The issue of mayoral control of the schools in New York City is now before the State Legislature, as its authorization expires in 2016. The current form of mayoral control was established in 2002, when the Legislature responded to newly elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s request for complete control of the sprawling school system. Mayoral control was renewed by the Legislature in 2009. Bloomberg promised to bring efficiency to the system and managerial expertise. Now the Legislature must decide whether to renew mayoral control or to tweak it or to substitute some other form of management.
I have written about mayoral control on many occasions over the years. My first book, published in 1974, was a history of the New York City public schools, and a large part of the story consists of the search for a competent way to govern the schools of a huge city. The city as we now know it was created by popular vote in 1898 (many people in Brooklyn, who opposed consolidation, thought the vote was rigged). In the nineteenth century, New York City consisted only of what is now Manhattan. Brooklyn was a separate city, and the other regions were towns and villages in what are now the boroughs of Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.
I won’t recapitulate the history of governance here; I wrote a paper on the subject a few years ago. It is not necessary to go into the twists and turns of the nineteenth century other than to point out that there was only one time in the past when the Mayor took total control of the previously independent New York City Board of Education and turned it into a department of the city government. That was during the heyday of the Tweed Ring. William Marcy Tweed (Boss Tweed), then in the legislature, steered through “reform” legislation in 1869 that gave over the entire school system of New York to his crony, who packed the board with allies and steered contracts to favorites of the Tweed Ring. The Tweed board canceled all book contracts with Harper Brothers as punishment for its publication of Thomas Nast cartoons ridiculing Boss Tweed. In 1871, the Tweed Ring was exposed, and its members eventually prosecuted. In 1873. the legislature restored the independent Board of Education.
For most of the history of New York City’s public schools, the members of the central board were appointed by the mayor. Mayoral control was typical, not atypical. In addition, there were local boards where citizens could participate in the governance of their community public schools and make their views known. For a time in the nineteenth century, the central board and the local boards were elected. After the debacle of the Tweed takeover, both boards were appointed, not elected, in an attempt to insulate them from politics. It is clear, however, that politics can intrude on any arrangement, whether appointed or elected.
When the city was consolidated as the Greater Metropolitan New York City in 1898, each borough had its own school board. However, there were frequent conflicts over money, curriculum, hiring policy, and other issues. The city leaders agreed that uniformity was needed, so in 1902, the legislature established the New York City Board of Education as a single governing body for the large school system. The new board consisted of 46 members, all appointed by the Mayor, representing all the boroughs. The city was divided into 46 local school districts, each of which had its own appointed local school board.
True power in the new, consolidated system rested in the hands of the professional Superintendent of Schools and his Board of Deputy Superintendents. As it happened, New York City had an outstanding educator as its first Superintendent, William Henry Maxwell. He was a superb administrator and a visionary, who saw the responsibilities of the schools as extending beyond academics to the health and well-being of children. He served for 20 years in that post, setting academic standards, opening schools for children with disabilities, creating adult education centers, and producing a host of innovative reforms that benefited the city. The city also had a Board of Examiners, which tested those who wanted to teach in the system.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the size of the school board was reduced from 46 to 7 and then expanded to 9, but it continued to be appointed by the mayor. The system was highly centralized until 1969.
From the mid-60s until 1969, black and Hispanic activists engaged in demonstrations and protests to demand desegregation. When their demands were ignored, they sought community control of the schools. The Ford Foundation subsidized an experiment in community control in three districts. In 1968, the city’s teachers went on strike for two months to protest the firing of union teachers without due process in one of those districts, Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn. Mayor John Lindsay sided with the black community leaders. In 1969, the Legislature passed a new decentralization law, establishing a seven-member central board and local community boards (which for a time were elected). The seven-member board consisted of five members appointed by the five borough presidents and only two members appointed by the mayor. This was most certainly a rebuke to Mayor Lindsay. Even under this new form of decentralization, the mayor still exerted considerable control, both through his control over the budget and his alliances with at least two of the borough presidents.
