Board of Education. It is absolutely essential that someone with direct, lived experience have a seat at the table where decisions are made. Other city boards have had dedicated disability seats for decades, beginning with the CTA under Mayor Harold Washington’s administration. Diversity without disability is not diversity, full stop.
I’m running because I believe our schools deserve someone with a record of fighting for our kids. I will bring an independent, parent voice from a historically underfunded neighborhood school.
How would you describe your district?
A quick data snapshot of the 37 schools in District 2: The Opportunity Index scores vary 8 schools have Oi scores between 17 – 21 11 schools have Oi scores between 24 – 30 17 schools have Oi scores between 31 – 39 19 schools have an ESL population of 41% or more 21 schools have student bodies with 15%+ diverse learners 31 of 37 schools have a 45%+ FRM population 6 schools have a white plurality students body 3 schools have a Black plurality students body 17 schools have a Latine plurality students body 1 school has a Asian plurality student body Racial and economic disparities are the most prevalent issue impacting CPS broadly and the schools of District 2, specifically. These disparities are manifested in a shrinking Black educator workforce, gaps in Black and English-language learner student achievement, increasing economic gentrification and reduced housing access/increased housing instability. At my children’s school, enrollment has consistently declined due to housing shifts. The sale of buildings to developers often results in the loss of 15-40 students, primarily from the lowest income households. In District 2, 31 out of 37 schools have at least 45% low-income students, with 19 schools exceeding 70%. Only one neighborhood school has a majority white student body. Hibbard Elementary, where my family attends, is 71.4% low-income and 8% white. I believe our representative should value and believe in our students and intentionally choose communities like ours for themself and their family.. Additionally, there are 28 different languages spoken at Hibbard Elementary. A meaningful investment in language services for LSCs, PAC/BAC, and parents and caregivers is critical to ensure every family can be a full participant in their child’s education and in their broader school community. Leveraging the existing resources available at our libraries, community based organizations, etc. can move our schools towards more robust and holistic engagement within and across our local schools. Finally, because our non-citizen families will not be afforded a say in who represents their interests on the new School Board, it is a priority of mine to listen to and elevate these vital voices and center their experience and concerns with the same weight and respect as the rest of our neighbors. After winning a seat on the School Board, continued engagement with the Non-Citizen Advisory Council will be a top priority of mine.
How would you describe your campaign platform?
The statement driving my candidacy that I will carry with me as a Board member is, “my child cannot succeed unless every child succeeds.” To me, this means that so long as CPS is rife with inequity and continues to deprioritize the experiences and success of Black and brown students, English language learners, LGBTQIA+ students and families and students with disabilities, no one is succeeding.
What is the single most important issue facing CPS students?
Inequity. A child’s race, family economic status, zip code or their parents ability to be consistently engaged advocates on their behalf should have absolutely no impact on their access to a high-quality, fully-funded neighborhood school that can serve them with the differentiation and specialization they need and deserve.
Provide three to four key points you want voters to know about your campaign.
From the beginning of my campaign, I have remained the only candidate to publicly release robust, detailed policy plans on the myriad of issues facing Chicago Public Schools. I encourage all voters to read through these at maggieforchicago.com. Four of my policies that have not been addressed in other questions here that I am particularly passionate about are: improving special education and realizing disability justice in CPS, prioritizing Black student success in Board decisions, totally reimagining community engagement and transparency in CPS and fostering LGBTQIA+ inclusion, equity and celebration in CPS.
Given this year’s budgetary problems and disagreements on how to solve them, what do you propose for the district’s funding in future years? Would you support the district in taking on any loans in future years to fund the annual budget?
I 100%, unequivocally oppose the Mayor’s proposition of taking out a short-term, high-interest loan. Instead, I propose…
IMMEDIATE SOLUTION:
Currently, the state of Illinois only funds the legacy pension contributions for schools outside Chicago. As a result, Chicago must cover these legacy costs through a property tax, creating an unfair burden on CPS.
This inequity is a little-known aspect of how the state underfunds public schools, and it must be addressed immediately. The Board should demand action by either pushing the legislature to resume funding legacy pension costs (as they did in the past) or by advocating for the merging of the state and Chicago teacher pension funds. This merger would strengthen teachers statewide and prevent future pension underfunding.
This change would free up $550M – $640M, all of which could be redirected to our schools.
THREE STRATEGIC LONG-TERM SOLUTIONS:
Earned Revenue
Many schools generate earned revenue (renting rooftops to telecom companies or parking to local businesses). Meanwhile, unused district-owned buildings cost the district to maintain. We need to diversify revenue through community partnerships that support neighborhood economies and generate income for CPS.
