Lisa Haver, parent activist in Philadelphia, was thrilled when the state relinquished control of the school board in 2018. Now Philadelphia has mayoral control of its schools. Haver soon discovered that the appointed school board is not interested in parent engagement and shuts parent voices down.
She wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Just weeks into the new school year, Philadelphia school communities find themselves already dealing with chaos. Parents, students, and school staff, many navigating toxic flood waters after a devastating storm, were not notified of the district’s decision to open schools late until two hours after the first bell.
Students at several district schools had to avoid mountains of trash left in schoolyardson their first day back.
The district has revised bell schedules and school calendars with a stunning disregard for the needs of parents.
In June, when the Inquirer Editorial Board asked City Councilmembers what their priorities would be for their 2021-22 session, education was barely mentioned — not even by the Chair of Council’s Education Committee.
Another recent editorial lamented the erosion of trust between Councilmembers’ constituents and city institutions including those between the school community and the Board of Education that “have been exacerbated during the pandemic which Council could ameliorate by finding ways to navigate and, hopefully, reduce.”
But that doesn’t seem to be a concern for councilmembers. Some have joined protests at schools where teachers refused to enter toxic buildings. But other than one letter signed by a handful of councilmembers sent last February, Council has been largely silent on the silencing of their constituents by the board.
Haver points out that neither Superintendent William Hite nor his staff was held accountable for the fiasco at Benjamin Franklin High School, when two schools merged. Construction costs soared from $10 million to over $50 million. Students and staff were forced to endure an unsafe learning environment while construction proceeded. Accountability for multiple failures? None.
Nor did anyone on the board respond when the district’s principals endorsed a vote of no confidence in Superintendent Hite for his lack of leadership during the pandemic.
Mayoral control enables the silencing of parent voices.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks, Diane.
“Accountability for multiple failures? None.”
A very common state of affairs in public education these days. Educational malpractices mandated and implemented with everyone involved taking credit for the future success of their fantasies. . . but when the rubber hits the road and the results are in, there isn’t anyone to be found for the educational messes that we have.
Adminimals + GAGA Good German implementers of egregiously harmful malpractices like the standards and testing malpractice regime = learning hell for the students.
I would add Layered administration to your list. Last night I discovered that my wife had spent over an hour typing in notes on a meeting that was required by some layer of the county administration, no doubt required of some other layer of state administration. These people are given a job, and must have things to read from us to justify their position. Thus more work for us, less accountability for students because we are so busy doing something besides thinking about them.
I’ve been thinking about that, in coming across the state “Department of Administration” (while reading about RI ed procurement). Hadn’t come across such a moniker before. Googling, it appears to be fairly common (& perhaps harmless), but really: did you ever hear such a redundant term? Imagine the layers within that department 😀
Both cities and states that favor privatization try to limit public discourse in order to impose their top down agenda. They don’t really want to hear from school boards, parents or teachers. Some of the red states are expanding vouchers despite the terrible results they provide. This is not so-called choice. It is anti-democratic authoritarianism.
These mega-school districts are just too large to manage.
I have often thought that the most dangerous reality plaguing our large city district is that because it is a large city district it handles money in truly massive numbers: the bigger the money, the easier to be scammed and manipulated by those looking to suck off that big money.
There are so many layers of management, with opaque and poorly communicated edicts that get more opaque as they run down the org chart. Little consideration for specific school conditions. It’s a recipe for disaster.
Perhaps that is a good reason to have multiple independent school systems in what is now a single school district.
I would say it is a good reason to have an elected school board that listens to constituents.
Diane is right. Having an elected school board matters. A big district is fine if you have a big teachers union hounding an elected board to listen to parents and teachers. Corporate meddlers are planning a secession in my district. They want to break up the district. It’s been a rightwing dream for decades. The wealthier neighbors are tired of helping less wealthy neighbors. They’re planning to break up the teachers union along with the district so they can get away with even more malfeasance. Let’s not lend them any hands.
What’s an example of a mega-district that’s “fine”?
San Diego is doing very well. Most large districts have large proportions of students who are LEP, special education, and/or impoverished. Breaking them up into multiple districts won’t change the underlying issues. Philadelphia is an urban district that has been systematically short changed by the Republican legislature in Harrisburg. It has also lost resources to its charters. The district is seriously underfunded.
Breaking them up will make them easier to manage. If the underlying issues stay the same but the schools are better managed, that’s a win in my book.
Here’s one example of how fine it’s going in a mega-sized school system with a big teachers union:
Flerp,
San Francisco?