Almost every mayor subsequently asked for a larger role in the running of the schools but was ignored by the Legislature. When Michael Bloomberg was elected in 2001, one of his major campaign promises was to gain control of the schools and reform them. The Legislature complied and granted him full control in mid-2002. What was once the New York City Board of Education is now the New York City Department of Education, just another city agency, akin to the Police Department, the Fire Department, the Sanitation Department. The legislation kept a central board of 13, but the majority (8) was appointed by the mayor and serve at his pleasure (Mayor Bloomberg called it the Panel on Educational Policy, to signify its powerlessness). Local school boards were replaced by powerless community education councils. Mayor Bloomberg appointed attorney Joel Klein as his first chancellor (and subsequently replaced him with publisher Cathie Black, who had a brief and stormy three-month tenure, then replaced her with Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott). The system went through several reorganizations. The Bloomberg administration relied on test scores to close low-performing schools and to open many new small schools and more than 100 charter schools.
What should be done now? Mayor Bill de Blasio and former Mayor Rudy Guiliani have appealed to the state legislature to retain mayoral control and to make it permanent.
Here is what I think, based on what I know: I agree that there should be mayoral control. But it should be modified to add checks and balances. No one chief executive should have total control of the public’s schools. No one chief executive should have the unlimited power to change the schools without referring to anyone else. No one mayor should be able to ignore the views of public school parents.
The mayor should continue to appoint the members of the New York City Board of Education. Those who wish to serve should be vetted by a review panel composed of representatives of civic and educational organizations (this was the practice in the early 1960s). This prevents the mayor from stacking the board with campaign donors and friends.
Members of the Board of Education should serve for a set term of three or four or five years, to ensure their independence. At present, they serve at the pleasure of the mayor, making the Board a rubber-stamp.
The Board of Education, not the mayor, should select the Chancellor. The Chancellor should report to the Board of Education and seek their approval for his/her proposals and budget.
Local school boards should be elected by parent associations, with the approval of the borough presidents.
Mayor Bloomberg was right to restore mayoral control, but it should now be improved upon by inserting checks and balances. The mayor should appoint the Board of Education, and this board should serve set terms and be responsible for the appointment and replacement of the chancellor.
No one should imagine that mayoral control is a panacea. It is not. Cleveland has had mayoral control for many years, and it continues to be one of the nation’s lowest-performing cities (and also a city with extreme poverty). Detroit had mayoral control for a few years, until voters eliminated it (one of the city’s mayors went to jail a few years ago). Chicago has mayoral control, and this enabled the mayor to close 50 public schools and to ignore the outcry from the affected communities; no one (except perhaps Arne Duncan) would consider Chicago to be a national model. Boston has mayoral control, and performance varies with economics, as it does everywhere. The District of Columbia has mayoral control, and it also has the largest black-white, Hispanic-white achievement gaps of any urban district tested by NAEP. The highest performing districts on NAEP (Charlotte and Austin) do not have mayoral control.
Mayoral control, with the checks and balances I described, makes sense organizationally. By itself, it solves no problems. It still requires the hard work of school improvement, the hard work of creating good schools and a good working environment for students, teachers, and principals. And schools in urban districts still require the resources to meet the needs of the children they enroll, regardless of who appoints the central board.
Saw this study in the Huffington Post, pretty nice analysis of efficacy of mayoral-appointed vs. elected school boards http://ceje.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/CEJE-ERSB-Report-2-16-15.pdf
Thanks so much for sharing the link to current research in Chicago! They said it so much better than I ever could (Lipman, Gutstein, Gutierrez & Blanche, 2015):
“After 20 years of mayoral control, the research paints an alarming picture of inequity in Chicago Public Schools. The policies, actions, and budget decisions of Chicago’s mayor-appointed Board have consolidated a two-tier school district that is more unequal on nearly every measure we examined and less accountable to the public” (p. 28).
(Thank God for Pauline Lipman!)
References
Lipman, P., Gutstein, E., Gutierrez, R, R,, & Blanche, T. (2015). Should Chicago have an elected representative school board: A new review of the evidence. Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education. Retrieved from http://ceje.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/CEJE-ERSB-Report-2-16-15.pdf
Diane, this is a terrific and informative historical summary. What form of governance is optimal isn’t clear. However, I think few things are.
