Mayoral Control of Schools Under Scrutiny

The New York City Department of Education may be responsible for over 1.1 million students and more than 1400 schools, but it answers to a single man—the city’s mayor.

With the end of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s second and final term on the horizon, mayoral control of the schools is coming under increasingly close scrutiny. City schools have undergone many bureaucratic changes since Bloomberg took charge of the system. Bloomberg petitioned for mayoral control early in his administration, and he was granted that power by a 2002 vote of the City Council.

While the administration lauds mayoral control, parents and educators—whom the legislation affects on a day-to-day basis—give the system, which the administration has reorganized three times within five years, mixed reviews. Harriet Barnes, president of the Local Community Education Council, speaking last October about the variety of codified schools that have been created in the city, said, “Ask the mayor, because this school thing is his baby.”

Throughout the city, many parents, teachers, and school officials recognized a need for change in 2001, when the system was decentralized and community school boards held control of local schools. Under mayoral control, the system was again centralized and the Board of Education, a seven-member board appointed by the mayor and borough presidents that met twice a month, was replaced by the Panel for Education Policy. The 14-member panel is made up of eight members appointed by the mayor and five by the borough presidents—these members must be parents of children in city schools. The PEP has a public meeting once a month and is responsible for approving standards and policies for educational achievement and student performance, as well as overseeing the estimated annual operating budget and the DOE capital plan.

Bloomberg gained the power to appoint the chancellor Joel Klein and 32 Community Education Councils, which comprised primarily of parents from each of the community school districts and took the place of community school boards. With Bloomberg’s increased emphasis on accountability and high standards in education, graduation rates and tests scores have improved overall.

While concerned parties across the board recognized the need for change, some said the DOE’s trademark trial-and-error tack for rapid action jeopardized the quality of the reorganizations. “I appreciate the inefficiencies and patronism of the previous decentralized system he [Bloomberg] inherited,” said Lenore Michaels, co-president of the PTA at P.S. 163 on West 97th Street. “I appreciate Bloomberg’s and Klein’s efforts to make tangible improvements, however in their haste to act, they have created unnecessary chaos for parents and schools.”

Many have expressed a need for more checks and balances in the system—without which, local advocate Leonie Haimson finds—there are “almost dictatorial powers being exercised by the mayor and chancellor.”

The DOE under Bloomberg’s control has made many efforts to give voice to more people from the schools’ communities, circulating surveys to parents, teachers, and principals and holding open meetings on upcoming changes. But for some, these efforts have apparently not been enough. The advocacy group Class Size Matters, of which Haimson is executive director, produced its own parents’ survey, in order to address issues that it believed the DOE had left out. Of the 604 New York City parents surveyed by Class Size Matters in a telephone poll, 58 percent of respondents said that they were in favor of ending or amending the current mayoral control policy. A separate online poll of 1159 parents also found strong support for a policy change. The 2007 annual DOE survey did not question parents on mayoral control.

Some specific policies implemented under the Bloomberg administration have made parents particularly weary of mayoral control. For example, frustrated with a newly implemented middle school application process, Bijou Miller, a local parent, called the problem “just one of many reasons that mayoral control must be really analyzed by the state before they sign on again in ’09.” Difficulty coordinating school tours with testing days, a handbook that Miller found to be “rewritten but not improved,” and a late response date for students to be assigned their middle schools were top concerns. “It is apparent,” Miller wrote, “that the DOE has haphazardly rolled out this new model and it is, like most other initiatives that the DOE has introduced in the past few years, a disaster.”

In 2009, the legislation designating control of the schools to the mayor will expire, and it will be up to City Council to decide what will happen next. The council can vote to renew the policy as is, modify the powers allotted to the mayor, or simply let the legislation expire. Control of the schools would then revert to a mayor and borough presidents-appointed Board of Education and community school boards.

alicia.outing@columbiaspectator.com