Mayoral control of the schools was always a dumb idea. The mayor of a big city has many more important priorities than running the schools. He or she cannot give the schools full-time attention. The mayor has to worry about the economy, crime, transportation, taxes, sanitation, and a thousand other things. Education is always going to be on the back burner. Mayoral control is also guaranteed to politicize education. The mayor will brag about his or her accomplishments. Chicago has had mayoral control since the 1995, and all they got for it was Arne Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 plan, which imposed a plethora of bad ideas about closing “failing” schools and replacing them with charter schools instead of helping them. New York City got mayoral control in 2002, at the insistence of Michael Bloomberg when he was elected the previous fall; in his billionaire fashion, he thought he knew how to turn the schools around. The District of Columbia schools were turned over to the mayor, who hired Michelle Rhee as chancellor, although she had been neither a principal nor a superintendent. Boston still has mayoral control.
The Illinois legislature just voted to end mayoral control in Chicago and let the citizens have an elected school board like every other district in the state.
The Chicago Teachers Union released this statement:
CHICAGO, June 16, 2021 — The Chicago Teachers Union issued the following statement regarding today’s historic passage of HB2908, which gives Chicago public school students and families an elected representative school board:
Today’s vote represents the will of the people, and after more than a quarter of a century, moves our district forward in providing democracy and voice to students and their families. This is the culmination of a generation of work by parents, rank-and-file educators and activists, who recognized the shortcomings of mayoral control of our schools and demanded better for our children. This is their legacy. This is Karen’s legacy.
Our union is grateful for the work of state representatives Kam Buckner and bill sponsor Delia Ramirez, Sen. Rob Martwick, and Speaker Chris Welch and Senate President Don Harmon, who were instrumental in bringing this landmark change to Chicago Public Schools. We look forward to Governor J.B. Pritzker’s signature on this bill, and thank everyone who has fought to grant Chicagoans the right that residents in every other school district in the state possess: the right to an elected representative school board.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Now we need Providence and the Rhode Island General Assembly to see the light.
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This seems good, but I also see from what happened in LA how easy it is to buy a school board seat because there isn’t a lot of fundraising but billionaires will spend big for their candidates. But I hope that this makes the situation in Chicago better.
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like a teeter-totter: the big money never stops pushing its way back in
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“A plethora of bad ideas” explains so-called reform in a nutshell. In so many cities with a minority majority, mayors often appoint school board members. With education such a political issue, it gives mayors too many opportunities to appoint like minded disruptors. Black and brown citizens should have the same democratic agency as white majority communities. Appointed school boards and wealthy controlled school board elections undermine democracy.
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You are right about wealthy elites intervening in local school board elections with their big money, distorting the electoral process and making it impossible for locals without big money to compete.
Billionaires John Arnold and Reed Hastings set up the City Fund specially for that purpose. On day one, the City Fund had $200 million. It’s goal: privatization.
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On the one hand in some districts there is big money trying to influence school board elections. In other districts, you have advocacy groups exercising outsize influence on school board elections. Most parents are disengaged and don’t have the time or energy to make their voices heard, or even to vote (turnout in school board elections is atrociously low). So I’m skeptical that ending mayoral control actually improves the school experience for most students.
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With a democratically elected board, parents have a chance to be heard. Under mayoral control, they have none.
Whether democracy improves student performance is not clear, but it is hard to make the case that eliminating democracy makes the system more effective. During Detroit’s era of mayoral control, the mayor went to jail.
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Mayoral control does allow voters a clear understanding of what will happen with their vote that is sometimes lost in school board elections.
For example, I voted for de Blasio in the primary 8 years ago specifically because his stance on charters and policing. It was obvious to me that the other candidates were milquetoasts too scared to take any stance. And NYC is far better off as most parents who haven’t been brainwashed by the non-stop propaganda know. (de Blasio’s biggest support during his re-election was in the very communities who were supposedly desperate for charters and his very lowest support among white affluent folks who don’t use charters but love the idea that non-white kids get harsh discipline that they all seem to believe is necessary for non-white kindergarten children).