First, democracy matters. Authoritarianism, whether benevolent and informed or malevolent and uninformed always turns out badly. Whenever, the public is excluded from decision-making, policies and implementation plans become subject to the changing whims and self-interest of the empowered. So, whatever governance system is devised it must include a real mechanism for public input and means to reject decisions and decision-makers.
Second, values matter. Unless policies are guided by the principals of equity and community responsibility, it doesn’t matter who is charge.
http://www.arthurcamins.com
Democracy matters, authoritarianism is bad, and values matter — I don’t know, these are some pretty extreme positions, you may catch a lot of flack about this.
FLERP, I don’t think anything I propose here is extreme. What I describe has historical continuity and responds to the times.
I wasn’t referring to your post. I was writing to Mr. Camins.
FLERP, thank you for clarifying.
“Democracy matters, authoritarianism is bad, and values matter — I don’t know, these are some pretty extreme positions, you may catch a lot of flack about this.”
Arthur Camins will get absolutely no flack from me. Democracy and values DO matter, authoritarianism IS bad, and there is nothing extreme about acknowledging any of that.
Arthur Camins, thank you for your comments. I agree. Democracy matters. During the 12 years of Mayor Bloomberg’s control of the system, it became customary to see school board meetings where members sat at the podium, looking at their emails and ignoring what people said in testimony. Sometimes a thousand or more parents and students would turn out, and they got to be rowdy because they knew no one was listening to them. The public should not be treated as irrelevant nuisances when it is their children whose lives are affected.
Diane, I appreciate that you took the time to write this, and I’m especially grateful to learn more about the history behind how we got to the present moment, but I think this is a pretty flimsy defense of mayoral control. If another large city district were contemplating a change to mayoral control, I have no doubt that you would strongly oppose it. I apologize if you find this suggestion offensive, but it almost seems to me that the mayor or a staffer may have asked you to write this (the part where you recommend that only parent associations elect board members is a tip-off.)
Mayoral control was a positive in that it eliminated 30+ separate boards of education in one city. But parent and citizen voices will never truly be heard until there is a single board whose members are chosen by open public elections. This is the system in 99%+ of American school districts. It should be the goal in New York, in Newark, in Detroit, in Chicago, and in any other city where it has been taken away.
I tend to agree with Diane on the organizational point, but I may just be terrified by all the horror stories I used to read in the 90s.
Weren’t the 90s horror stories primarily a function of still having separate boards in each district?
I would like one elected board for the whole city. Like Scarsdale.
Tim, the “horror stories” were overblown. Only a few boards had problems, and the Chancellor took control of one. Most community boards were responsible and hard-working. Having an elected central board would allow the richest people in the city to control the schools, unless candidates were required to be parents of children in the public schools. None of the hedge fund managers would qualify.
I think that was part of it. That may have been part of why the elections were so game-able — extremely low interest among the public, very low voter turnout, very little sunlight on the process.
Maybe it could work, what do I know. I think I’m at the point where I don’t believe it’s possible to run a school system this huge without screwing it up almost constantly for one reason or another.
FLERP, remind me of the horror stories. I bet they all appeared in the NY Post. You can still read horror stories about the principal called “Ms. No,” whose school had no textbooks, no lessons, no anything, or the teacher found smooching with a student, or the worst financial scandal in the city’s history when an IT company fraudulently collected $600 million for a contract that was originally for less than $100 million, and some of the principals went to jail. Men are not angels and no system of government will ever prevent people from doing bad things. So we look for the least worst system, and the least worst will always have checks and balances.
I don’t remember the specific horror stories — I’d have to check. I could have sworn that you wrote some of them!
FLERP, I supported mayoral control then, and I support it now—but only if checks and balances are added. If we don’t learn from experience, how do we learn at all?