A district that has an elected school board, is well regulated by the state, and has a partner with a strong teachers union is fine, not immune to the forces of wealth inequality or meddling billionaires, but solidly good, a community asset appreciated by everyone who cares about the welfare of their city.
San Diego and San Francisco are excellent school districts, big ones. I don’t speak for Diane, but I should think anyone is welcome to provide us with a specific example of how small districts work better. They do not by my reasoning. The smaller the district, the more amplified are the voices of individual individualists. Anti-maskers come to mind. Segregationists come to mind.
Breaking up districts would not make them easier to manage any more than breaking up the states of our Union would make the states easier to manage. It helps to have a Constitution. It helps to have a fully collective bargaining agreement and well-resourced managerial oversight. What breaking up districts (or nations) does is weaken them, making them more vulnerable during recessions and attacks from corporate reformers. It also increases the revenue of the haves and robs from the have nots. And when districts break up, so do unions, lowering the quality of education and life in general for all citizens.
The reasons people are actively trying to use California’s messed up ballot initiative system to break up California, and the reasons Los Angeles school board members whose elections were funded by billionaires are actively plotting to break up LAUSD, are libertarian. I. Me. My.
LCT– I think you’re hitting on a specific re: when breaking into smaller districts can cause issues that counter the ‘easier to manage’ aspect. Diane has already noted that cronyism/ corruption is more tempting in city-district subdivisions, being easier to miss by those trying to oversee multiple pieces of a city system. Smaller budgets can be addressed by redistributing tax income among districts. And I don’t see where unions are ‘broken up’; they bring the solidarity of a larger base to their districts’ subdivisions. But any region which has a high degree of residential segregation &/or stark divisions in political opinion runs the risk of amplifying that divisiveness.
I worked in a smaller district. It is easier to get things done, questions answered and problems addressed in a smaller district. There is less bureaucracy. Some teachers that live in the community know members of the elected board.
This community was very diverse, and the Board reflected it. We also had a large arts community that tended to have divergent thinkers. At one point we had a civil rights lawyer, a song writer and a college dean on the Board. People moving to this area embraced diversity. We also had a vigilant, educated NAACP that watched like a hawk, and I think that was a good thing. They nudged the Board to work for equity.
retired teacher, this was my experience too, where I grew up (NYS) and where I raised my kids (NJ). Both towns pop 30k with pubsch enrollment about 6k. As you point out, there are community factors that make it work, not just the size.
BTW I was educated in the Philly public schools where I got a good education, but it was a long time ago before the schools under funded and long before NCLB and privatization.
If LAUSD were to cease to exist, how would UTLA have a collective bargaining agreement with LAUSD? Separate CBAs would have to be negotiated with each smaller district, eliminating the collective power of the union.
Flerp, I’ve always thought the same, mainly for the reason ciedie mentions, but also your reason. Cruise ships can’t turn on a dime. Nor can even well-run democracies for that matter; that’s just as well, and baked in. But a democracy managing a cruise-ship-sized school district is doubly slow to respond to constituents’ differing needs. In that case there will always be a tendency toward authoritarianism, overriding local voters’ druthers, just to counter excessive inertia. Even though Diane’s example of San Diego as a well-run large district with a democratically-elected board is well-taken, SD’s enrollment is 1/7 the size of NYC’s. There’s probably some kind of “tilt” size. SF’s is only 55,600k; DC’s only 51k. Beyond tilt, to me, would be Chicago (340,600 pubsch students), LA (600k), NYC (900k).
This article discusses some pros and cons for NYC mayoral control vs the set-up in ’90’s & before. They come out in favor of mayoral control, but I think they’ve overlooked some options in between the two poles: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/nyregion/new-york-school-control.html
I wrote a history of NYC public schools. They have tried many formats: 5 borough school systems; decentralization, with decision making shifted to districts; mayoral control. All have pluses and minuses. The smaller the district, the easier to capture by small interest groups and the more corruption and cronyism because it’s harder to oversee 30+ districts. Mayoral control gives too much power to one person, who appoints flunkies to the board and acts without accountability.
I’ve read that brook and I agree about the trade-off. With all the attention paid to “dark money” and corporate influence, it’s good to remember the outsize power that “small interest groups” have over small local districts.
More evidence of the concerted effort by libertarians, neoliberals, neoconservatives, tea party people, most of the current GOP, and any and all MAGA Trumpists to turn the United States into an autocratic-kleptocratic theocracy of some demented kind where justice is dished out by the whims of an insane, enraged mob that is rewarded everytime they do it.