As ads bombard voters in Chicago School Board race, a growing call for campaign contribution limits

Organizations and several state lawmakers allied with the Chicago Teachers Union are calling for limits on campaign spending, as big money — some from billionaires — is being used to inundate voters with texts and fliers about the city’s first-ever school board elections.

The elected officials said Monday that they plan to work on campaign finance legislation in Springfield. But those efforts will face headwinds, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s stance that limiting election spending represents a challenge to free speech.

The complaints come in response to millions of dollars raised and spent by super PACs, or political action committees, backing candidates who oppose CTU-endorsed hopefuls. Unlike regular PACs, these super PACs have no donation limits and aren’t supposed to coordinate with individual campaigns. Significant contributions to those funds have come from wealthy individuals and a few billionaires, some of whom don’t live in Chicago or Illinois.

The teachers union and its affiliated PACs have spent almost the same amount as those opposing groups in the past month — but they argued they have a bigger stake in the future of the school system.

“I’ve sat and fought for our children to have … a proper education,” Jeri Hayes, a mother of five CPS students, told reporters at a news conference. “I never saw a billionaire’s child in the Chicago public school system. So how do I expect a billionaire to understand what we’re going through, what our children are going through?”

About a dozen elected officials attended the news conference outside the Michigan Avenue high-rise building that houses the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, which advocates for publicly funded, privately managed charters. Some supporters held oversized fake checks from “The Waltons” and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to “INCS and their candidates for privatization.”

Jim Walton, billionaire heir to the Walmart family fortune, most recently contributed $400,000 to the INCS super PAC on Oct. 3 using his Arkansas address, election records show. He gave the group $350,000 earlier in the year and has handed over $2.3 million to INCS since 2016. Hastings, who lives in California, gave $100,000 in July.

INCS and Urban Center Action — the other super PAC orchestrating the spending in question — sat on a combined $3.6 million at the end of September, records show. At that point, the 31 candidates had raised a total of $1.3 million in cash contributions.

INCS’ fundraising since July has come from three people: Hastings; another $100,000 from Chicago-based Craig Duchossois, the chairman of his family’s investment firm; and $500,000 from Chicago philanthropist Helen Zell, widow of real estate tycoon Sam Zell. Urban Center’s contributors are mostly wealthy Chicago business executives.

The two groups have shelled out at least $2.7 million on school board elections since July, the vast majority of it — more than $2 million — in the past four weeks.

INCS and Urban Center Action fired back Monday that the teachers union is the one trying to buy the election. Urban Center Action said the union and its president, Stacy Davis Gates, “have enjoyed a free rein over our communities for too long. No more!”

The CTU and affiliated PACs have spent about $1.9 million since Oct. 1, a Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ analysis shows. The vast majority of the CTU’s political cash has come from contributions of less than $150, usually from a portion of union dues that teachers opt to send to the political fund. The union has transferred six-figure amounts to United Working Families PAC and Our Schools PAC, both of which are spending on the same candidates.

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

“Everyone knew that if a school district of the importance of the Chicago public schools were to be corrupted with outside money, that would not lead to good results, and that's exactly what we have going on here,” he said.

But Martwick said he and others decided that creating Chicago's first-ever elected school board was revolutionary and complicated enough for one bill. They opted to try to deal with issues in future bills, including campaign finance, whether noncitizens could vote and whether board members should be paid, he said.

None of those items have yet been resolved.

Progressive activists are pushing three measures in Springfield. Those include a limit on contributions from people outside the state. They want the top five contributors to any super PAC disclosed on campaign advertisements. And they want some sort of public financing for political campaigns. It’s likely those attempts to curb spending would face legal battles.

Some lawmakers were notably upset at the infusion of money. U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., said her first experience as a politician was knocking on doors to gather petitions in support of an elected school board. When she was in the Illinois Legislature, she was the chief House sponsor of the bill.

“They're being told by billionaires … who want to privatize education that they have the best interest of our communities in mind. And we say that's a lie,” she said

In return, the INCS super PAC called those attacks “lies.” The group said the candidates its supporting have more grassroots backing than those with ties to the CTU.

“To be clear, INCS Action is supporting independent, student-centered Democratic candidates who believe all children in our city deserve access to a high-quality public school no matter their ZIP code and will prioritize students over politics,” the group said in a statement.“It is evident that others in our city support this simple notion too.”