Sunsetting Costly Underperforming Contracts
The practice of outsourcing school needs to for-profit companies, like Aramark, for financial efficiency has been a disaster. Their opaque system lacks transparency, leaves schools in disrepair, and undermines high-quality union jobs while costing the district millions. We must rebuild internal infrastructure for facilities maintenance and unionized city employees supervised by school principals.
Balanced Budgets & Financial Sustainability
The Board must collaborate with state and city leadership on pension reform without further benefit reductions. A multi-year plan to address debt service and reamortization is essential. We should also review capital budgets, create a public database of investments, and ensure transparency in decision-making. Finally, new program investments should not come from facilities budgets.
The Chicago Board of Education recently adopted a new five-year strategic plan. Which aspects do you support and which would you change, if any?
I support all of the priority areas identified in the Strategic Plan. I was very encouraged to see Black student success, multilingual pathways, and students with disabilities highlighted as students priority areas.
As with all long-term, global-lens plans, the critical aspect will be the effective and equitable implementation of Together We Rise. The expertise required to competently execute a strategic plan in the government sector is exceedingly rare and the other candidates in District 2 simply pale in comparison to me.
As thousands of migrant families settle in Chicago, how should the District handle the influx of English learners? What more should be done to ensure consistent bilingual education is provided and funded?
My children attend a school with a two-way, immersive dual language education program and I have seen first hand how difficult it is to identify and hire educators with the requisite bilingual teaching certifications. The district must work with all of our education workforce development partners to dramatically increase the certified bilingual educators in CPS schools. I would support efforts to incentivise current educators to secure bilingual certifications, to ensure a robust pipeline in partnership with post-secondary institutions, and to identify innovative opportunities to recruit new teachers to this field.
Do you believe the district has historically underinvested in South and West side schools? Yes.
If yes, what solutions would you propose to address inequities and opportunity gaps in the school system?
First and foremost, I am deeply committed to centering Black experiences and doing this work as appropriate and invited. I will not compromise on establishing the Black Student Achievement Committee AND ensuring that its members have the resources required to make meaningful change for Black students. Additionally, I will advocate for incorporating all recommendations from the Black Student Success working group into the district’s strategic plan. I attended several sessions and witnessed the labor that built this robust, achievable platform.
Finally, elected members of the Board of Education must continue the moratorium on school closures and staunchly oppose any further school privatization efforts. When Chicago closes schools, Black schools are disproportionately negatively impacted.
Not only have school closures proven deeply destabilizing for Chicago’s Black middle-class communities, there is OVERWHELMING evidence that having Black educators dramatically improves Black student outcomes.
More Top Picks Beach Chair
When Chicago closes schools, Black teachers are purged from the workforce. The systematic elimination of Black educators in Chicago Public Schools was the predictable and inevitable outcome of every sweeping policy reform effort over the last 3 decades – from the devastation wreaked by Renaissance 2010 to the closure of 50 schools (leveraging manipulated “utilization” data) in 2013.
Black students who have one Black teacher by third grade are 7% more likely to graduate high school and 13% more likely to enroll in college. After having two Black teachers, Black students’ likelihood of enrolling in college increases by 32%. And this is but one such statistic.
The Chicago Teachers Union has long provided insights and suggested policy reforms that could increase the number of incoming Black teachers in our schools, such as reestablishing a hiring pipeline through Chicago State University. As a member of the Board of Education, I will have the opportunity to listen to the experts on the education workforce and will make translating those recommendations into policy changes a top priority.
Since his election, Mayor Johnson has indicated a desire to move away from school choice and bolster neighborhood schools. This was recently reinforced by in the district’s five-year strategic plan. Do you share this position? Why or why not?
I strongly believe that CPS needs a long-term approach to ensure that every child can walk to an excellent neighborhood school.
Our current system is often painted as one where families and students have a “choice”, but any CPS family knows that could not be farther from the truth. A district with chronically underfunded neighborhood schools, small regional schools that can only serve a fraction of our gifted students, and a few exceptional options that are the only alternative for a tiny fraction of students is not a district where any of us has a “choice”.
We must create a long-term, transparent plan to increase funding to neighborhood schools that does not make those investments at the expense of the only options available to students currently navigating the deeply inequitable systems we have built to date.
I do not object to magnet or specialty schools being available to students who want to pursue fine arts, STEM, trade programs, or other educational opportunities and I believe that, once we are able to provide quality education to all our students, the landscape for selective enrollment and magnet schools may look very different than it does today. When we center and invest in our neighborhood schools, we build up all of our children and create a public school district that draws families and residents to every corner of our city.
What solutions do you propose to provide busing for students at selective enrollment and magnet schools?
