Macquline King was a young principal working hard at a small South Side elementary when she got word that her school was slated to close.
Teacher Claire Brandon remembers watching King fight to keep Dumas Technology Academy open “to the bitter end” alongside parents and staff.
“It was a hurtful time,” she says, remembering the many protests and hearings where King and parents begged school district officials for a reprieve, to no avail.
Not long after she hugged the students at Dumas goodbye, King was thrust into another tense situation. She became principal of Courtenay Language Arts Center on the North Side, which was designated to take in children grieving their own closed school.
King says it was “horrible” watching one community lose its school and then difficult to bring together two schools that had different needs and demographics. At Courtenay, she says, she “began to really understand how policy played a large role in what happened in the day-to-day activities at a school.”
Those experiences propelled her to seek out a broader leadership position. It’s also why some see her as uniquely qualified to lead the district as it grapples with a big drop in enrollment and current and future budget deficits.
She says the experiences taught her the importance of listening and not trying to tackle problems alone.
“I really believe in shared leadership,” she says. “Chicago is so big and it’s so diverse, and so going around having round tables, having learning sessions, that’s really important to me. Because I can’t bring all of the families and the students into the building, but I can go out into the community to elevate their voices.”
The Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jackson Potter says students need King to “meet the moment.” And he agrees she can’t do that solo.
“It will require her to lead a team in partnership with the mayor, board members, and educators who have been pushing to reconstruct and transform the district,” Potter said in a statement.
King built leadership skills as Chicago principal
After a nationwide search, it’s surprising in some ways that the school board chose King.
She originally wasn’t named a finalist for the permanent job. Now the board is scheduled to vote to approve King as CEO on Monday, and will offer her a three-year contract.
Before becoming interim CEO 10 months ago, she’d never run a school district. She has not even run a Chicago Public Schools department or headed a network, which would have put her in charge of around 20 schools.
After spending 15 years as a principal of the two small elementary schools, she went to work on policy in former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office and was kept on by Mayor Brandon Johnson.
King also doesn’t have a lot of experience lobbying for state policy or working with lawmakers at a time when CPS is about to have a fully elected board and is in desperate need of more state funding.
And she hasn’t created a budget for a big complex system like CPS. She and her staff are in the process of developing the spending plan for next school year.
However, the school board made having a superintendent’s license a new requirement for the CEO position, signaling that they wanted someone more steeped in teaching and learning than finance or bureaucracy.
In other ways, her background makes her ideal for the job. Teachers, parents and a former top Johnson aide all lauded King.
Tonda Lee, whose son transferred into Courtenay elementary from a school that closed, says she remembers King as a “lovely lady.” King won over several parents who carried their anger about their school closing into Courtenay.
“She’s one that actually thinks about the parents and families. She has a way of bringing people together,” she says.
Brad Worrell, who taught under King for eight years, said he often left meetings held by King feeling “motivated and empowered” and that she had “tremendous” leadership skills.
“She is not afraid to roll up her sleeves and get into the dirty work,” said Worrell, who now teaches in Indiana. “She pushed us.”
Worrell says King also has a playful side. He still has a video of King competing against Courtenay students in a sack race, noting how she put her all into trying to get in front of the kids.
“She was in it to win it,” Worrell said.
Brandon, the Dumas elementary teacher, followed King to Courtenay. She says King sees “treasures” in people that they might not see in themselves. And, King knows how to provide criticism to her staff and then support them to improve, Brandon says.
Brandon says it is rare as a Black woman to find a boss that looks like her and is “caring, loving, supportive, and knows her stuff.”
King’s time as CPS student and parent give her unique lens
Like her two most recent predecessors, King is a homegrown talent.
She grew up on the South Side and in a twist that’s emblematic of CPS’ history, the schools she attended as a child and teen — Oakenwald North Elementary and a high school called Metropolitan School of Studies — are now closed.
She earned a scholarship to attend Olive Harvey College, a City College of Chicago, and then went to the University of Illinois Chicago where she intended to become a pharmacist. But she says she fell in love with teaching while volunteering and changed course. She got her teaching and graduate degrees from National Louis University.
King is the mother of two grown sons who also attended and graduated from CPS. She says raising children in the city gave her another lens for seeing the system. She remembers how difficult it was to navigate the high school application process, and then her boys ended up on opposite ends of the city — one at Von Steuben in North Park on the North Side and the other at Kenwood on the South Side.
Getting to report card pickup at both schools from her teaching job was a struggle. “I had that battle,” she says.
Lessons learned during time as interim CEO
As interim CEO, King took some bold stances. But in other situations her response was tentative. Some criticize that hesitancy, while others say she was up against some unprecedented situations at a time when she didn’t have a secure leadership position.
