This issue deserves a longer post by me, since my first book in 1974 was a history of the New York City public schools.
Mayors have always had a large measure of control over the city’s public schools, but only under Mayor Bloomberg did the mayor take control of appointing the superintendent/chancellor and direct every aspect of the system. Bloomberg used his power without checks/balances to close scores of schools, to fire principals, and to disrupt every aspect of the system, while expanding the public relations staff and making unsubstantiated claims of success. Bloomberg trumpeted the success of authoritarian, top-down control, absent any democratic voice. When his appointed board members dared to disagree with him, he fired them.
The public continues to think there should be meaningful democratic input into the decisions about their public schools.
Leonie Haimson sent out this summary from the Quinnipiac polling service:
Three Quinnipiac University polls over the last two years show New York City voters oppose by wide margins mayoral control of the public schools.
The independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University Poll asks, “Do you think the mayor should retain complete control of the public schools or share control of the public schools with other elected leaders?”
Opposition to mayoral control is more than 2-1, even topping 3 – 1, in each of three surveys:
May 12, 2015 – Opposed 60 – 28 percent;
August 2, 2016 – Opposed 65 – 23 percent;
May 18, 2017 – Opposed 68 – 21 percent.
“The pundits and the experts may believe that mayoral control of the public schools is the best way to proceed, but they haven’t convinced the people,” said Maurice Carroll, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.
In each survey cited, Quinnipiac University surveyed more than 960 New York City voters with margins of error that were less than +/- 3.3 percentage points. The surveys were conducted by live interviewers calling landlines and cell phones.
The Quinnipiac University Poll, directed by Douglas Schwartz, Ph.D., conducts public opinion surveys nationwide and in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Iowa and Colorado as a public service and for research.
Visit poll.qu.edu or http://www.facebook.com/quinnipiacpoll
Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
phone: 212-529-3539
leonie@classsizematters.org
leoniehaimson@gmail.com
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I live in the suburbs of NYC. The wealthy school district that my son attends is managed by a democratically elected school board. Why shouldn’t the children and parents of school children in NYC be granted the same form of democracy?
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As usual, key pieces of data are left out here to paint an inaccurate picture. Support for mayoral control topped 55% when Bloomberg was mayor. It has declined each year under DeBlasio despite his high approval ratings in other areas.
Why? Because he has backed off on many Bloomberg era reforms and schools are doing worse under his governance. Why? Because he is answering to unions and other adult interests instead of to parents and students.
NYC school boards were a disastrous mess of special and personal interests prior to Mayoral control. The fact that people would consider going back to that is in part due to short memory and in part due to DeBlasios reversing the gains Bloomberg made to curry favor with employees.
When dems pick the interests of the adults in public education over the interests of students and education, they lose. Public education exists to serve students first.
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Or perhaps without his PR machine, the gold veneer chipped off and people saw that the emperor had no clothes.
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I’m a New York City teacher in the Bronx and a proud union member. John, I welcome you to my school to teach for a month.
Where did schools get better under Bloomberg? Bloomberg’s largest initiative of small schools is a failure. Under Bloomberg, the bureaucracy became more bloated and class sizes increased. Remember Cathy Black?
The reform rhetoric of “adult interests” is getting stale. I can tell you first hand that teachers in NYC care deeply about their students. Here in the Bronx, we teach some of the most marginalized and traumatized students – poor, homeless, growing up in violent neighborhoods. We care. Politicians in Albany and Eva are using the process to aid their own interests and the interests of their big money donors.
Again, my offer stands. You are always invited to come teach with me in the Bronx.
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The “adult interests” meme feels stale because nobody is willing to have a straight conversation about it. I never see increasing retiree healthcare benefits mentioned as a partial cause for art or music programs being cut.
What benefit does Buffalo’s elective plastic surgery benefit have for the students in their financially struggling district? What benefit does LIFO have for students if a teacher of the year is fired instead of a lower performing teacher?
While many interests of teachers and students align, it is preposterous to pretend they are never in conflict.
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John,
So it is your belief that teachers who have devoted their lives to this low-paid profession should retire without a pension?
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No, I don’t think any benefits should be cut. I just don’t like it when increasing benefit costs are not acknowledged as a reason that other parts of the budget have to be cut.
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John,
Pension benefits are necessary. So are arts and physical education, science, math, history, foreign languages. We can afford to pay for it if we raise taxes on the 1%.
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I agree. I have no problem with increasing taxes statewide to spend more on education in schools high numbers of economically disadvantaged, ELL, or IEP kids.
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Hearing John criticizing pensions and benefits of union teachers while he “sees no evil” when Eva Moskowitz endorses Betsy DeVos and claims that outrageously high numbers of non-white students in her schools are violent at age 5 and 6 — talk about hypocrisy. John doesn’t criticize those “adult interests” even when children are directly harmed, as long as those adults have the power to keep those dollars flowing to his charter.
