Politico reported recently that Mayor Eric Adams is pulling out all the stops in his campaign to persuade the legislature to extend mayoral control of New York Ciry’s public schools.
That’s understandable. Every mayor wants as much power as he can gather. Guiliani wanted mayoral control. The legislature turned him down. Michael Bloomberg got it after he won the mayoralty in 2001, pledging to make the schools run efficiently and successfully after years of political squabbling and disappointing academic results.
A historical note: the last time that the independent Board of Education was abolished was in 1871, when Boss Tweed pushed through state legislation to create a Department of Education, in charge of the schools. The new Department immediately banned purchase of any textbooks published by Harper Bros., to retaliate for the publication of Thomas Nast cartoons ridiculing the Tweed Ring in Harper’s magazine. The new Department steered lucrative contracts to Tweed cronies, for furniture and all supplies for the schools.
Two years later, the corruption of the Tweed Ring was exposed, and criminal prosecutions ensued. In short order, the Department of Education was dissolved and the independent Board of Education was revived.
In the 2001 race for Mayor, billionaire Mike Bloomberg campaigned on promises to rebuild the city’s economy after the devastating attacks of 9/11/2001. He also promised to take over the school system, make it more efficient, improve student performance, and able to live within its budget of $12 billion plus. He won, and many people were excited by the prospect of a successful businessman taking over the city and the schools.
In 2002, the State Legislature gave Mayor Bloomberg control of the schools in New York City. It replaced the independent Board of Education, whose seven members were appointed by the five borough presidents and the mayor. Bloomberg had complete control of the school system, with its more than 1,000 schools and more than one million students. The new law allowed him to appoint the majority of “the Panel on Education Policy,” a sham substitute for the old Board of Education.
The new law still referred to “the Board of Education,” but the new PEP was a shell of its former self. It was toothless, as Bloomberg wanted. He picked the Chancellor, and he had the policymaking powers. Early on, in 2004, he decided that third graders should be held back based on their reading scores. Some of his appointees on the PEP opposed the idea and he fired them before the vote was taken. He wanted all his appointees to know that he appointed them to carry out his decisions, not to question them. The retention policy was later expanded through eighth grade but quietly abandoned in 2014 because it failed.
I won’t go into all the missteps of the Bloomberg regime, which lasted 12 years, but will offer a few generalizations:
1. The mayor should not control the schools because they will never be his first priority. The mayor juggles a large portfolio: public safety, the economy, transportation, infrastructure, public health, sanitation, and much more. On any given day, he/she might have 30 minutes to think about the schools; more some days, none at all on others.
2. Mayoral control concentrates too much power in the hands of one person. One person, especially a non-educator, gets an idea into his head and imposes it, no need to talk to experienced educators or review research.
3. Mayoral control marginalizes parents and community members, whose concerns deserve to be heard. At public hearings of the PEP, parents testified but rightly thought that no one listened to them. In the “bad old days,” they could speak to someone in their borough president’s office; now the borough presidents have no power. No one does, Except the mayor.
4. The Mayor picked three non-educators as Chancellor. Joel Klein disdained educators and public schools, even though he was a graduate of the NYC public schools. He created a “Leadership Academy” to train non-educators and teachers to bypass the usual path to becoming a principal by serving for years as an assistant principal. Klein surrounded himself with B-school graduates and looked to Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and Jack Welch for advice. Large numbers of experienced teachers and principals retired.
5. Bloomberg loved churn and disruption. He closed scores of schools and replaced them with many more small schools. Some high schools that had programs for ELLs, special education, career paths for different fields, were closed and replaced by schools for 300/400 students, too small to offer specialized programs or advanced classes.
6. New initiatives were announced with great fanfare (like merit pay), thanks to a vastly enlarged public relations staff, then quietly collapsed and disappeared.
7. Bloomberg and Klein imposed a new choice system. But all high schools and middle schools became schools of choice. A dozen students of the age living in the same building might attend a dozen different schools, some distant from their homes. One retired executive told me that this dispersal was intended to obstruct the creation of grassroots uprisings against the new dictates.
8. Bloomberg and Klein favored charter schools. In short order, more than 100 opened. The charters were supported financially and politically by some of the wealthiest Wall Street titans. When there was any threat to charters, their wealthy patrons quickly assembled multi-millions dollar TV campaigns to defend them. Because of the deep pockets of the charter patrons, the charter lobby gave generous contributions to legislators in Albany. The legislature passed laws favoring the charters, including one that required the public schools to provide free space for them or, if no suitable space was available, to pay their rent in private facilities.
9. Bloomberg and Klein made testing, accountability and choice the central themes of their reforms. Their approach mirrored President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which began at the same time. Raising test scores became the goal of the school system. Schools were graded A-F, depending primarily on their ability to raise test scores. Eventually, teachers were graded by the rise or fall of their students’ scores. NYC faithfully mirrored the tenets of the national corporate reform movement.