Last June, she inherited a budget deficit originally pegged at $734 million, got into a public disagreement with the mayor’s office and school board allies over borrowing and then spent the fall trying to protect students and families from President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement operation.
More recently, she and her staff have had to figure out how to address a charter school network that ran out of money, forcing the unheard-of midyear displacement of nearly 600 high schoolers.
Depending on where people sit, King gets different reviews.
She surprised many when she stood up to the mayor and his allies on the school board by refusing to draft a budget that could have put the district further into debt. The mayor’s people not only took issue with her decision, but they also said she didn’t communicate well with them. Initially, they did not see her as a contender for the permanent post.
Yet others applauded the stance, noting that CPS is already deep in debt and doesn’t need to take on more.
“Her ability to stand up to that kind of pressure and really decide what was in the best interest, I believe, for CPS speaks volumes about her integrity, and so in that regard, I appreciate her leadership,” said 40th Ward Ald. Andre Vasquez, who represents parts of Edgewater and Lincoln Square on the North Side and is the chair of the Latino caucus.
That independence impresses Vasquez so much that he supports her, but he still wants to see Latinos in positions of power in CPS, where 46% of students are Latino. Some Latino leaders criticized the school board for not having any Latinos in the most recent finalist pool.
Vasquez points to the school district’s fragmented response to the aggressive immigration enforcement this fall as evidence that CPS needs leadership who “understands the particular challenges faced by the Latino community and the undocumented Latino community.”
It took King and her team a month and a half to adjust protocols around when to lock down schools if federal agents were nearby and to create a 24-hour command center that schools could go to for help.
King also insisted that the state needed to give CPS permission to put a remote learning option in place and, at least publicly, did not push Gov. JB Pritzker to allow it.
Vasquez says that a Latino leader might have pushed harder for virtual learning for families that were afraid to bring their children to school.
“I think those are pressures that if perhaps you’ve not experienced it or come from a community that’s experienced it, you wouldn’t have the appreciation for the dire need,” Vasquez said.
The Chicago Teachers Union has asked King to bargain over issues related to protecting students and families should there be another surge of federal immigration agents coming into Chicago. So far, she has refused.
Still, Potter says he’s impressed with how King has kept her cool under pressure. CPS needs that as Trump continues to attack public education, immigrants, LGBTQ people and programs that support poor families, he says.
“We need someone who’s going to go to bat for kids, and for school funding and take on the racist administration that is constantly attacking our city and our schools,” he said.
Issues ahead: declining enrollment and troubled charter schools
King typically reads prepared statements at board meetings, but at the October meeting her voice shook as she tried to address members’ concerns about the district’s response to immigration enforcement.
She said she and her team were fielding calls at all hours about “every single detainee,” as well as other serious issues like gun violence.
“We have to carry that every day,” she said, pleading with board members to tap into their networks to help the school district.
As she gets ready to take the permanent position, King says one of the biggest challenges is trying to keep students safe. In order to do that, she says the district has to work collaboratively with the city and other agencies.
“It was humbling to understand just the power that a safe and trusted environment can have in the face of something so catastrophic as the federal activity,” she says. It reinforced “that this leadership role is not one that you can do on your own.”
Andrew Broy, president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, said King also has been in a tough position as she’s had to deal with privately run public schools that are in trouble financially. That includes the Aspira charter school network, which ran out of money and will officially close next week.
Some board members are diametrically opposed to both charters and the idea of shutting down schools. That has resulted in “haphazard” decisions, he says.
When asked about charter schools, King doesn’t say whether or not she generally supports them. She says they are part of the CPS system and that she sees this moment as one where their role within the district “can be clarified.”
King also doesn’t rule out closing district-run schools.
There’s a growing buzz among fiscal conservatives and even some school board members and candidates that this needs to happen. Since CPS closed 50 schools in 2013, only a few additional district-run campuses have been shuttered. But CPS has about 85,000 fewer students than it did in 2014 and 44 district-run schools have dwindled to fewer than 200 students.
King, however, bristled at the idea that schools should be closed to save money.
“I do not want to reduce our students to dollars and numbers,” she said.
She says her time at Dumas and Courtenay taught her how much students and communities are impacted when their schools close.
The focus, King says, must be on student experiences at really small schools that don’t have the budgets or students to host a variety of classes and clubs.
“Does the building itself or the programming or the funds set the conditions for us to fulfill our mission?” she says. “Are those students receiving the same experience as a student that’s in a school with a larger enrollment?”
While King acknowledges CPS is facing many complex issues, she says she’s looking forward to trying to set up the school system for the future. Artificial intelligence and other new technologies are reshaping the job market and she’s worried that if leaders don’t prepare students, they could be left behind.
“The landscape of education, the way we teach, hasn’t really changed that much,” she says. “But society and the jobs that we’re preparing students for are changing quite a bit.”
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