General News
Governance commission: What should be done about mayoral control?
Dec 6, 2007 11:34 AM
UFT President Randi Weingarten testifies at the opening session of the state Assembly’s New York City Commission on School Governance.
With Albany legislation authorizing mayoral control of the city schools due to expire in 2009, the question on the minds of state legislators is, “Do we end it, mend it or extend it?”
UFT President Randi Weingarten was first to testify at the Nov. 29 opening session of the New York City Public Advocate’s Commission on School Governance. It is working in tandem with the state Assembly and plans to make recommendations to the Legislature well in advance of the present school governance law’s potential sunsetting.
Weingarten cautioned that any concrete recommendations she would make had to wait upon the conclusions of the UFT’s own Task Force on School Governance, which is engaging “in a unionwide discussion and including other school stakeholders, most particularly parents and community leaders, in our deliberations.”
She said the deliberative process will include hearings, set for January in all five boroughs, as “a series of sounding boards; we’re not interested in a gripe fest or in finger pointing. We want to pinpoint what works, what can work better and what we need to do to get school governance right to enable the best educational opportunities for our kids.”
She also said that framing the question as mayoral control or not is too simplistic.
“Mayors have run the schools for much of the last century and it’s a political fiction to think they did not,” Weingarten said. “In fact, for most of the history of the city’s school system, the mayor appointed each and every member of the central school board, and when he didn’t, he virtually appointed the schools chancellor. What did change, and what we initially applauded, was Mayor’s Bloomberg’s agreement in 2001 to unambiguously say he would be accountable.”
The downside of that pledge: “a lack of checks and balances, transparency and public deliberation, despite the 2002 legislation’s being chock full of them.”
Weingarten also used the last three top-down reorganizations the chancellor undertook in the last seven years as an illustration of this approach.
“Where was the analysis of what worked and didn’t work in the regions or the empowerment zone?” Weingarten said. “Where is the analysis of whether a fully decentralized structure of 1,500 schools, essentially standing alone and reporting to a computer system, will work to help all kids achieve. To date we’ve had no systematic public accounting, other than, “We ended [the old reorganization] because it was so successful.”
She noted that “there is no universally agreed-to definition of progress or success in schools, and so the administration has fallen back on default measures like scores on standardized tests. What’s been lacking in each reorganization is a citywide discussion on just what constitutes success, she said. “The mayor famously said, ‘Judge me on the results.’ Which results?”
Weingarten raised the issue of oversight as well. “The city has no independent source of school data, and a nonpartisan public body akin to the city’s Independent Budget Office for analyzing that data, to use as mile-markers to act as a check-and-balance against education department claims or gauge its successes or even guarantee that we’re all talking the same language.
“For me, personally,” Weingarten concluded, “the question is: How do we maintain a mayoral responsibility while also institutionalizing the checks-and-balances so that other stakeholders have voice and responsibility? It’s about fostering collaboration and a sense of common cause, in the quest of increasing educational opportunities for students.”
Members of the commission included Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum; former Board of Education President Stephen Aiello; former Giuliani Commissioner of Social Services Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, currently CEO of Safe Space; and David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York.
Come learn, listen and speak out
The UFT Task Force on School Governance will convene public forums in the five boroughs from January through March 2008. For dates and locations as they become available, go to www.uft.org/calendar.
The views of educators, parents and community members are needed to help form recommendations for future school governance that will effectively serve the educational and developmental needs of the children of New York City.