10. NYC test scores improved on NAEP during the Bloomberg years, but not as much as in other cities that did not have mayoral control.
11. To get a great overview of “The Failure of Mayoral Control in New York City,” read this great summary by Leonie Haimson, which includes links to other sources. See, especially, the recent article in Education Week on the decline of mayoral control. Chicago had mayoral control similar to that in New York City, which allowed Mayor Rahm Emanuel to close 50 schools in black and brown communities in one day, completely ignoring the views of parents. It was an ignominious example of the danger of one-man control.
12. There is no perfect mechanism to govern schools, but any kind of oversight should allow parent voices to count. 95% of the nation’s school districts have elected school boards. Sometimes a small faction gains control and does damage. That’s the risk of democracy. Whatever the mechanism, there must be an opportunity for the public, especially parents, to make their voices heard and to have a role. The mayor controls the budget: that’s as much power as he should have.
History is an excellent overview of New York City school governance—history and myths. Again, by Leonie Haimson. (Note: her history leaves out the two years of mayoral control from 1871-1873.)
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Mayoral control in NYC is a cautionary tale of placing too much power in the hands of politicians who are education amateurs with big egos and big ideas. These big ideas often come with a heavy dose of personal bias and political influence. The structure is autocratic, and stakeholders have little say in policy. Elected boards are more likely to reflect the interests and needs of the community, and they are an expression of democracy in action.
Yours remains the best history of the NYC schools.
How did you come to notice that nobody had ever written a comprehensive history of that subject? Must have been an exciting moment, to realize that you could be the first to do it.
Agreed
FLERP,
I was hoping to write an article about the two-month teachers’ strike in 1968, and I decided to research the background. I went to the library to find a history of the NYC schools, and the most recent one was 1905! From that moment forward, my career was set. THE GREAT SCHOOL WARS was published in 1974.
Wow. That’s just awesome, Diane. Smart to seize upon this!
“Mayoral control concentrates too much power in the hands of one person.” Montesquieu would be proud of this logic! In my estimation, it is always good logic for the most part. It does remind me, however, that local control can mean power in the hands of a sort of local oligarchy. Growing up in a rural south, I understood that you often were at the mercy of a good old boy network. Indeed this network got me my teaching job, mainly because the powers that be knew my mother and had known my father. I hope I was good enough to merit the confidence.
We have witnessed the Republican Party arguing for local control in recent years, if it makes their local oligarchy powerful. The balance of power in all communities must keep the powerful from cannibalizing the many. Hardly a human being is not susceptible to the temptation of great power.
Well said, Roy.
This is awful, to think that what the students would be learning, is, decided on the, opinions of just, one man, what if, that individual just so happens, to be immoral, like Donald Trump, the next generations are bound to get, totally, screwed, and, they will be the ones, governing, the, countries we live in for the, future, can you even, imagine, how screwed over this world will, get!
The fact that we are still hearing about the failures of Public Schools no matter what the policy changes that have been made from Testing to Common Core to closing schools . And the fact that Charters and Private Religious Schools do not do better when playing on an equal playing field rather than having cherry picked student bodies and high attrition rates.
These factors and others may indicate that the problems in Public Schools have little to do with Policy and a lot to do with inequality. Or simply” its the economy stupid” and who it serves. Bloomberg would never buy into that as a Master of the Universe. As for Adams (Curtis Sliwa light ) does not belong in the Mayors office no less in charge of schools.
Boston has had mayoral control of our public schools since 1993. Many see the precipitating event as the election of people of color to the school committee after its restructuring. We are the only one of 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts which do not elect their own school committee.
Two years ago, during our mayoral election, a ballot question drew support of 99,000 voters to return to an elected school committee. That’s more than the number of voters who elected a progressive mayor who is a public schools advocate. But the mayor, under law, has to give up control to return to an elected school committee. She has refused to do so.
On the positive side, the mayor and superintendent have just announced they’re ditching weighted student budgeting, which has been used as a privatization tool.
This evidentiary hearing in the Georgia case just got interesting. A former assistant DA in the Fulton County DA’s office just testified that Wade and Willis had a romantic relationship prior to his hiring by Willis, that she regularly saw them often “hugging and kissing” in that timeframe. The State is now attacking her credibility on the basis that she’s angry over being disciplined by Willis and threatened with firing unless she resigned.
Typical Trumpish move – cover crimes with scandal.
The news reports I have seen reported what the anti-Fani witnesses said, so I wondered if Fani and Ward had legal representation who were allowed to cross-examine them, or if this was a one-sided hearing, where the lawyers for the Trump cronies presented “evidence” with no cross-examination, and also were able to cross examine Fani and Ward with them both being banned from giving testimony from their own lawyer asking questions.
