(Continued on page 134)SEPTEMBER 2019 | CHICAGO 95
and “countless stakeholder meetings,”
the CEO “felt comfortable entrusting her
team of district leaders to participate in
the hearings on her behalf.”)
What Jackson found hardest to
deal with about the sex abuse scandal,
though, was not her public critics but
her private fears. The sheer scope of the
abuse made her more acutely aware of
potential harm in the world around her,
she says — and around her 10-year-old
daughter and 13-year-old stepson. “I was
out with my kids, and I said to my son,
‘Watch your sister.’ ”
LONGTIME FRIENDS DESCRIBE JACKSON
as honest and direct, sometimes disarm-
ingly so, and not inclined to shy away
from touchy subjects. In my encounters
with her, she demurs only once, and then
only momentarily: when I bring up the
subject of her brother Cordney. “Talking
about this can break me down,” she says,
her words catching in her throat. After
taking a breath and collecting herself, she
says, “My brother was an amazing, smart
person. I used to say he was like a black
Cliff Clavin from Cheers, because he knew
all the most obscure facts, random fac-
toids. He was generous. He loved sports.
He loved competition. He would watch
two rats race across the street just to see
which one won. He died protecting my
mom. That’s just who he was. But I wish
he had not intervened.”
Jackson is speaking of the evening,
in 2010, when two men, with ski masks
over their faces, broke into Jackson’s
parents’ house in West Pullman — a
home she had bought them a few years
earlier — and robbed her mother and a
group of her friends who’d come over
for a weekly card game. When Cordney
tried to defend the women, one of the
intruders fatally shot him. He was 31.
The crime remains unsolved, and the
family rarely discusses it. Jackson’s
mother is raising Cordney’s son, now 15.
Cordney’s death changed Jackson.
She stopped postponing things. She says
she felt freer and more determined to do
what she wanted, because time might be
limited. And the tragedy strengthened
her faith in education. “It gives people an
opportunity,” she says, “and lessens the
chance they will do violent things.”
At her home in Bronzeville, Jackson
and her husband, a construction worker
named Torrence Price, value family sta-
bility, keeping social engagements to a
minimum. Partly this is out of neces-
sity, given the demands of Jackson’s
job. “I can’t take my kids to school in
the morning anymore. That bothers
me.” Her heightened visibility has also
eroded her anonymity. Jackson was in a
restaurant recently with her family. “A
man at the next table was holding up his
phone for his wife to look at my picture,”“In her admissions
material, Janice wrote
that her goal was to be
the CEO of CPS,” says
a former mentor at UIC.
“No graduate student
has ever written that.”Public
Schools
2019