As a board member I will work closely with various stakeholders, including CPS Parents for Buses (who have proposed numerous well researched and concrete solutions) who I am proud to be endorsed by, to build a coalition to solve this issue. I would invite the union(s) who work with and for school bus drivers to identify long term solutions, understand the workforce pipeline, and address any systemic barriers to ensuring long-term strategies. I would also reach out to my network both in Chicago and other cities to understand how districts have successfully solved this problem in the past and to explore municipal policies that could be modeled here going forward.
Please share your thoughts on how the District and the Chicago Teachers Union can reach a new four-year contract.
The current contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union have taken place under a completely different framework from what we will see with an elected school board. Under the ERSB, the dynamics will be vastly different from what we have seen to date and I believe this will be a critical area for new Board members to re-envision.
In the past, the Mayor would be negotiating said contracts and would have the legal and contractual power to commit resources from Chicago’s various departments like DFSS, public safety, public health, etc. Going forward, the Board of Education (together with the CEO) will have no authority over those parallel city services and resources. Board members will need to build substantial relationships across other city departments in order to develop meaningful relationships and secure productive partnerships.
The Chicago Teachers Union has built a comprehensive framework for contract negotiations – bargaining for the collective good. With an elected and democratic body, I imagine that role will be more appropriate in the hands of each board member who has been chosen by these groups directly. In that case, CTU will no longer be the party at the decision making table who is advocating for the students, parents, and community members. That will, naturally, fall to us.
I have extensive experience developing programs that are grounded in participatory practices, co-governance, mutual aid, and other movement based values. I believe we must center community accountability which requires a deep understanding of these concepts and a relentless commitment to meaningful community engagement. This office is ideal for meaningful implementation of community accountability because schools are physical anchors in our neighborhoods and natural centers for developing and building together within and across our schools.
The creation of an elected representative school Board is steeped in the hard-fought battle to create it and the work of educators, parents, and activists over the course of decades. The roles of the district, the board, and key stakeholders (like our teachers) will evolve and that will include CTU contract negotiations.
In 2024, Chicago Public Schools’ average literacy proficiency rate is 31%, an increase from pre-pandemic years. These rates, however, were lower for students from low-income families, English learners and students with Individual Education Plans (IEPs). How should the district seek to improve literacy rates going forward?
Less than 20% of CPS schools have a full-time librarian on staff. As with many aspects of CPS’ underperformance, their lack of transparency around this issue means there is no public database of which schools do and do not have a full-time librarian. This is unacceptable for the third largest school district in the country, and putting full-time librarians in every CPS school is a top priority of mine.
Furthermore, librarians provide so much more to our educational environments than they receive credit for. They play a key role in helping our children shape their personal identities and sense of self by connecting them with books and media that reflect their unique interests, identities, concerns, and dreams. Librarians also teach children how to critically evaluate the factual accuracy of both print and digital media—an essential skill in today’s media landscape, which is alarmingly prone to disinformation.
Moreover, librarians are crucial to ensuring that the rest of a student’s educational experience is meaningful. Around the third grade, a major shift occurs in literacy for American students: they transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Students who fall behind in reading at this stage are likely to experience a steep decline in educational outcomes through to graduation. In a system where teachers are already stretched thin by large class sizes and the lack of curriculum differentiation, cutting librarians is exactly the wrong approach.
What is your position on expanded funding and renewal terms for charter schools?
While I do not want to see any additional charter schools in Chicago, they have become part of the fabric of Chicago’s public education landscape for the time being. My desire to not see any additional school closings in Chicago encompasses ALL schools; and in many neighborhoods, charter schools have taken the place of what used to be a neighborhood school. While working toward the long-term goal of making all neighborhood schools high-functioning, well-resourced and able to accommodate learning differentiations for the broad scope of learners they serve, each type of school woven in the CPS tapestry must have their students, teachers, staff and families heard and served equitably by the Board.
That said, I believe that all public schools should be subject to the same standards for education, discipline, admittance/rejection, etc. I would also make it a top priority to expand LSCs to all charter schools.
Please provide your thoughts on how to keep Chicago Public Schools as safe havens for students to learn and flourish fear of violence. How do you propose the district approach this?
In terms of physical threats of violence, I am deeply committed to continuing to lobby the local, state and federal government for gun control ordinances and bills. I am a strong proponent of banning assault weapons, removing guns from individuals with a history of domestic violence and restraining orders, and significantly increasing background and mental health checks for prospective gun owners.
As far as peer on peer bullying in CPS is concerned: While mine is an often unfavorable perspective, I am deeply committed to the principle that hurt people hurt people. I believe the best way to address bullying is by providing services and supports to people who cause harm while protecting victims, respecting their experiences and trauma, and working to proactively practice restorative justice toward healing.
Lastly, grounding our whole school safety plans in a gender-based-violence prevention framework and ensuring the implementation of sex education from kindergarten at every school are critical issue areas that have been grossly underlooked as proven tools to reduce violence.