This month marks the 15th anniversary of the landmark state legislation that ended the dysfunctional New York City system of decentralized governance of the public schools and replaced it with mayoral control.
Back then, the law was meant as an experiment to see whether greater authority and accountability vested in the mayor would prove to be a better system than the previous one. By most objective measurements it is, although it’s not without its flaws and failures.
Today Mayor de Blasio, like his predecessor, resists a basic element of the governance balance. In creating mayoral control, the state Legislature — led by the Assembly — did not mean to establish mayoral dictatorship.
The enterprise of public education is unique to city government services because it is intensely personal. One million children are entrusted to our schools every day by their parents or guardians.
So it is vitally important that these families and their communities have a shared role in the advancement of education policies and priorities.
The decentralized system created in 1969 was built to fail. It was a mishmash of political deals brokered by Mayor John Lindsay and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. It sought to appease those who advocated for absolute community control, and those, notably Albert Shanker and his teachers union, who wanted to continue to have centralized decision-making.
In the end, there was virtually no integrated accountability at all. The mayor was responsible for proposing a budget and making funding available. He had two representatives on a seven-member central Board of Education that set citywide policy.
The chancellor was selected by the Board of Education and did not report to the mayor. School-district superintendents were hired by each of the elected local school boards and were not answerable to the chancellor or the Board of Education. The School Construction Authority was virtually unaccountable, as well.
The 2002 mayoral-control law sought to change all that by creating coherent lines of authority leading to the Mayor’s Office. So in this construct, the mayor appoints the chancellor, who presides over the city school system.
The chancellor, in turn, appoints the 31 local community district superintendents, who administer the day-to-day needs of the schools in their districts, including appointing school principals and staff.
Yet critical to this construct was preserving a voice for parents and communities. Hence the Panel for Educational Policy was created with a majority of appointees from the mayor’s office and appointees of the five borough presidents.
The PEP is empowered to vet and approve, or disapprove, policy initiatives of the chancellor, with public input. Community education councils for each school district were also created to give parents a voice and avenue of redress for issues arising in their neighborhood schools.
Both de Blasio and Mayor Michael Bloomberg before him fully embraced their more centralized powers in presiding over education, but each has given lip service at best to the participation of the public or even the local superintendents. They fail to realize that effective governance of schools requires both buck-stopping accountability at the top and meaningful involvement in education policy at the grass roots.
The ultimate consumers of our education system are our students and their families. They matter and they count most of all. Their opinions need to be valued and their voices must not be stifled because they may be contrary to what a mayor wants to do, or because City Hall lacks sufficient interest.
Very often it is parents who have the best ideas. At the end of the day, a successful mayor needs to be a strong leader — but also a good listener.
Steven Sanders served as an assemblyman from Manhattan from 1978-2006 and oversaw state legislation that created mayoral control of the city’s schools in 2002.