Mayors and Public Schools: Another Collision

There is greater clamor for mayors to take over the pubic schools:

Mayors increasingly seek to take charge of schools

The statistics tell a sorry tale about the public schools in America's capital.

A majority of fourth- and eighth-graders are failing to read or do math at basic levels... Just 43 percent of students graduate from high school in five years...

...In most places, elected school boards and the superintendents they hire govern school districts. It is a structure set up about a century ago to insulate schools from political strife and corruption in city government...

...City leaders and their allies make the case that better schools help make cities prosper. Mayors say they are better equipped to take on the infighting, inertia and high turnover rates associated with school boards and the superintendents who report to them.

The inherent structure of pubic schools is flawed. Their chief executive, the superintendent, reports to a board and has no base in a system that is inherently political. Mayors and governors report to the electorate, and have considerable political influence within their own government or when negotiating with others.

Consequently, when it comes to political leadership, particularly in fiscal matters, school districts must rely on their elected board members. School board members, while elected public officials, never muster the influence of their compatriots in other legislative bodies, or the elected mayor or governor, their counterparts as executives.

The attack on public education increased over the past thirty years. It was compounded by California style tax limits, Proposition Thirteen, and inadequate funding in the face of overwhelming poverty and diminishing tax bases in older cities like Chicago and Providence, Rhode Island.

There are two solutions. One is to turn over education to politicians, the mayors and the city council.

The other is to recognize the inherent organizational flaws and then figure out how and why some school districts work effectively within this structure, simultaneously educating children and keeping politics out of the classroom.

Lets study the best districts academically. My guess as to the findings:

• High per-pupil expenditures
• Low levels of poverty
• High levels of parental involvement
• Low numbers of parent bitter about their own experiences as pupils
• Business support for athletics and cultural activities
• Children with an abundance of role models in and out of the home who represent the benefits of education
• Lots of computers that work
• Predominantly white student populations (race and poverty go together)
• Teachers with advanced degrees and a high level of continuing education
• Higher than average teacher salaries when compared to the local economy
• A modern physical plant
• No interference from the local mayor or city council

For over thirty years I said, "There is nothing a mayor can do that has the impact on a city that is as great as the public school system."

The mayor needs to be a partner, a protector, an advocate for the public school system. Any mayor who lets a week go by without having some contact, involvement or support with public education is not doing the job.

Comments

[Beth]

As a teacher educator, I can tell you that your guess is most often correct. However, I think we need to focus on what works for children of color in this country who are more likely to live in poverty and attend schools where teachers are underprepared. "Underprepared" is actually euphamistic here. Many of these so-called teachers have little preparation, if indeed any at all. And before people begin to post that not all teacher education institutions prepare teachers well, I agree. However, many do. So you get a variety of factors that can doom children's education from the start: crumbling schools, underprepared teachers who are paid meagerly, poverty (which, as you point out, is tied to race in the US and has continued to rise as social programs have been cut), and a pervasive culture of violence. Add to this a fixation on standardized testing and the punitive environment of NCLB and we wonder how students from these schools ever succeed. But, and this is important, they can and they do. It takes extraordinary schools and extraordinary teachers and principals. What can we learn from these? How do some schools treat their students humanely above all and instill in them a love of learning. Here's a little bit to add to your spring reading list: 1) Deborah Meier's In Schools We Trust. 2) Jonathon Kozol's The Shame of the Nation: Apartheid Schooling in America. Anything by those two authors could be read by the layperson and might give insight to the struggle to provide meaningful educative experiences to ALL of our children.

[Brian]

One more thing you find at high achieving schools where the focus is on deep understanding of what student learn: lack of emphasis on standardized testing and more focus on performance accountability, portfolios of student work, learning records compiled by teacher and parent, and public student exhibitions of work (every Friday night the football team displays what they practiced, but not the history team or the English team; no, for them, abstract scores are released, like if you only released the footballer's 40 yard dash times).
Take, for example, Deborah Meier's Central Park East Secondary School (when she ran it, she has since moved on to other schools and positions).
The school specifically did not focus on raising test scores as she knew this was irrelevant to the goals of a good school. Instead they focused on five habits of mind tying the kids' learning to intrinsic motivation and deep understanding with a less is more approach to content. The focus was on "discovery" not coverage of the material. The result: 90% plus graduation rates, most going on to and graduating from four year schools and becoming doctors, lawyers, architects, teachers, etc. This in an overwhelmingly minority area. The test scores? Didn't really budge that much because, guess what, they measure such a narrow range of abilities, and the tests reflect a measurement gap due to the history of how they are constructed. Thus the focus on them by most of America is misguided and foolish ( and for some people a neurotic obsession).
Let's have some good old fashioned progressive accountability in our schools like the great progressive John Dewey would be fighting for today.
Where are all those progressives on accountability? George Miller and Russ Feingold and so many others in Congress? Clueless. Of the national politicians, only Nader got it right, recognizing that the teacher and administrator should be in charge of accountability, not the corporation, focusing on teacher created instruments to better reflect outward the thinking and learning of each child.
As Meier told me recently, before speaking at UW-Madison, many of the progressives in Congress are technocrats when it comes to their emphasis on abstract numbers.
We need to get away from that. As long as school reform is tied to an early 20th century testing model that has little support from the cognitive sciences, the best teaching is going to be straight jacketed and schools are going to continue to be, as the fine educational theorist Seymour Sarason maintained, boring in this country.