I won’t rank Kathryn Garcia at all because of her rabid desire to have Andrew Cuomo’s handpicked group of mostly white men – people who are personal injury attorneys and businessmen — be given total power over how 25% or 50% or 75% of the NYC public school budget is spent with Kathryn Garcia having absolutely no say about the schools those mostly white guys decide to open nor any oversight if they do abhorrent things to children. None. Garcia thinks it is better that way because she trusts Cuomo’s appointed board of mostly white men a lot more than she trusts herself when it comes to education.
No thanks, I’d rather have Eric Adams, and I don’t particularly want Eric Adams. But at least he isn’t advocating for outsourcing the oversight of an limited number of schools to Cuomo and his cronies because he knows they would do a far better job than any Mayor could.
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Can you elaborate on the “white men” that Kathryn Garcia “rabidly” wants to control how the NYC school budget is spent? I’m not following.
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^^typo correction:
…at least he (Eric Adams) isn’t advocating for outsourcing the oversight of an UNlimited number of schools to Cuomo and his cronies…
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FLERP!,
I’m going to take you at your word that you actually want to have a reasonable discussion – you usually just descend to snark and attack. So I’m calling your bluff.
What does “lift the cap” mean? There is currently a cap on the number of charters that the SUNY Charter Institute is allowed to issue — but lifting the cap would give complete authority to the SUNY Charter Institute to issue as many charters as they choose to issue – in fact, next year SUNY could issue 50, 100 or 1,000 new charters and all of them – by law – must be funded by the NYC public school budget and space would have to be made in existing public schools for them Once the charter cap is lifted, it will always be the duty of the Mayor to serve the needs of every charter granted by the SUNY Charter Institute board.
And who is this board? Chairman Joseph Belluck, who has settled over $1 billion of asbestos and personal injury lawsuits for his clients! (Clearly a busy man, but always time to approve and do oversight over hundreds of charters!)
Eric Corngold, another lawyer who “represents businesses, their executives, and their employees during federal and state criminal investigations, as well as in regulatory matters involving the Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal and state government agencies.” (Also a busy man, but always time to do oversight).
And Edward Spiro, yet another lawyer!
There was once a trustee who wasn’t white — Pedro Noguera — who also happened to know a lot about education. He supported charter schools, but when he saw how the SUNY Charter Institute was using its power, he resigned in 2012. And since then the charter institute has proven that as long as charters have good results with their highest grades, they do not care how many students disappear or how small those highest grades are.
Kathryn Garcia is campaigning to “lift the cap” and those men (or whoever the Governor decides to appoint) will be empowered to decide how many charters they will give to people who are politically connected, which will be funded from NYC taxpayers whose Mayor will have no oversight over them.
Feel free to point out if any of the facts above are not true. Or if you can make no good argument as to why lifting the cap must be done, just respond with a snarky and insulting remark.
So far, the only argument in favor of lifting the cap I have heard is “parents want it”, when everyone knows that what parents really want is good schools that are properly overseen by someone accountable to voters. Kathryn Garcia seems to be saying to parents, don’t expect me to provide good schools because I have no idea how to do it, but elect me so I can lobby to give taxpayer dollars so private organizations that I have no control over can provide them.
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And Garcia is “rabid” about this? She’s “rabid” about having white men control NYC public school spending?
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Garcia has said very little about schools. Except that she would lift the cap on charter schools, protect the elite exam high schools, and open more of them.
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Yes. Now that is an accurate description.
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FLERP!,
Glad you aren’t challenging any of my facts except “rabid”. For you, I’ll stipulate that Kathryn Garcia has UNRABIDLY promised voters that if they vote for her for Mayor and she is elected, she will work as hard as she can to get Albany to lift the charter cap. And what lifting the charter cap means, as I assume Kathryn Garcia is competent enough to know, is that instead of establishing new magnet schools that she and the chancellor she chooses will oversee, she wants the 3 white lawyers who currently lead the SUNY Charter Institute to be empowered to grant charters to private entities to open an unlimited number of new schools in NYC public school building over whom Kathryn Garcia knows she has no power at all to oversee. In short, Kathryn Garcia wants outsiders to decide how many privately run charters will exist in NYC school building and Garcia is happy to hand over whatever resources they need to them without having any oversight.
