Jan Resseger nails the central issue in the Chicago mayoral race: school reform. Pail Vallas tried to make the race about crime and his promise to control it. But the deciding issue was education, and their very different visions for improving it.

How do we know? Vallas has no record as a crime-fighter. He has a long resume as a school superintendent, starting in Chicago. He was the ultimate technocrat, who ruthlessly imposed his test-and-punish and school closing-choice ideology, regardless of how parents, students, and teachers felt about it.

Brandon Johnson was a social studies teacher and then a community organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. He was the antithesis of Vallas. He knew that the root of school problems was not in the schools but in the social and economic conditions in which children were growing up.

Brandon is the heir of the late, great Karen Lewis. She changed…