Just eight months after the Chicago Teachers Union helped to usher Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson into office, Johnson’s Board of Education is putting the brakes on school choice in the Windy City.

Board members on Thursday considered a five-year “transformational” strategic plan to shift back to a focus on neighborhood schools, after more than two decades building a system of school choice that allows students to compete for selective programs, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

The plan will “transition away from privatization and admissions/enrollment policies and approaches that further stratification and inequity in CPS and drive student enrollment away from neighborhood schools.”

While officials contend they do not plan to do away with magnet, charter and selective-enrollment schools, they will hold meetings over the next few months to allow the public to shape the transition.

“The plan needs to be guided and informed by the community,” Board President Jianan Shi said. “The goal is that we’re able to change (the) current competition model so that students are not pitted against one another, schools are not pitted against one another.”

The current competitive system has produced some Chicago schools that are consistently ranked among the best in the country, according to the Sun-Times.

In February, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates urged union members to cast their lot with “union brother” Johnson because “no other candidate in the race will bring the change our schools and city need.”

That change, from the CTU’s perspective, involves limiting competition with traditional public schools that employ the bulk of the union’s members, as well as significantly more tax dollars flowing to those schools.

Currently about 76% of the city’s high school students and about 45% of elementary school students do not attend their assigned neighborhood schools, while about 50,000 students attend charter schools.

Whether charter schools fit into the reimagined school system remains to be seen. School Board Vice President Elizabeth Todd-Breland has said CPS is questioning whether those schools are siphoning public funds from traditional schools while “not performing at a level that we find to be a high quality educational experience for young people.”

That aligns with the CTU’s position on charters, and school choice in general.

The board’s strategic plan also aligns with the union’s fixation on funding, with a call to move away from student-based budgeting tied to enrollment to a system “based on student need, prioritizing communities most impacted by racial and economic inequity, and structural disinvestment and abandonment.”

How the city plans to accomplish that with a $670 million deficit in 2025 is unclear, though Davis Gates has suggested to CTU members Johnson “has a plan to pay for desperately needed new investments by asking the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share.”

The new plan comes less than a year before Chicagoans will elect school board members for the first time. Getting the plan finalized before that happens will ensure new board members “understand this is the direction that the district is moving in,” Shi said, according to Chalkbeat Chicago.

Nearly half of charter schools authorized by the board are up for renewal this year, with dozens more next year, the news site reports.