Ellen Sherratt had rung two dozen doors, most of which had gone unanswered, before meeting Michael Solheim on his shaded porch in Wrigleyville. His eyes skimmed over her flyer and colorful campaign sticker pinned to her blouse.
He leaned against his doorframe. “So, how do you think this reshuffling to a fully elected board is going to make a difference?” asked Solheim, whose two children attend the nearby Hawthorne Scholastic Academy.
“I think, hopefully, there can be more accountability,” Sherratt said. “I’m not someone who’s connected with City Hall. I think we need some independence.”
Three candidates are running to represent school board District 4A, stretching over 15 schools on the North Side. The two best-funded contenders — Sherratt and incumbent Karen Zaccor — are going head-to-head in a race that has become a microcosm of a broader fight over who will shape Chicago’s first fully elected school board.
It’s also one of five races where the district’s two largest labor unions, the Chicago Teachers Union and the Service Employees International Union Illinois, are backing opposing candidates.
The district spans affluent stretches of Lakeview, but also Uptown and Edgewater, two of the North Side’s most socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods. Its voters include many of the politically influential North Side progressives who helped elect Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former CTU organizer. Zaccor ran for the seat in 2024 but finished as runner-up. Johnson later appointed her to the adjacent subdistrict.
Now, as CTU seeks to maintain its board majority, the race is testing whether the union’s political influence can hold — and drawing heavy spending from outside groups with opposing visions for the district.
Also running in District 4A is Angel Alvarez, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and a former Local School Council member, though he has no major endorsements and a comparatively smaller pot of campaign cash.
Zaccor is a recently retired Chicago Public Schools teacher, a longtime Uptown organizer and a member of Northside Action for Justice. She has argued that board members should advocate to challenge district policies and press Springfield and CPS for more resources. Her top priority, she said, is ensuring fully funded neighborhood schools across the city.
“I want to see CPS transformed into a system that is truly equitable. Not that we have some really great-sounding plans, but that we’re actually practicing equity. And so to me, that absolutely takes activism, right?” Zaccor said. “It’s not going to happen by us just sitting and listening to whatever is brought to us and saying yes or no.”
In her time on the board, Zaccor has been a vocal CTU ally. In the spring, she successfully led an effort to delay charter school renewals, calling for stricter oversight. More recently, she joined a bloc of CTU-aligned school board members in amending the district’s $10 billion budget with $150 million in unconfirmed state funding.
Board members in favor framed the move as a pressure tactic to force Springfield to assume responsibility for hundreds of teacher layoffs, pointing to commitments from several state lawmakers. But district leadership warned the move could lead to deeper midyear cuts.
Zaccor pushed back against the criticism her opponent, Sherratt, has directed toward the union. “What they fight for is social workers in every school, nurses, librarians, restorative justice coordinators, smaller class sizes. … Why do we not like that? Why are those things bad?” she said.
Sherratt, meanwhile, has argued that CTU-aligned board members’ budget revision falls into political brinkmanship — what she called an effort to “legislate through a megaphone.” She said she would have supported the spending plan as presented by CPS leaders.
“It was very irresponsible to play politics with the budget and hope that Springfield will come to the rescue,” Sherratt said.
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The Lakeview East resident has spent much of her career researching the national teacher shortage. She has led advocacy efforts to advance the American Teacher Act, a proposed federal bill establishing minimum salaries for public school teachers. Sherratt has emphasized her research background on the campaign trail, and said her top priority would be student learning and what she calls “responsible leadership.”
Her two children attend private school, a decision her family made during the pandemic. “We were absolutely planning to have our children at CPS, but remote learning was not working for my family,” she said, adding that she decided to keep them there because they were already settled.
The North Side race reflects the broader tension in the shift to elected governance, said Arnie Rivera, executive director of the nonprofit Chicago Education Alliance. This is the first year all 21 school board seats are up for grabs. For nearly three decades, the board had operated under mayoral control.
“I do think a big part of this is activism versus governance, and what members are understanding as their roles in those seats,” Rivera said, though he noted “much of this is politically driven.”
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Indeed, the financial backing behind Sherratt and Zaccor — along with spending from independent expenditure committees, or super PACs — reflects how competing interests are lining up behind the candidates. Super PACs can spend unlimited amounts, but aren’t allowed to coordinate with candidates.
A large pool of individual donors, plus a $15,000 check from SEIU, has helped Sherratt raise about $145,000 — among the largest war chests in all district-level races. She also has some support from three groups opposing CTU’s influence on the board: Common Ground Collective, the Illinois Network of Charter Schools and the Urban Center.
“I’m not beholden to any of the organizations,” Sherratt said. “And there’s also just families around the district who are concerned about their neighborhood schools.”
But CTU has argued that those groups and their affiliated super PACs are flooding the race with outside money. INCS’ super PAC has spent nearly $90,000 on digital ads and mailers opposing Zaccor, as well as $39,000 to support Sherratt. Urban Center’s super PAC has spent another $13,000 on text messaging supporting Sherratt.
“So control by billionaires is OK, but CTU having an influence is bad?” Zaccor said, referencing the group’s wealthy donors. To date, she has raised about $44,000, including $20,000 of in-kind from Our Schools PAC, a pro-labor group affiliated with CTU.
To be sure, CTU is also expected to spend heavily in the school board races — the union was the biggest spender in the 2024 election. Earlier this year, CTU leadership attempted to raise member dues, in part to bolster political spending.
That fight over campaign money and influence is playing out in 20 other races across the city.
The union split
Meanwhile, Brighter Futures Chicago, a new super PAC funded by SEIU Illinois State Council, has put hundreds of thousands of dollars behind SEIU-endorsed candidates, including $37,000 on digital ads and mailers supporting Sherratt.
What to know before you vote in Chicago’s elected school board races
SEIU was once closely aligned with CTU, and the two unions helped elect Johnson as mayor. But their relationship frayed last year amid a turf war involving special education employees. The two unions have since publicly diverged over the amended budget. After the vote, SEIU leaders said the resulting financial uncertainty “threatens the stability of the entire school system.”
Particularly in down-ballot, nonpartisan races, union endorsements can carry the signaling power of a party label, giving voters a sense of a candidate’s priorities, according to Robert Bruno, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Labor and Employment Relations.
“These endorsements can be very important, particularly when the unions involved have a broad scope of representation and really have good reputations for organizing from the ground-up,” Bruno said. “Both CTU and SEIU have demonstrated that capacity.”
The two unions are still supporting some of the same candidates. But the question is, Bruno said, whether their increasingly separate political operations could weaken their collective organizing power within CPS.
“If the SEIU candidate is, ‘Vote for me because I’m anti-CTU,’ that’s not great. That’s bad. And if the CTU endorsed candidate is saying, ‘Vote for me, because I’m anti-SEIU’ … that is certainly destructive for both unions,” Bruno said. “And it’s not good, quite frankly, for the school system, either.”
The third candidate, Alvarez, is a CPS parent who directs a stem cell research facility at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He has raised $1,500.
Alvarez said he would focus on early literacy and math screening before second grade, and more foundational support for students with disabilities. He acknowledged his lack of union endorsements and big-money support, but said, “I have to run my own race.”
“Anyone who thought that there wasn’t going to be large outside campaign contributions just was really naive,” Alvarez said. “I’m not going to go and try to outspend them, so I try to make sure my message is heard.”