Mayoral control of the New York City public schools doesn’t expire until June 2009, but with the state legislature seemingly in the mood to oppose anything Mayor Bloomberg is in favor of, the Mayor has already started a public relations push. I happened to be at home one day last week and saw a commercial on the subject, albeit obliquely on the subject, on daytime television. And in late June Crain’s NY Business reported that in a breakfast for business leaders the Mayor “vowed to fight for renewal of mayoral control of the school system when the law authorizing it expires.” “It's hard for the Legislature not to reauthorize something where parents say, ‘My kids for the first time in memory are getting the kind of education they need to compete in the world,’” the Mayor is quoted as saying. Another publication quoted the Mayor as not wanting to go backward on education. Well, it isn’t hard for the New York State legislature to do anything, regardless of how good or bad it is for the city’s children. They don’t care. They don’t have to. But even if they did, it isn’t clear Mayoral control should simply be extended as it.
I don’t want to go backward either, but I do want to continue moving forward. And it may be that those are the choices, because we may not be standing still. According to the New York Sun“the City Council, the principals union, and the teachers union have all convened working groups charged with proposing what to do when City Hall's control expires in 2009. While saying no decision has been reached, some members of the working groups say they are inclined either to balance the mayor's control with independent oversight or squash it altogether.”
Mayor Bloomberg’s own words demonstrate the reason why change has not gone far enough to assure the future. “Most of the biggest pieces of our school reforms are now in place,” Crains reports Mr. Bloomberg said. “From here on out, what we'll be doing will be deepening and refining.” With 49% of the children graduating from high school in four years instead of 41% there has been “a sea change in how to run a public school system.” I guess we’re done here, and given the effort and resources the Mayor applied to get this far, I suppose it’s to be expected that he thinks so. But contrast that with what David Gunn, the former president of the New York City Transit Authority, gave as a reason for leaving the job after helping to turn the agency around after its darkest days. Touring the system with his replacement, he kept pointing out the improvements compared with when he had arrived, but the new president kept noticing the remaining deficiencies. That is why Gunn, a very smart and dedicated man, believed new leadership is periodically required.
Although I do hope we do not go back to an unaccountable Board of Education, its former members, like Mayor Bloomberg, could make a reasonable argument that the public school system circa 2000 was the best that it could have been given its circumstances and history. During the 1990s the city’s schools were faced with a surge of additional enrollees as the children of the baby boomers entered school, most the children of the poor or immigrants with limited English language skills. During Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure enrollment has been declining as that wave passes, removing some of the pressure.
During the 1990s the city’s schools, which had done relatively little hiring since the 1970s fiscal crisis, were faced with a wave of retirements by qualified teachers hired before the crisis occurred. The BOE was forced to recruit teachers, both to replace the retirees and to offset rising enrollment, during an economic boom that featured rising wages and the lowest unemployment rate in 25 years, and at a time when — as a result of the baby bust of the early 1970s — the number of Americans reaching age 22, the age at which one exits college, was low. The low point for recent college graduates, before the children of the baby boomers (Gen Y) began completing their education, was 1997. The result was a teacher shortage, both in NYC and nationally. During Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure, on the other hand, it seems that every young person in the United States has decided to live in New York City. I’ve met a couple who came here during the recession and entered teaching because it was the only job they could get.
During the teacher shortage of the 1990s, New York State cut public school aid to New York City when money was tight while increasing it for the rest of the state, and kept the gap wide ever after. The city’s public school spending was far below the national average as a share of its residents’ personal income, and its spending and teacher salaries were far lower than the rest of the metropolitan region, which solved its problems by recruiting the best teachers out of the city’s schools.
While Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have improved the schools, therefore, they were in a better position to do so than those who came before. And while a new Mayor and Chancellor, with a new set of eyes, may push for additional improvements, there is no guarantee that this will happen — even if Mayoral control is retained.