Here’s one one of the horror stories:
https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/ravitch-century.html
The Decentralization Law enacted by the state legislature in 1969 was actually a political compromise that perpetuated the centralized bureaucratic system and parceled out control of the elementary and middle schools to elected local boards in thirty-two school districts. An outgrowth of the community power movement of the 1960s, the law was explicitly designed to create an institutional mechanism for giving parents access to and participation in educational decision making. By the middle of the decade, black and Hispanic children were a majority of the enrollment in the school system. Many parents within minority communities believed that the centralized bureaucracy was indifferent to the needs of their children. Political activists, especially antipoverty workers in minority communities, wanted to create power centers with control over budgets and hiring rather than continue to trust the closed system that had prevailed for more than a half century.
As the ancient Chinese curse augurs, the reformers of the day had their wish granted. Politics they wanted, and it was politics they got. The transfer of power was grudging and only partial. Demands for community control set the stage for one of the most divisive political struggles in the history of the city, with a variety of community activists on one side, bolstered by Mayor John Lindsay and the Ford Foundation, arrayed against the teachers union on the other. Because most of the community activists were black and the educators were predominantly white and Jewish, the contest had an ugly racial and religious undertone that tainted local politics for years.
The decentralization law requires that school board elections be held every three years to elect nine-member boards in each of the thirty-two districts. School board elections have seldom drawn a turnout of more than 10 percent of eligible voters. The 5.2 percent turnout in 1996 was the lowest yet. Some would argue that the low turnout is a function of the electoral system itself–a confusing proportional voting scheme, using paper ballots that are cast in early May rather than on election day in November. It is also true that the communities are artificially drawn and that few eligible voters know or care who is running for the local school board. Or the participation rate may be a true barometer of the confidence that people have in the voting process and the boards that are elected. Whatever the reason, school board elections can hardly be viewed as models of democratic politics. The low turnout makes the elections fair game for organized interest groups, such as unions, political parties, and small bands of opportunists who see school politics as a well of patronage.
In 1993, the Special Commissioner of Investigation completed an inquiry into the school board election process that revealed “widespread fraud and corruption as well as administrative mismanagement.” In one Manhattan district an undercover investigator was allowed to vote fifteen times under fifteen fictitious names; another did the same ten times in a neighboring district. This corruption spills over to the actual governance of the districts, where school boards control more than $100 million in funds, as well as the power to appoint district superintendents, administrators, principals, and thousands of paraprofessionals. It is not uncommon for teachers and paraprofessionals to be forced into political servitude by local board members–collecting petitions, fund raising, electioneering–as a price for professional advancement.
The story of wrongdoing within the districts has been told many times. One can pick up a New York newspaper almost weekly and read about jobs that were sold, nepotism in the hiring of principals, teachers who were pressured to attend political events for board members, money that was misappropriated for private use, or sex scandals or drug abuse involving school board members. Every year the chancellor goes through the almost ritualistic practice of suspending school boards for some kind of misconduct or just plain incompetence. The event usually attracts a great deal of media attention and head shaking by local politicians. But more often than not the same board members who were removed by the chancellor for malfeasance subsequently manage to get reelected in a political process that defies any form of accountability. The persistence of scandals involving local school boards finally prompted the state legislature to pass legislation in December 1996 that removed from the local boards the power to hire their district superintendent and shifted that decision to the chancellor. Decentralization has now been transformed to recentralization; the local elected school boards have been allowed to continue existing, albeit with greatly curtailed authority.
School decentralization in New York City is a conspicuous example of distorted public priorities. It allowed the elementary and middle schools of the city to develop into arenas for adult ambition and greed rather than as institutions dedicated to the well-being of children. A survey conducted by the Daily News in 1995, to which 236 out of 288 school board members responded, indicated that only 38 percent had children in the school system. Nearly 80 percent of the respondents did not know the size of their district budget or such basic information as enrollment data or test scores. Nearly half could not identify the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. New York may be unique in the way it permitted local politics to take the place of meaningful parent participation.
Those “horror stories” served the purpose of discrediting the public schools and democratic oversight, paving the way for Bloomberg’s “reforms.” The horror stories resulting from that somehow don’t get the same media attention.
Funny, that .