Sound good to you? Seems we both agree that an elected school board may also have downsides. But seems we disagree about whether or not we think it is a good idea if a board appointed by the Governor should have the power to order the city to pay for an unlimited number of new charters over which only that board of 3 white lawyers has oversight.
I can appreciate that Kathryn Garcia has sincere, child-like faith in the 3 white lawyers who she trusts implicitly to tell her how many charters the NYC public school budget will pay for and trusts implicitly to completely oversee them. But her child-like faith in those 3 white lawyers is misplaced, as Pedro Noguera made clear when he stepped down:
“Although charter schools were serving low-income children of color, they were often under-enrolling the most disadvantaged children — those with learning disabilities, English language learners, and those with chronic behavior problems.
These children are typically under-represented in the lotteries used to select students for charters, and as a result, these children are being concentrated in the “failing” public schools.
Thus far, the only strategy that the D.O.E. and State Education Department has had to address the plight of these schools is to label them as “failing” and call for their closure. It is a set up, and it is blatantly unfair.
In too many cases, the new charter schools are not serving the same children as the schools that have been shut down. Instead, those children are being reassigned to other schools that will soon be labeled failing once again.
Whether it was intended or not, in many cases charter schools are contributing to a more inequitable educational playing field.”
And yet Kathryn Garcia’s education policy begins with her trusting the vision of 3 white lawyers over the knowledge of Pedro Noguera. Garcia incomprehensibly supports having a MORE inequitable educational playing field for public schools!
FLERP!, I challenge you to discuss the content of this post, but if you feel the need to pick out a word because you don’t really have a good argument that contradicts what I posted, then have at it. I suspected that your curiosity was feigned, but since I like to respond by assuming the best in people, I took you at your word. But most likely you were never interested in anything but snark. Sorry that I think education deserves more than snark.
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So she’s not “rabidly” supporting lifting the charter cap, ok. Would she still support lifting the charter cap if the SUNY Charter Institute didn’t have as many white men on the board? If the board was majority black, you think she wouldn’t support raising the charter cap? Or is the fact that there are several white men on the board completely irrelevant to Garcia’s position?
Remember, this is what you wrote originally:
“I won’t rank Kathryn Garcia at all because of her rabid desire to have Andrew Cuomo’s handpicked group of mostly white men – people who are personal injury attorneys and businessmen — be given total power over how 25% or 50% or 75% of the NYC public school budget is spent with Kathryn Garcia having absolutely no say about the schools those mostly white guys decide to open nor any oversight if they do abhorrent things to children. None. Garcia thinks it is better that way because she trusts Cuomo’s appointed board of mostly white men a lot more than she trusts herself when it comes to education”
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FLERP!, thank you for making it clear to all the readers that you have no interest in a real discussion of whether Garcia’s promise to work to lift the charter cap is a good idea. I assume from your extreme desire to keep focusing on semantics that you want the SUNY Charter Institute board to be empowered to create unlimited numbers of charters that the NYC school budget would pay for, but would have no oversight or authority over.
You seem to prefer posting hypotheticals to discussing Garcia’s education stance – her strong belief that it would be a great thing if an upstate board appointed by Cuomo made decisions and did oversight instead of her, but she will gladly find room and pay for any schools that upstate board decided the NYC school budget should fund.
Are you arguing that the SUNY Charter board isn’t 3 white lawyers? Are you arguing that Pedro Noguera resigned and made it clear why? Nope. You are simply ignoring that truth to act as if the real discussion should be whether the fact that it is 3 white lawyers now is not allowed to be mentioned because (in your hypothetical), you seem to feel very strongly (without having any evidence) that the child-like faith that Kathryn Garcia places in those white lawyers to do her job much better than she could would be the case no matter who was doing the oversight. You seem to have the same child-like faith that Garcia does that Andrew Cuomo’s appointment of 3 white lawyers reflects what you assume is the reality that those 3 white lawyers were simply the most qualified people to do the job.
I disagree. But as you clearly don’t want to defend your position, maybe you can find another semantic argument to make as you seem to be convinced that no one but me sees it for what it is. I doubt that very much.