When you say “the State” is attacking the credibility of someone angry she was disciplined, is that Fani’s attorney?
“Hugging and kissing”? Is there more detail?
I have seen two people hugging and kissing (hello, goodbye, on the cheek) and they aren’t sexually intimate, nor do they have a special commitment to one another that signifies a relationship.
Typical reporting I have read in the NYT:
“In her questioning, Ashleigh Merchant is suggesting that Fani Willis found herself struggling financially after losing a judge’s race in which she lent herself $50,000. Merchant’s argument for disqualifying Willis from the Trump case is that she engaged in self-dealing by hiring her boyfriend and then letting him take her on fancy vacations with the money he was earning from her office.”
According to the NYT, newspaper of record with all the news that is fit to print, apparently the above is a very serious concern with much evidence to support it, and Fani’s testimony offered nothing at all to contradict this very major concern, based on Merchant’s evidence-supported theory of the case.
If “Kavanaugh needed money, so he committed a crime” was the kind of evidence the NYT treated seriously, methinks there would be a different Supreme Court Justice.
On the contrary! Clarence Thomas needed money and his “friends” bought his mom’s house and paid his kid’s tuition for years! Love that when it’s a Democrat, getting to go on a vacation with your boyfriend is acceptable incentive…not sure what. Hiring your boyfriend for a job he is qualified to do?
I trained at Bank Street College of Education in 1970-71 where child-centered learning was fostered. I then taught in a public elementary school in Boston for 7 years. I taught during the Boston School Committee reign of Louise Day Hicks and John Kerrigan. The school committee at the time was elected city-wide, so power was easily in the hands of divisive pols. I entered my first grade class in September of 1971 as an energetic 23 year old, only to find that our little neighborhood school had no teaching supplies (none). The very few Boston “magnet schools” at the time (the precursors of today’s charter schools) had all that they needed. It took half the school year for us to get any of our required learning materials. I bought all the crayons, pencils, paper, books for my class myself on a very small teachers’ starting salary. When signing my contract that year, women were forced to sign off on a requirement to report a pregnancy as soon as the condition was known, so the school department could remove the woman from the classroom. So, in some ways, I guess, we have come a long way. I taught through court-ordered desegregation in Lower Roxbury. I participated in a Boston Teachers’ Union contract strike where most of us were driven more by improving children’s education than benefits, although our benefits were stingy. Over all these years the same problems exist in our country without lasting solutions. And now we’re seeing both the good and the bad characteristics of governance, politics and local, parental control. In reality, we know how to educate a child: Make learning fit the individual child; include rich and relevant, hands-on experiences; use phonics, but include some of the good that holistic methods enables; consistently make parents and the community part of the planning and learning activities; measure the child’s starting point each year and then, at internals, measure again to assure that learning and growth is happening, among many other sensible actions. Simply understand, and care, that our jobs as leaders, teachers, parents and community are to help our children and young adults grow into satisfied, reasoning, capable, and engaged citizens. Forgive my long-windedness! Who controls the schools has been batted around for over 100 years. What’s required is including all the stakeholders and putting the educated child first.
Beautifully said!!! And thanks for sharing your experiences and learnings! Happiness to you and yours!
Thanks, Bob. I’m embarrassed that I went on for so long, but it’s so disheartening to witness the same situation and hear the same talk that’s been going on for decades. Now I’m old enough to see the trend line….it’s flat. Take care and let’s continue to communicate. I so appreciate it.
As an old ex-Bostonian myself, I felt an affinity! Best to you and yours, and again, thanks for sharing.
I started teaching in Boston in 1975, the second year of school desegregation. My first position was teaching Spanish in the same school where I had attended junior high; some of my colleagues had been my teachers. That BTU strike happened in my last year of high school; the union itself was only a few years old.
We didn’t have a lot, but no one bothered us in the classroom, either. My principal had risen from a classroom teacher through the ranks and held a Masters from Harvard from before the HGSE was filled with privatizers.
Funny, though, when opponents of an elected school committee press their point they single out the racism of Kerrigan and Hicks. They served in the 70’s and their obstinacy against desegregation was what led to court intervention. The mayoral takeover came twenty years later, after something that is often elided over.
Good summary of the history here: https://www.electthebsc.org/history
Of the 12 points you made about the NYC school system, # 4 stirred my memory when I saw the name Eli Broad a low level billionaire from California who also had a distain for educators who met with Joel klein soon after Bloomberg became mayor. According to Joe Williams who was a reporter for the NY Daily News who wrote the book, “Cheating our kids, How Politics and Greed Ruin Education.” has an eye openingh section on Eli Broad. Now what is hysterically funny if it were not so sad is the fact that the “leadership Academy” that was supposed to train future school leaders to replace the principals and superintendents who were grounded in education and not business were being trained by the SAME principals and superintendents that Broad so despised.