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School Agenda Bedevils Chicago Mayor in Race

Overton Elementary, one of nearly 50 schools that were closed.Credit...Andrew Nelles for The New York Times

CHICAGO — The sky-blue paint has begun to peel on the three-story building that was once Anthony Overton Elementary. Window air-conditioners are speckled with rust. Doors where children used to rush in and out are sealed with plywood.

The empty shell of this school on Chicago’s largely black South Side stands as a reminder of one of Rahm Emanuel’s defining acts as mayor: overseeing the closing of nearly 50 public schools deemed underperforming, underutilized or both. It was the largest closing of schools in memory, with many of them in black or Latino neighborhoods.

For the mayor, this was one step toward bringing better education to students trapped in failing schools amid a fiscal crisis. Overton, after all, was nothing to brag about. Its test scores put it in the lowest tier of the nation’s third-largest school district, and it had been placed on probation by school officials for three years. The population in Chicago had shrunk over time, some students had chosen alternatives like charter schools, and Overton was only half full.

But for families who saw Overton as an institution that gave the neighborhood stability, the decision was a blow. “It hurts,” said Earvin Wade, 55, who lives across the street. “You used to have a lot of kids there, families around. It was at the heart of our neighborhood. Now it’s nothing but an eyesore.”

As Mr. Emanuel faces an unexpected runoff election for mayor, questions are percolating through the race about his brusque style, his handling of gang violence and whether he has favored wealthy downtown interests over ordinary neighborhoods. But in the end, it may be the education agenda that he proudly, defiantly and swiftly carried out that threatens his political future.

Like many mayors of big cities, Mr. Emanuel, a Democrat, came into office four years ago bluntly pledging to turn around a troubled school system and improve graduation rates, which hovered around 58 percent. He was withering in his critique, asserting at one point that students were getting “the shaft.”

Mr. Emanuel sought to reduce dropout rates and extend the availability of preschool and full-day kindergarten. He pushed to toughen teacher evaluations and oversaw an expansion of charters schools, which are privately run and publicly funded. He demanded an increase in the length of the school day — which compared unfavorably with that of other major cities — helping set off the first teachers’ strike in a quarter-century.

Teachers, who said they felt attacked by Mr. Emanuel and carried pointed signs with messages like “What’s Rahm With You?” during the strike in 2012, are now leading the charge against him.

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Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago greeted students at Shields Middle School in 2012. Teachers staged a strike that year.Credit...M. Spencer Green/Associated Press

Chicago Teachers Union leaders urged Jesús G. Garcia, a county commissioner known as Chuy, to enter a wide field of candidates in the first balloting last week against Mr. Emanuel. And they said they would be pressing efforts on behalf of Mr. Garcia, who finished second to Mr. Emanuel, forcing him into the runoff election on April 7.

Teachers’ groups, including national unions like the American Federation of Teachers, have donated at least $500,000 to elect Mr. Garcia, though Mr. Emanuel has raised far more. In one sign of the environment Mr. Emanuel faces, advisory measures calling for the school board to be elected instead of appointed by the mayor won overwhelming support from Chicagoans on ballots last week.

“That’s a pretty strong message to Rahm about what people thought about his education agenda,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “His education agenda is based on sanctions and punishing and tests in lieu of the professional judgment of educators.”

Despite the opposition from teachers, Mr. Emanuel boasts of his record on education, ticking off school statistics he likens to the report cards he says his parents used to post on the family refrigerator for all to see.

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Chicago teachers on a picket line in 2012.Credit...John Gress/Reuters

“We had to make changes in the structure of the system that was holding our kids and our teachers back from doing what they do best,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview. “Now, we’re not done. It’s not over. There are things that have to get done. But they’re finally pointing in the right direction and repeatedly doing better and better each year.”

During his first term, graduation rates rose to just under 70 percent, a high for the Chicago system, according to school officials. The number of African-American students in Advanced Placement classes grew by 40 percent. Suspensions and expulsions dropped.

In the wake of the strike, school days grew to seven hours for public elementary school students, up from less than six, school officials said, and students now attend class 178 days a year, not 170. Mr. Emanuel has pressed for a new program that provides free tuition to the City Colleges — the local community college system — for public school students who graduate with a B average or better.

“This is someone with a vision,” said Juan Jose Gonzalez, the Chicago director of Stand for Children Illinois, an education group that has endorsed Mr. Emanuel.

Yet on the South and West Sides, people seem to remember Mr. Emanuel most for the decision his appointed school board made to close nearly 50 public schools from among the district’s more than 700.

Of the closings, Mr. Emanuel said the choice had been vexing but necessary.

