CPS Board Approves Macquline King as Permanent CEO

The Chicago Board of Education voted Monday to approve a three-year contract for Macquline King as the district’s permanent CEO, with only one dissenting vote on a board that has spent much of the past year fractured along political lines.

King, who has run Chicago Public Schools on an interim basis for the past 10 months, will earn a starting salary of $380,000. That figure tops the $340,000 earned by her predecessor Pedro Martinez, who was pushed out amid a bitter dispute between the board and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration over a proposed $175 million loan to the cash-strapped district.

The contrast with that turbulent chapter was hard to miss Monday. A board that has often struggled to find common ground came together with rare unanimity, with only Jennifer Custer, who represents the Far Northwest Side, casting a no vote. After the tally was announced, King received a standing ovation.

King’s rise to the top job carries a certain Chicago weight to it. She is a homegrown product of the district she now leads, and her selection bypassed the national search that critics had demanded. Supporters argued that the district’s needs were too urgent and its institutional knowledge too valuable to hand over to an outsider.

The bet the board made on continuity rather than change reflects both the confidence King has built during her interim tenure and the sheer scale of the problems she inherits. CPS faces a structural budget deficit, enrollment pressures driven by population loss on the South and West sides, and a federal funding cliff as pandemic-era relief dollars have run dry.

King did not shy away from those realities Monday. She acknowledged “the serious challenges” facing the district while insisting the trajectory is pointed in the right direction. Her remarks centered on protecting recent gains in graduation rates and dual enrollment, programs that allow students to earn college credit while still in high school.

“We will protect the progress that we’ve made with everything we have,” King said. “Our path forward is clear, it’s etched on our strategic plan centered on one thing: student experience.”

She framed her three-year mandate around building what she called “a bridge of excellence” across the full K-12 experience, with a focus on establishing a strong curriculum in every subject at every grade level.

That kind of systematic thinking will be tested almost immediately. The district’s budget negotiations loom this spring, and the political dynamics around school funding at both the state and federal levels remain volatile. King will need to manage relationships with the Chicago Teachers Union, whose contract expired last year, while keeping a board that is still finding its footing after transitioning to a partially elected structure.

That board makeup is itself part of the story here. The hybrid model, some members appointed by the mayor and some elected by voters in their districts, was designed to reduce the kind of mayoral control that critics blamed for politicizing school leadership. The near-unanimous vote for King suggests the new structure may be capable of deliberate action, at least when the choice in front of it is clear enough.

Custer’s lone opposition reflects ongoing concerns some board members have raised about the process by which King was selected rather than any broad opposition to King herself. The district skipped a formal national search, a decision that drew scrutiny even from some who ultimately voted yes.

For King, the standing ovation matters less than what comes next. CPS enrolls roughly 320,000 students across more than 500 schools. Many of those schools serve neighborhoods that have been hollowed out by decades of disinvestment. The challenges there do not yield to strategic plans easily, and they do not wait for new leadership to get comfortable.

King has been in the building. She knows where the bodies are buried, institutionally speaking. That experience is exactly what the board wagered on Monday. Whether that bet pays off for the students who have the most to gain, and the most to lose, will define her tenure.