Diane, In Chicago, I think the main reason why the mayor hates elected Local School Councils is because they specify who is eligible to sit on them, such as specific numbers of parents, teachers, community members and student reps, so that outsiders and shills can’t be elected and dominate the board. I’d like to see something like that for elected school boards in cities as well.
Tim,
I can assure you that no one asked me to write the piece on mayoral control. When I read that de Blasio and Guiliani were making a joint appeal to the Legislature to renew it, it occurred to me that it would be a huge mistake to renew it “as is,” with no checks and balances. I wrote what I believe, uninfluenced by political considerations. I don’t think the legislature should write a law that suits the present mayor but a law that suits this mayor and future mayors. I believe it would be a huge mistake to have no local boards. In a city of 8 million people, there must be ways for parents to become involved in their children’s schools and in the decision making structure that imposes rules on their children’s school. As I said in an earlier reply to you, a citywide election for the central board would hand it over to the city’s wealthiest people. If there were a stipulation that they had to be current public school parents, that might be an interesting idea and it would screen out people who want to use the school board as a political stepping stone or as a chance to gain control of a multibillion dollar budget and 1.1 million children. Any system that excludes the voices of the parents of those children would not be legitimate.
Fair enough. I just can’t imagine why the local boards shouldn’t be elected by all parents or even by all residents, period.
If we can’t see eye-to-eye on this, at the very least I hope that you are using your influence with the mayor and other politicians to get additional checks and balances installed post-haste. Both for the short-term–fundamentally, not all that much has changed in the de Blasio DOE in terms of parent voice–and for the long. I don’t think you’d be as sanguine about mayoral control if Eva Moskowitz were about to be sworn in, e.g.
Boss Tweed did favor teacher salary increases …
From 1970 until 2002 NYC had elected school boards, and, in the poorest districts corruption and self-aggranidizement the norm. In the handful of white, middle class districts school boards were high functioning, in the poorest, neediest districts voter turnout was in the low single digits and local political machines dominated the elections. Los Angeles has an elected central board and a highly dysfuntional school system.
Mayoral control does put the mayor in the limelight, school success or failures fall to the mayor. other systems allow mayors to walk away from schools.
I agree the central board should have fixed terms.
The Community Education Council, the former local school boards, should be granted additional responsibilities. School and district leadership teams should be resusitated, the current model is far too top-down. Participation reduces resistence, the current leadership is still a paramilitary structure. For school reform to become sustainable capacity must be built into schools from the bottom up. The current Tweed led “reforms” are not “Sticky,” they will fade away.
Neighborhoods should be the basis of any school system – integrating all social services, including health and policing, should be integrated with schools. Rebuilding schools must be part of rebuilding neighborhoods.
And. of course, the key to rebuilding neighborhoods is jobs.
The current Washington policies which ignore the socio-economic impact of poverty makes these initiatives futile.
I don’t recall whether the Tweed Ring increased teachers’ salaries; they were too busy stuffing their own pockets to think much about teachers.
NYC did not have elected boards from 1970 until 2002. Turnout was so low that the elected boards were abandoned early on, I think it was after eight years. For most of the decentralization era, the local boards were appointed. It is hard to have local elections in NYC because the people running don’t have money to campaign and seldom have name recognition beyond their own immediate neighborhood. In the end, schools will be improved by educators, parents, and communities working together. The biggest school improvement would come from a reduction in poverty. But at the moment we are discussing structure. I agree with Michael Fiorillo that many of the scandal stories were magnified to pave the way for mayoral control. I supported mayoral control, then and now, but now understand better than in 2001 that mayoral control without checks and balances is authoritarian and undemocratic. Even the best of mayors needs to be questioned, needs to defend his decisions, needs to be accountable. At election time, the issues are seldom about schools but about the economy, the crime rate, and the quality of life. In reality, the mayor has no accountability. Making him or her the sole arbiter of what happens in the schools creates an incentive for the mayor to claim major successes before the results are in and to turn the operation over to the press department.