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You wrote that Garcia has a “rabid desire” to have “white men” given “total power” over the schools budget. If a reader were stupid enough to take your comment at face value, they would conclude that Kathryn Garcia is an out-of-control, frothing-at-the-mouth racist. Can you defend your ridiculous language? Your comments sounds like something Louis Farrakhan might say.
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FLERP!,
Now you agree with my facts being true, but you object to me including them because you assume that everyone reading them would assume that anyone who supported such a policy would be racist.
I removed the word “rabid” which offended your snowflake sensibilities and – had you actually been interested in a discussion – would have allowed you to discuss the content of what I wrote.
I can play that game, too. Your ignoring what I wrote about Pedro Noguera is revealing. I quoted Noguera to explain why Kathryn Garcia’s placing her faith in the 3 lawyers appointed by Cuomo was terrible policy, and all you could focus on was how offended you were that I identified the members of the charter board that Noguera so strongly criticized as white — certainly suggesting to readers that those 3 lawyers were far more qualified than Pedro Noguera to know what kinds of schools NYC needed to pay for without having any oversight over.
Does Pedro Noguera matter? When you ignore the main arguments to profess that your white sensibilities were offended by having white people being identified as white, it reveals a lot about you.
Since you are completely uninterested in discussing whether having 3 lawyers upstate deciding how many privately operated schools will be funded from the pull school budget with no oversight by the Mayor, let’s have the kind of discussion you seem to want to have. Was it intentionally racist that you ignored what Pedro Noguera said, or did your knee jerk defense of the 3 men who serve on the SUNY Charter Institute board now reflect your strong belief that there are 3 white men because those 3 white men had far superior qualifications for their job and should be trusted to decide how many charter schools should be given space in NYC public schools and funded with no oversight allowed?
I don’t find this kind of discussion worthwhile, but clearly you prefer it to actually having to defend Garcia’s promise to fight to lift the charter cap so the NYC public school budget can pay for a lot more charters that they have no oversight over.
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You’re absolutely correct that this discussion isn’t worthwhile. Please stop with the misleading diatribes and the race-baiting. Kathryn Garcia does not have a rabid desire to hand total power to a cabal of white lawyers. Just because you disagree with her policy on charter schools doesn’t mean you have to write garbage.
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Please stop insulting Pedro Noguera by pretending his views do not matter.
We have a serious disagreement – you object when race is mentioned and think that the people mentioning race must be racist. It doesn’t surprise me given how you kept posting links to nasty and dishonest smears of educators as being “anti-white” for daring to point out implicitly racist curriculum that needed to be changed.
You are ignoring the content of my argument, and even worse, totally dismissing Pedro Noguera’s criticism.
I can only assume you believe Pedro Noguera is wrong and not worth listening to or discussing. And that says a lot about what your implicit biases are.
I know you believe I am the racist one because I pointed out that the people on the SUNY Charter Institute board were white and their oversight of charter schools was to approve of very harsh discipline – including astonishingly high numbers of out of school suspensions given to Kindergarten and first graders in schools with virtually no white students. You are certain that approving of those discipline policies was not racist at all, just something that those students deserved, and I am the only racist one for questioning those harsh discipline policies that the charter board strongly approved of.
Your dismissal of Pedro Noguera has nothing to do with his race — you just don’t find him worth listening to and you (and Kathryn Garcia) put your faith and trust in the people on the SUNY Charter Institute board. Who just happen to be white but only because – as you keep insisting – those 3 white men just happened to be the very best candidates for the job overseeing charter schools.
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FLERP! says: “Just because you disagree with her policy on charter schools doesn’t mean you have to write garbage.”
FLERP! posts: “Director Cindy Green has made it clear that Critical Race Theory and “anti-racist” teaching is mandatory for the 52 Madison Metropolitan School District k-12 schools. They have “interrogated” their teachers curricular resources to eliminate “whiteness”.
FLERP! posts: “The absolute state of colleges. White and academically gifted? No such thing—you’re the beneficiary of white supremacy. Give all your money to BLM.”
FLERP! posts: “There are “Theory” nuns teaching K-12 now 😑”
Yes, FLERP!, do you think anyone who is familiar with your posts believe that you really object to “writing garbage”?
