Former Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas joined Chicago’s Morning Answer with guest host Chris Krok for a blistering assessment of Chicago’s violence crisis, the state of public education, and the political class he says is failing the city’s most vulnerable residents. Vallas, a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and current CEO of the McKenzie Foundation, said both Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor JB Pritzker have “accepted chaos as a way of life” while children continue to be “shot, ignored, and abandoned.”
Vallas’s recent column in the Chicago Contrarian, titled Chicago’s Killing Fields, served as the backdrop for the conversation. He noted that 42 school-aged children have been murdered and 154 wounded by gunfire just this year, yet city leaders have held “no press conferences, no protests, no outrage.” Meanwhile, he said, elected officials staged multiple press events attacking federal immigration enforcement after ICE arrested a single school employee. “One ICE arrest gets days of headlines,” Vallas said. “But dozens of murdered children? Crickets.”
The former CPS chief accused both City Hall and Springfield of playing politics with children’s lives. He pointed to school shutdowns during the pandemic—driven, he said, by Pritzker’s executive orders and intense pressure from the Chicago Teachers Union—as a catastrophic decision that left students isolated and vulnerable. “During the shutdown, 900 children were shot. Thirty-eight thousand students left CPS and never returned,” Vallas said. “The system collapsed while officials and union leaders fought to keep classrooms closed.”
Vallas also highlighted a new inspector general report detailing lavish CPS spending on travel, conferences, hotels, and perks—even as the district now faces a $700 million deficit and continues to raise property taxes. “Two-point-eight billion in COVID money—gone,” Vallas said. “Trips to Vegas, safaris, retreats at spas, Disney conferences… while kids were stuck at home and falling behind. It is highway robbery.”
The discussion turned to school choice, where Vallas sharply criticized Gov. Pritzker’s recent vulgar remarks directed at supporters of private school scholarship programs. “The hypocrisy is stunning,” Vallas said, noting that many political and union leaders who oppose choice send their own children to private or selective schools. “Working-class black and Latino families are trapped in failing schools, while those in power lecture them about equity.”
Vallas warned that Chicago’s black population decline—down 47% among children over the past two decades—is accelerating as families flee violence, failing schools, high taxes, and declining opportunity. He argued that the city has replaced departing residents with newly arrived migrants as a political strategy, not a humanitarian one. “This is about preserving congressional seats and political power,” he said. “Black families are leaving, and leadership won’t talk about why.”
The interview closed with Vallas criticizing Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García over allegations he orchestrated a last-minute maneuver to hand his congressional seat to his chief of staff. Vallas said the episode reflects a broader trend: “There is no democracy in the Democratic Party in Illinois. It is a one-party state run by insiders, unions, and machine politicians.”
Throughout the conversation, Vallas painted a stark portrait of a city in decline—not because of lack of resources, but because of failed governance. “The greatest threat to Chicago’s future,” he said, “is the absolute stranglehold of the Chicago Teachers Union and the politicians who do their bidding. Nothing will change until that grip is broken.”