Mayors Get Mixed Grades in Running City Schools

It’s becoming a popular idea for the seemingly intractable problems of big urban school systems: Let the mayor take over.

Sometimes it has helped, as in Chicago and Boston. Sometimes it has produced mixed results, as in New York City. And sometimes it has failed, as in Detroit.

During the last 15 years or so, mayors -- who know well the importance of education to voters and to the future of their cities-- have increasingly stepped into school policy-making, eroding a century-long tradition of school district independence.

Now it could be Los Angeles’ turn.

Mayor James K. Hahn has proposed adding at least three appointees to the seven elected officials who oversee the Los Angeles Unified School District. Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, Hahn’s challenger in the May 17 election, has called for giving the mayor “ultimate control and oversight” of the district. The City Council and Board of Education are examining district governance as well.

As these ideas are considered, city and school district officials may find some cautionary tales in the experiences of other cities. Even the successes, with their high-profile mayors and their long traditions of far-reaching City Hall power, might not be replicable in Los Angeles, say experts in school system governance. An experiment in Oakland to add mayoral appointees to the elected board flopped. Voters in Detroit last fall decided to ditch their appointed school board and return to a system of elected trustees.

Michael Kirst, professor of education and business at Stanford University, said such factors as a school system’s academic and financial track record, the political climate and even the personality and priorities of the mayor help shape the nature and outcome of a mayoral takeover.

By the time the Illinois Legislature gave Mayor Richard M. Daley control of the Chicago public schools in 1995, the system was by most accounts a mess. It was running a $1.8-billion deficit, schools were crumbling and student test scores were in the basement. A few years earlier, then-Education Secretary William Bennett had called Chicago schools the worst in the nation.

Daley won authority to appoint the school board and hire the superintendent and other top school officials. He reassigned 100 City Hall workers to the schools and named his chief of staff, Gery Chico, president of the school board.

The mayor helped raise money for schools, ended social promotion, required homework, eased labor unrest and concentrated on raising test scores in the lowest-performing schools.

Although the schools posted academic gains, their largely impoverished students still remain below national norms. Only 23% of Chicago students were reading at standard levels before the takeover; now that number is “in the mid-30s,” Chico said. Eighth-grade scores are the highest they’ve been in 15 years.

“Over the 10 years, you’ll see some ups and downs, but the trend overall is definitely upward,” said Chico, an attorney.

Stanford’s Kirst said it is clear that mayoral control has brought financial stability and other improvements to Chicago but said it is impossible to determine whether the academic gains can be attributed to the mayor.

“When it comes to student achievement, the big question is always, ‘What causes what?’ There are so many factors, so many things going on that you can’t really say” whether it was mayoral control that raised the test scores, Kirst said.

But Kenneth K. Wong, a Vanderbilt University professor of public policy and education, attributes successes in Chicago and Boston to the right kind of mayoral takeover -- with clear authority and a highly motivated municipal leader. Those school systems have the longest tradition -- a decade or so -- of mayoral control.

“The key for these two cities is that the mayors have been willing to put their political capital into” reforming the schools, Wong said. “Some mayors have said they would but have been reluctant” or were not given enough authority to get deeply involved, he said, citing Detroit. In that city, schools did not improve under a system in which the mayor and governor appointed the board members.

Boston voters gave their mayor the authority to replace the elected school board members with his appointees in 1991 and later rejected a ballot measure to reestablish an elected board. The city also finances the school system, a longtime practice that gives the mayor even more power.

Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who has made school reform a top priority of his administration, has worked with his like-minded school board and the district’s superintendent, Thomas Payzant, to reorganize the schools and try to close the achievement gap between middle-class white and low-income minority students.

“Some people still think having an elected board would cure all our ills,” said Jonathan Palumbo, a Boston Public Schools spokesman. “But the continuity of leadership we’ve had with the mayor, the superintendent and the school committee all working together helps tremendously when you are trying to reform an entire school district all at the same time.”

New York City’s Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg found struggling schools and rapid turnover in the chancellor’s office when he persuaded the state Legislature to give him broader powers over the nation’s largest school system in 2002. That included authority to abolish the school board in favor of an advisory panel comprising his appointees and the city’s five borough presidents and to make the school system into a city department. Bloomberg hired as chancellor Joel I. Klein, a former assistant U.S. attorney general in the Clinton administration, who cut district offices and boosted teacher training, among other things.

But education experts say it is too soon to tell whether the schools will fare better in the long term. That is true in part because the system is large and complicated by fierce politics and entrenched unions and in part because Bloomberg has been in charge for only a short, tumultuous time.

Results so far are mixed: Reading scores have remained generally flat, while math scores are rising, a trend that began before Bloomberg took over.

In California, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown recently called his experiment with adding appointees to the seven-member elected school board a failure.

Most who have studied so-called hybrid boards -- part appointed, part elected -- agree they don’t work.

“The elected board members jealously guarded their position and tended to marginalize the appointees,” said Brown, a former California governor. “So, instead of increasing mayoral influence, it tended to polarize the board.”

California has a stronger tradition of school district independence than some large Eastern cities, said Thomas Timar, associate professor of educational policy at UC Davis. The power of local districts to steer their own course also has gradually eroded, leaving little leeway for whoever is in charge, Timar said. Sacramento has control over everything from curriculum to enrollment policies and provides most district funding.

Still, the idea remains appealing to mayors and others who think they could improve accountability and efficiency in the schools. Los Angeles billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad’s education foundation investigated several mayoral takeovers around the country, concluding they are having a positive effect and could work here.

“You have got to have one visible person accountable to the public,” Broad said. “Cities aren’t perfectly run, but they are far more efficient than school districts.”

Broad is pushing for state legislation that would give mayors of Los Angeles, Oakland and Fresno the power to appoint their school boards and hire superintendents.

That idea is likely to meet resistance.

Scott Plotkin, executive director of the California School Boards Assn. and a former school board member, said calls for mayoral control are “total nonsense and an incredible distraction” from solving urban schools’ struggles with budget cuts, crowding and large numbers of poor families.

UC Davis’ Timar said reformers need to focus on what’s important.

“The big question is: What is the best institutional arrangement that is going to fix the schools and help children with [their] real challenges?” Timar said.