“Could I have done things different?” Mr. Emanuel asked. “There’s no doubt you could, and your strengths are your weaknesses. But those were structural things. You needed leadership. You needed fortitude.”

He added later: “There were a lot of people that had a vested interest with what was going down, except it wasn’t working for the kids and the families of Chicago. Obviously the school consolidation is a piece of it. But if you’re going to close the education gap you can’t keep kids trapped in underperforming schools.”

A study by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research found that 93 percent of the nearly 11,000 displaced elementary students wound up in schools with better ratings. About one in five ended up in schools the district has deemed in its top tier. More than a third of the students, though, remained in schools in the lowest tier, leading the researchers to conclude that while most students had gone to better schools, in many cases the schools were only marginally better.

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Requia McKinnis, whose son was affected by a school closing, backed one of Mr. Emanuel’s rivals in the first round of voting this year.Credit...Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

“That’s because we have very few high-performing schools in these neighborhoods,” said Andrea Zopp, president of the Chicago Urban League and an Emanuel appointee to the Chicago Board of Education. “That’s the ultimate issue that we are trying to address.”

Running through the debate is tension over race and ethnicity. In a city where about one-third of the 2.7 million residents are white, fewer than 10 percent of Chicago public school students are white. More than 39 percent of Chicago’s nearly 400,000 public school students are black, and more than 45 percent are Hispanic. And many of the neighborhoods that faced schools closings were in predominantly black or Latino areas.

In these neighborhoods, parents speak of deep ties to their old schools and frustration at having to move their children, sometimes to schools farther away or across gang boundaries.

“I still don’t know why he did it,” said Percy Smith, who said he voted for Mr. Emanuel when he ran for mayor in 2011 but intends to cast a ballot for Mr. Garcia. “He closed so many schools, and he didn’t really give a good reason, you know?”

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Students from the Irvin C. Mollison Elementary School walk past the now-blank sign outside  Anthony Overton Elementary.Credit...Andrew Nelles for The New York Times

For parents like Requia McKinnis, 31, who supported Mr. Emanuel in 2011, the closing of Sexton Elementary in the Woodlawn neighborhood on the South Side, where her son went to school, was a final blow. It was supposed to mean a relatively simple change: He would now attend Fiske Elementary, a school that was to move into the closed Sexton building. But Ms. McKinnis said she found the new school chaotic.

Frustrated, she said, she moved her family to a different neighborhood and enrolled her son in a different school. She said she voted for another of Mr. Emanuel’s rivals, Willie Wilson, a black businessman, in the February election but had yet to decide whom to vote for in April.

Looming over all decisions about the schools is a dire financial picture. The system faces a $1.1 billion deficit. The pension fund for retired teachers is vastly underfinanced, part of a larger, deeply troubled pension system that Mr. Emanuel has made clear he intends to take on. Last year, Mr. Emanuel moved to require some city workers to pay more for their retirement benefits, and the threat of similar moves has added to strain with the teachers’ union. The runoff election is taking place even as negotiations for a new teachers’ contract — the first since the strike ended — have begun. The contract is to expire in June.

During the strike in 2012, Karen Lewis, the outspoken president of the Chicago Teachers Union, openly battled with Mr. Emanuel. For months she prepared to run against him — a race that would have been even more pointedly defined around education. Then in October, Ms. Lewis learned she had a brain tumor and stepped aside, urging Mr. Garcia to run instead.

Mr. Garcia, who received 34 percent of the vote last week to Mr. Emanuel’s 45 percent, has said he supports an elected school board and an end to “high-stakes standardized testing” and to “starving public schools to feed charters.” He has called for a halt to school closings. His campaign said he supported reopening some of the closed schools, though he said on public television: “I have not committed to reopening some of those schools. I wouldn’t close the door on them.”

Jesse Sharkey, the vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said, “As you have new Democrats running in a neoliberal vein in American cities, a space has opened up to the left, even here in the home of Barack Obama.”

Scores among the district’s more than 22,000 teachers, many of whom are required to live inside the city’s limits, worked at phone banks for months before the election last week, Mr. Sharkey said. He said more were expected to do the same in the weeks ahead, and noted that the runoff falls during the district’s spring break, when teachers will have extra time.

For its part, Mr. Emanuel’s campaign has started an ambitious citywide canvassing, and political experts said the mayor appeared likely to press hard for votes in wards where others in the larger field of candidates won significant numbers last week, including the South Side.

Michael Brown, an employee at Wentworth Elementary School in Englewood, said he hoped Mr. Garcia would unseat Mr. Emanuel. “Schools are closing; unemployment is still high,” he said. “What’s going on? You said you were going to make this city better.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: School Agenda Bedevils Chicago Mayor in Race. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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