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Normally I’m in agreement with your positions, John, but not this time.
Mayoral or state control may have a place in districts where rampant corruption, mismanagement, and/or extreme neglect have led to emergency conditions in a large number of schools, but it should only be a stopgap until a traditional board can be reinstated. I’m now skeptical that such widespread emergency conditions actually ever existed in New York City, but they certainly don’t now, at least not in the vast majority of schools.
Furthermore, what you are describing as the “bad old days” ended quite a few years prior to the adoption of mayoral control, when budgeting and hiring powers were stripped from the decentralized boards. The successes of the New York City schools that people attribute to mayoral control are just as likely to have grown out of this centralizing/streamlining. 32 autonomous unsupervised districts making all decisions was insanity. One central district (which had always controlled high schools) divided into smaller administrative pieces is much better, and that is what would be in place when mayoral control lapses.
No US district has adopted mayoral control in the past decade. With Illinois’s prudent decision to eventually restore control of Chicago’s schools to an elected board, among the ten largest districts in the US, only New York City will have mayoral control. Sure, school board or any other kind of election can get messy, but school governance is too important, too personal, and too hyperlocal to tie to the fortunes of a two-term-limited mayor. It also bears mentioning that it was under mayoral control that the city has made disastrous financial decisions, succumbed to fraud, and so forth.
The city deserves an elected school board, just like Manhasset, just like Los Angeles and Houston, and just like the district where you live. The “old” system isn’t perfect, particularly in that representationally it did not account for the population differences between the five boroughs, but it would only take a few small legislative tweaks to fix that.
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Good points, Tim. I don’t disagree. My main point is that people widely supported Mayoral control when it was Bloomberg, and widely don’t for DeBlasio. In fact, the poll question was actually worded as support for DeBlasio’s Mayoral control, not in general.
I defer to people who know more about NYC than I do when it comes to what’s best for governance, but I think DeBlasio has been mostly a negative influence for schools with the exception of the pre-K program.
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John, Bloomberg was VERY unpopular by the time he was leaving office. Especially with what he had done with schools. Please don’t make up things that you don’t understand.
Mayor de Blasio specifically ran on a campaign about charters. And it was NEVER anti-charter which is why he had a lot of support from parents who sent kids to charters.
It was about Bloomberg’s DOE giving special treatment to ONE rich charter chain that was already rolling in the dough because his very rich friends sat on their boards. It was about Bloomberg giving those special privileged charters free space and taking resources away from the most vulnerable students. It was about FAIRNESS.
Now NYC residents have learned that the ONLY way to have Mayoral control is to allow more of the most corrupt and Bloomberg-favored charters to grab more of our resources.
Sorry, as a parent I do NOT support that trade. So if voters are opposed to Mayoral control, it is because Albany is holding Mayoral control hostage and the ransom is giving money to unethical people.
And parents don’t want to make deals with hostage takers who want us to trade what is best for our children so that riches can go to the unethical people.
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John,
Bloomberg got rid of some of the best principals in the school system. Klein manipulated data. NYC was no miracle under Bloomberg, except for Eva, who got whatever she wanted
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Yes, it’s beyond preposterous to continue using the “adult interests/corruption” meme to continue attacking public schools and unionized teachers, in the face of Eva Moskowitz and Harlem Village Academy’s Deborah Kenny, et. al.
Kenny earned half-a-mil in 2013, for running 5 (!!!) schools, and is reportedly chauffeured to work in a limousine. Needless to say, her schools suffer from the endemic Charter School Disease of high student attrition and off-the-charts teacher attrition.
The corruption in local school boards in the “bad old days,” though real, was penny-ante stuff compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars skimmed off the education budget under mayoral control and the “business model of education.”
The main difference, aside form the scale, is that the money has been siphoned away under so-called reform went to people in better attire and with impressive (or so they’d like you to think) credentials.
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John,
What are you high on? This is about PROFITS for the FEW. Do you ever follow the money, even when Diane spells it out?
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John benefits from more money for charters which requires certain complicit charter folks like him to toe the party line and pretend to “see no evil’ when the person who represents him — Eva Moskowitz — says that so many 5 year old children are violent. Or when she gives cover to the Republicans approving Betsy DeVos by vouching for her excellence. John won’t say one word against that because after all, Eva Moskowitz’ interests align very closely to his. Talk about being a hypocrite and putting grown-ups first.
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Eva is paid handsomely to pit children first. She has no self interest.
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Mayoral control without transparency and with a rubber stamp public education panel is a sham. Doesn’t matter who the mayor is.
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