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A Fading School Reform? Mayoral Control Is Ending in Another City


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School & District Management


A FADING SCHOOL REFORM? MAYORAL CONTROL IS ENDING IN ANOTHER CITY

By Libby Stanford — June 27, 2023 7 min read
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson delivers his inaugural address after taking the
oath of office on May 15, 2023. Johnson will have to oversee the city school
district's transition from mayoral control to a fully elected school board.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AP
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Chicago’s newly elected mayor Brandon Johnson has a major transition ahead of
him over the next three years—as the city’s schools undergo a full leadership
restructuring.

Starting in November 2024, Chicago voters will elect their first school board
members in nearly 30 years, after state lawmakers passed a law backed by the
city teachers’ union that phases out the mayor’s control over the city’s public
schools.

By 2027, voters will have elected all 21 members of the board. It will be a
major change from the past three decades, during which the city’s mayor
appointed the district’s board and its CEO under an education reform popularized
in the 1990s.


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It will also be the latest example of the fading popularity of mayoral control
of schools, a reform that took root in some cities across the country in an
effort to boost accountability and urban school performance.

Eleven districts in nine states currently operate under a mayoral control model.
It looks different for each one. In some districts, like Chicago, the mayor has
full authority to appoint all members of the school board and the district’s
superintendent, called the CEO. In others, like New York City, the mayor
appoints some members while others are elected.

At its start, education reform advocates claimed that mayoral control made it
easier to hold school districts accountable for low performance because one
person, rather than a group of people, would be held responsible, said Celeste
Lay, a political science professor at Tulane University who has studied mayoral
control in schools.

“It’s almost always tied to the argument that the schools are performing badly,
that the schools are bad schools, and if we instill accountability that alone
will improve schools,” Lay said. “The mayor will then make it a priority and see
to it that the schools are more successful.”





But the model has shown mixed results over the years, and in some places, it has
failed to maintain community support. Earlier this year the Boston’s city
council passed a petition to the state legislature that would end mayoral
control of the school district and transition to a fully elected school board.
Mayor Michelle Wu vetoed that measure, according to the Boston Globe.

In Chicago, the end of mayoral control is the result of decades of opposition
from teachers’ union leaders, including influential former president Karen
Lewis. Opposition intensified as then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 schools in
2013.

The school closures, which affected primarily Black and Hispanic students,
followed the city’s decision to close the Cabrini-Green public housing project
in the early 2000s. For Chicago’s Black and Hispanic families, school closures
under Emanuel and mayoral control felt like a threat to their livelihood, said
Sally Nuamah, a political science professor at Northwestern University who has
studied the effects of mass school closures on Black Americans.

“This is about the fate of Black and brown communities,” Nuamah said. “And once
people understood that, whether their schools closed or not, they could see why
they should be invested in this issue and engaged in the resistance.”



DOES MAYORAL CONTROL WORK?

Mayoral control is one part of the larger education reform movement that swept
school systems during the 1990s and 2000s. That movement included the
introduction of school choice measures and charter schools, the bipartisan No
Child Left Behind law, and standardized test-driven accountability for school
performance.

At the time, mayoral control supporters argued that the traditional model of
electing school board members failed to hold schools accountable and give all
voters a say over what happens in their schools, Lay said. School board
elections tend to have lower voter turnout than mayoral elections, which
supporters said led to certain groups—namely teachers’ unions—exerting an
outsized influence over school board elections.





Mayoral control opened the doors to school districts operating more like
businesses, with the mayor as the district’s CEO, Lay said.

“It’s kind of a CEO model where a single person, the mayor, can then be held
responsible for school success or school failure,” she said. “Versus with school
boards, school board candidates or school board officers would argue they can’t
be held accountable because they’re just one voice on a board.”

School districts in a handful of cities, including New Haven, Conn.; Providence,
R.I.; Trenton, N.J.; and Yonkers, N.Y., were under mayoral control prior to the
1990s, according to a 2013 study from the Center for American Progress. Boston
became the first major city to adopt the model in 1992, followed by Chicago in
1995 and Baltimore in 1997.

Detroit, Oakland, Calif., Harrisburg, Pa., and Los Angeles all adopted the model
at one point but reverted back to traditional school models.

Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, the District of Columbia, Hartford,
Indianapolis, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, and Yonkers still operate under
some form of mayoral control.

Data on student performance in those cities show mixed results. In Boston,
4th-grade student reading and math scores steadily increased from 2003 to 2019,
but in Baltimore, scores are lower than they were in 2009, according to the
National Assessment of Educational Progress. The city’s math and reading
performance in recent years has lagged that of most other large cities.





Either way, it’s impossible to attribute gains or losses to mayoral control
because so many other education reforms happened around the same time that
mayoral control was introduced, Lay said. The test scores could be a reflection
of any number of other changes that happened locally, such as school choice
policies, like vouchers and charter schools, and increased accountability
requirements, like more frequent standardized testing and more rigorous
curriculum.

“What ends up happening is that supporters of mayoral control point to
improvements as ‘here, look, this is great because look at these cities where
test scores have improved, graduation rates have improved, and it’s all because
of mayoral control,’” Lay said. “And opponents look at cities and say, ‘Look,
the scores have gone down and it’s because of mayoral control.’ It allows both
sides to make the arguments they want to make.”

A Flourish table




THE FUTURE OF MAYORAL CONTROL

Johnson, the Chicago mayor, has his work cut out for him over his first term as
mayor, as he’ll have to navigate the transition from mayoral control to a
21-person elected school board. But the change is something Johnson has long
supported as a former teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer.

In Chicago, the push against mayoral control was propelled by Lewis, who died of
brain cancer in 2021. Lewis argued that the model led to the mass school
closures under Emanuel.

“Clearly this kind of cowboy mentality mayoral control is out of control,” Lewis
told NBC Chicago during a 2013 protest ahead of the school board’s vote to close
50 schools.

Lewis brought the teachers’ union into a more activist role in city politics,
Nuamah said. She also ran for mayor in 2015, but had to drop out of because of
her battle with cancer.





Chicago’s departure from the mayoral control model could be a sign that more
cities will consider reverting to traditional school governance models, Nuamah
said.

“Chicago often plays an important role in shaping policies or diffusing policies
for good or for bad across other cities,” Nuamah said.

Mayoral control opponents have argued the model takes away from democratic
ideals by not allowing voters to have a say in their school board
representatives, Lay said.

Opponents feel “that mayoral control, charter schools, these other kinds of
reforms, really damages that relationship between the community at large and the
school itself,” Lay said. “It makes it seem like more of a consumer choice
rather than a community institution.”

Other cities have had similar frustrations.

In Boston, a majority of voters agreed with a ballot question in November 2022
that asked if the appointed school committee structure should change to an
elected one. The question doesn’t provide for an automatic shift but it signals
political support for one, which the council capitalized on when it approved a
measure to make the change.





But in vetoing the measure, Wu, Boston’s mayor, said the shift would disrupt the
city’s schools during a period of change following pandemic closures.

“I believe that a dramatic overhaul of our selection process for the Boston
School Committee would detract from the essential work ahead,” Wu said in her
veto letter.

Lay wouldn’t be surprised if more cities abandoned the model in the next few
years as people push back on other education reform movements like standardized
testing and school choice measures.

“We’re seeing more division around education policy from a partisan perspective,
but yet both sides are pushing against that sort of accountability, standardized
testing, school choice, regime of the early 2000s,” Lay said.

Libby Stanford
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Reporter,  Education Week
Libby Stanford is a reporter for Education Week.
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