Sorry, Diane, I am confused by your statement here that:
NYC did not have elected boards from 1970 until 2002. Turnout was so low that the elected boards were abandoned early on, I think it was after eight years. For most of the decentralization era, the local boards were appointed. It is hard to have local elections in NYC because the people running don’t have money to campaign and seldom have name recognition beyond their own immediate neighborhood.
I recall robust election campaigns throughout the 90s in D1, along with low voter turnout as documented here.
What am I not getting?
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/06/nyregion/low-voter-turnout-found-in-school-board-election.html
Thanks,
Lisa
BRAVO!! I hope your clarity and accuracy will be heard by the legislature.Thank you,Eva Peterson
From: Diane Ravitch’s blog To: evapet2@yahoo.com Sent: Friday, March 27, 2015 10:03 AM Subject: [New post] New York City: Should Mayoral Control Continue? #yiv4093271448 a:hover {color:red;}#yiv4093271448 a {text-decoration:none;color:#0088cc;}#yiv4093271448 a.yiv4093271448primaryactionlink:link, #yiv4093271448 a.yiv4093271448primaryactionlink:visited {background-color:#2585B2;color:#fff;}#yiv4093271448 a.yiv4093271448primaryactionlink:hover, #yiv4093271448 a.yiv4093271448primaryactionlink:active {background-color:#11729E;color:#fff;}#yiv4093271448 WordPress.com | dianeravitch posted: “The issue of mayoral control of the schools in New York City is now before the State Legislature, as its authorization expires in 2016. The current form of mayoral control was established in 2002, when the Legislature responded to newly elected Mayor Mich” | |
I was there before an dafter Mayoral control. Within a year after mayoral control began the public schools were targeted and the charters moved in, as teachers were fired and schools made to fail.
Diane you are wrong; the New York City Department of Education is NOT “just another city agency, akin to the Police Department, the Fire Department, the Sanitation Department.” The City Council has NO power to make law in relation to the DOE as opposed to any of the other city agencies, they only have power to require better reporting. Thus there are NO effective checks and balances to the unilateral power of the Mayor, and none of the tweaks you have put forward would provide any real improvements.
Exactly !
Speaking as a Chicagoan, where we’ve never had an elected school board and have been under mayoral control for the past 20 years, with 100% of our school board members appointed by the mayor, I beg to differ, Diane.
Mayoral control and an appointed school board gave to my city the business model in education, which typifies authoritarian leadership, and this formed the basis for the national education policies that Duncan and Obama gave to the nation, which includes disproportionate corporate influence, top-down control, the micromanagement of professional educators, federal over-reach, etc. There are no checks and balances of any significance in that model. Prior to mayoral control, education was decentralized here and we had elected Local School Councils (LSCs) at every school. Not only has mayoral control resulted in more centralization and stripped LSCs of most of their autonomy and power, it has also managed to secure loopholes so that new public schools can now be established that are exempt from having elected LSCs.
In recent elections, people here voted overwhelmingly for an elected school board on referendums, but due to a City Council that rubber stamps most of the mayor’s wishes, the referendums were more like surveys, not binding, because not all communities were permitted to vote on them. (My own community has been excluded every time.)
I abhor mayoral control and appointed school boards and I strongly support elected and empowered LSCs in all schools that claim to be public and receive public funds –including charters.
If we want democracy to continue in a country that is now dominated by 1% of the population by virtue of their wealth, which on the whole detests democratic governance and regulations that protect the masses, I think people must demand representation at all levels of government, including those ruling over public education. People need to insist they be given the right to vote on important matters which impact them, their children, their community and society, such as mayoral control, school boards and Local School Councils.
The problem with too many boards is the same as the problem as authoritarianism.
With an authoritarian, you might get someone who knows what they’re doing and handles schools well, but you might also get someone elected for their stance and competencies in other areas that don’t extend to education. Someone “good” can get a lot more done fast, but someone “bad” can screw it up just as fast and possibly more irrevocably (building is always far more expensive than destruction).
With boards, you might end up with deadlock, gridlock, and little change because people can’t agree on what the problem is, and/or, what should be done about it, and how to appropriate the resources to implement the inevitably disputed solution.