Indeed, it is unlikely that the next Mayor will care as much about the schools as Mayor Bloomberg, given — as Bloomberg himself once said, that only 20 percent of New York City voters care about the city’s schools, and just about everyone in the rest of the state remains hostile to them. Given a near monopoly, and the lack of competing examples in similar circumstances, it will be easy for the next Mayor to not only say the schools are good enough but also that they are better than can be expected under the circumstances.
And there are plenty of interests that would like nothing better than to go back to the old system of having no one completely in charge, and no one completely accountable. For example it is clear the teacher’s union liked things the way they were, with teachers permitted to teach how, what, and if they wanted and not given a hard time as long as they didn’t make waves. It is not hard to envision a Board controlled by the union frustrating the next Mayor’s policies to hold them hostage to, say, the diversion of money out of the classroom and into earlier retirement. It is not hard to envision the replacement of “high stakes tests” with a simple assertion that the children are learning all they need, and all they have to, and that is all anyone need to know. It is not hard to envision a Mayor deciding, in that case, to divert funding elsewhere, and simply state, with absolutely no way to say otherwise, that things are good enough. No Mayoral control, no Mayoral responsibility.
The way to make people care, as I have said before, is to replace a monopoly Mayor Department of Education with three competing public school systems — one run by an appointee of the Mayor, one run by an appointee of the City Council and one run by an appointee of the Borough Presidents. Each would receive equal resources per child, or per child with similar needs and background, and each child would be zoned for a school in each system. The systems would compete for students, who the money would follow, and qualified and motivated teachers, who the students would follow. Increased support for non-public schools, and charter schools, would be on top of these three systems. With a direct comparison available it will be easy to tell if one school system was failing relative to the others, allowing multiple avenues of accountability. The elected officials who appointed the leaders of the lower quality school system could be criticized or perhaps unseated, or teachers and children could simply move to one of the options that was doing better. Competition between ambitious elected officials is a way to ensure that schools remain near the top of the city’s priorities, rather than resuming their place at the bottom aside for special schools for the elite and the insiders.
Moreover, with a choice of competing labor contracts, teaching philosophies, leaders and organizations, teachers and students would be able to move to a system that wasn’t necessarily better, but was more in line with their own preferences. Much of the criticism of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein has been advanced by those with a (not so well) hidden agenda that is contrary to the interests of the children. But much of it is simply a natural reaction to having a particular set of decisions rammed down people’s throats, with no choice and no voice. A Board wouldn’t add a voice, it would add an obstacle to improvement. But having three people in charge, instead of one person in charge, would mean teachers and parents would no longer be powerless. If such a system were in place today the Mayor and Chancellor’s more legitimate critics would not be complaining. They would have simply moved on.
With Mayoral control set to end in two years, and a transition required to anything that will replace it, it is important to address this issue now. And the people who need to address the issue are the Mayoral candidates and Mayor Bloomberg himself. The current Mayor should have a realistic view of what will happen to the school system when he is gone, as long as it is a de facto monopoly, with Mayoral control or without. Better three people each in charge of a competing system than one person not in charge of a monopoly system, and not accountable either. Possible future Mayors should think of what is best for the schools, instead of realizing how easy it would be to reward those in a position to help them at the expense of the children. I fear a bidding war, with the children and the future used as collateral.
There is no question what the state legislature and those who support it would want. A lower share of state school aid for New York City schools and lower pay for newly hire teachers who would be less qualified in exchange for earlier retirement for existing staff on more lucrative terms. The recreation of multiple steps in any decision, and the ability of anyone to say they were in no position to do anything. The recreation of fiscal promotion, which was dishonestly called social promotion, by stealth. An avenue for those who know how to work the system to get their kids in to the best schools and into the classrooms of the best teachers, with the poor left with the worst. And an end to any measurement of educational progress, and any pressure to improve. I’m not making up the future; I’m describing the past. I don’t want to go back, but we are going to go somewhere.