FLERP!, given a choice between having a discussion about what Garcia’s desire to eliminate the charter cap means, and demonstrating your hypocrisy, you prefer to demonstrate your hypocrisy?
We both agree that Garcia wants to abolish the charter cap. The question is about whether that is a good idea – I think it is a terrible idea and explained why. You profess to be too concerned with people who “write garbage” to defend Garcia’s support of charters.
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None of those were my words and you are melting down on this thread. Take the loss and stop lying.
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“None of those are my words”?
You endorsed them and posted them here to comment on a discussion. You had no problem with them being “garbage”.
The fact that you are now trying to mislead people by claiming “none of those are my words” when they would never have been on this blog without you “helpfully” posting them here.
You should stop replying now — I have no interest in having a discussion with someone who is so clearly disingenuous. I suspected from the first that you had no interest in having a discussion about education policy — you haven’t made one attempt to explain why you believe allowing the SUNY Charter board to grant unlimited charters is a good idea. You are just very, very angry that I pointed out what a bad idea it is.
Why didn’t you just admit it instead of continuing to post your disingenuous posts about how you can’t be responsible for the content of the quotes that you keep posting for people to read. I don’t agree with dienne77’s positions, but at least she is honest about her views.
Still waiting for you to address what Pedro Noguera said, but you have made it clear how little you think his opinion is worth. That speaks volumes about you.
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Test.
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I think that both of you have exhausted this line of disagreement, both FLERP and NYC public school parent. No one else is interested in reading about your parsing of the other’s words. Please stop or I will put you both in moderation and delete continuing debate on this verbiage non-issue.
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My apologies, Diane. I should know better than to take the bait. (Thank you for your posts about the Mayoral race elsewhere).
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In my observation, Chicago has always been the big city that pushed back against ed reform. It doesn’t surprise me at all that they regained democratic control of their public schools- they’ve never marched along quietly and compliantly with the echo chamber.
These are public schools. They belong to the people who live there. Why shouldn’t they govern their own schools? The ed reform agenda is so super fabulous it can’t even be questioned and people can’t try something else?
I think more public schools should go their own way. Public school students aren’t being served by this “movement”. Find and hire people who will serve them. Hiring people who don’t value public schools to run public schools will never serve public school students well.
If I told charter supporters I was going to hire a bunch of people who oppose the existence of charter schools to run a charter network they would object. Yet somehow public school supporters are supposed to hire and pay a group of people who don’t buy into the basic concept of public schools and have them run our schools. Why on earth would we do that? How will that possibly serve our students?
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i disagree with this quote from the Chicago Teachers Union: “moves our district forward in providing democracy and voice to students and their families”
That phrase would have said, “returnns our district back to providing democracy and a voice to students and their families”
After all, before 1995, Chicago’s students and families had a democratically elected school board, and that was taken away from them by a bunch of incompetent, greedy, mean, corrupt, autocratic power-hungry kleptocrats.
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Mayoral control of schools is rheediculous.
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Especially in DC.
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Speaking of rheediculous and other rheetoric, whatever happened to KrazyTA, resident expert on all things rheelated?
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I miss KrazyTA. He vanished. WordPress kicks readers off the blog with great frequency and no explanation. He might have been on of them who got ousted.
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“The mayor has to worry about the economy, crime, transportation…”
In the case of Chicago, the mayor has to worry about covering up crime.
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Which, as Rahm Emanuel learned, is a full time job in itself.
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Yay!
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No, Chicago never ever had an elected school board before 1995. 😟
In 1983, Chicago Mayoral Candidate Harold Washington promised an elected school board, but reneged on it as mayor. ☹️
In 1989, under Mayor Richard M. Daley, local school councils for each school debuted, which could hire and fire principals. 😐
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I am proud of Newark. They elected Ras Baraka who ran for Mayor on a platform of take back local control of our schools—run by the state since 1995– right in the middle of the cruddy One Newark plan. He also pushed for Cami Anderson to resign. Wa-lah. Anderson resigned & the state magically decided NPS was ‘ready’ thanks to their 20 yrs of ‘improvement’ [especially those of Christie/ Cerf/ Anderson – NOT!], & set the transition in motion.
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