I think mayoral control with a check and balance is a pretty good extension of our democratic process which we haven’t abolished in favor of a King. Our Congress is almost inarguably a “do-nothing” congress because of the partisan gridlock between both houses and the president, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing because the first rule of any profession is “do no harm” – and it’s better to do nothing than to make situations worse – and even if you assume the best of intentions (absence of greed, nepotism, lust for power), those intentions can still go wrong (remember what the path to hell is paved with?).
Let’s say we “win” today and start building community schools with wraparound services for poor students. How long do we “do that” for until we declare the results are unsatisfactory if the uptick is delayed even a few years but the cost is high?
Education needs a long view and the year to year evaluation and micromanagement with major course corrections needs to stop. If we look at other social services, and how they are measured, we usually don’t adopt “dramatic” changes based on one year outcomes – especially when the damn measuring stick changes every year making results difficult to compare and the measurements are less than objective (medicine with cancer – you can very concretely track adverse events, disease free survival, overall survival, and even then they can have trouble controlling for the populations they’re measuring).
We need periods where the checks and balances align and agree on changes. We need periods where they trip each other up. That’s the whole idea. What we have now is subject to dramatic swings in politics and local opinion based on data controlled by people who have a vested interest in the outcome (so it is far from objective) as we disagree what is the expectation that should be met year over year and the teacher’s ability and role in meeting it. We need teachers, but we need a functioning society that makes them able to do their job too and making teachers the whipping boy for everything wrong in society is just fundamentally logically ethically and morally flawed.
But politicians control teachers. They need parents to vote for them so there is far more temptation to focus on what’s within their sphere of control without pissing off the people who put them in power (and even then, many times it is not the parents’ faults that they need to work so hard to the point of neglect of their children – this is what society demands of them to put food on the table and stay healthy – survival first).
We don’t need a socialist state that guarantees the comfort of every member of society, but we also need one that isn’t so laissez faire that those with money can chew on the powerless members of society. We’re going in the direction of shredding safety nets and making survival the primary incentive to do “stuff” and to make it the individual’s responsibility to find a way to get the education and means to do that “stuff”.
Sensible regulation has a place but those with money have gotten so out of control with their “rights to free speech” (Citizens United) that the regulators promise some things to get elected then renege on them when they have power – and there is little to stop this cycle.
The more concentrated the power is, the more easily that person or even persons can be controlled. Power needs to be diffuse in ways that make those with the power act in the best interests of the body they are regulating, not those who stand to profit from regulation or deregulation.
Remember that under mayoral control, accountability at the top was “they can boo me at parades.”
“Those who wish to serve should be vetted by a review panel composed of representatives of civic and educational organizations (this was the practice in the early 1960s). This prevents the mayor from stacking the board with campaign donors and friends.”
Diane, I think this is very problematic and not likely to be indicative of a genuine system of checks and balances. In the 60s, people who promote neoliberal economic policies and represent corporate interests, over the best interests of children, parents, teachers and the community, were not in the habit of infiltrating civic and educational organizations, as well as both political parties, like they are today.
Therefore, given our current climate, the review panel itself would have to be vetted –and by whom? Who would determine how many lobbyists for privatizers that promote charter and voucher schools get on the panel?
If representation on the panel was determined according to the percentages of children attending neighborhood and charter schools in the district, the impact of annual charter school expansion would affect the makeup of the panel and it would soon reach a tipping point…
This is complicated by the power of the state and privatization friendly legislators to determine charter school expansion. I don’t think an appointed, vetted panel is the answer to the need for checks and balances.
I am far from making up my mind on the topic proposed by this posting.
But y’all have given me a lot to think about.
A hearty thanks to all commenters for serving up a full plate of food for thought.
😎
Current NYS education laws on Mayoral Control of NYC public schools expire on June 30, 2015, and not in 2016 as stated at the top of the blog post.
http://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/2013/edn/title-2/article-52-a/2590-a/
Thought you would be interested!! Best regards and good luck tomorrow. Eva Peterson
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