Controlling interests: Politicians vie for power over urban schools
By:
Brian Taylor
Locally elected governing boards represent the most fundamental element of a democratic society and are the basic embodiment of representative government.
Sound familiar? It’s not in the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution, but the concept traces its origins back through those wellsprings all the way to the Magna Carta in 1215, when King John agreed on the plains of Runnymede to limits on the power of the English throne.
Those first 21 words are the preamble to the California School Boards Association’s 2005-2006 Policy Platform section on Governance and Structure. “Governing board members,” as that bedrock document goes on to say, “are elected in nonpartisan elections by their communities to provide leadership and represent the community’s interests in the governance of neighbor[hood] schools.”
But that core value — not just of CSBA, but of public education in America — has been eroding. The seminal 1983 study, “A Nation at Risk,” brought welcome attention to problems facing the nation’s schools, but it also unleashed waves of often misguided reforms. Now, in a reversal of Progressive Era changes a century ago, when schools were taken out from the control of city bosses’ political machines, a handful of urban school districts — along with their considerable budgets and job-dispensing opportunities — have been wrested away from elected boards and turned back over to big-city mayors. Fiscal woes often led to the switch, but academic achievement was also often an issue.
The trend began in Boston in 1992, when Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s hand-picked school committee supplanted an elected board of education. Other cities followed. Most notably, Richard M. Daley superseded two decades of fitful reform of Chicago’s schools in 1995 with a mayoral takeover that itself is now in its second decade. And Michael Bloomberg rode the issue (and a multimillion-dollar campaign chest) into Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York, in 2001.
California's experience
In California, Oakland’s Jerry Brown and Fresno’s Alan Autry fell short in their bids for mayoral control. Brown won voter approval to appoint three extra delegates to the seven-member Oakland Unified School District Board of Education, but the board was reduced to an advisory role following appointment of an administrator under state authority in 2003, and Brown’s appointment power lapsed in 2004. Fresno’s Autry went to the state Legislature seeking the power to appoint governing board members, but was rejected in 2002.
Southern California real estate tycoon Eli Broad sought to revive the idea last year. Sometimes called a “venture philanthropist,” Broad and his eponymous foundation underwrite many efforts on behalf of public education. In this case, Broad sought state legislation to allow mayoral appointment of both school boards and superintendents in Fresno, Oakland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose and Sacramento. Shopping the proposal around the state Capitol, his representatives later narrowed the laundry list down to the first four cities.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Unified School District — the state’s largest — became a political punching bag in last year’s campaign for mayor. Former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg based his run in part on a vow to break up the district. He finished third behind incumbent James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa, another former Assembly Speaker, but those two adopted their own anti-schools strategies in their runoff election. Hahn sought appointment power and policies similar to Jerry Brown’s in Oakland; Villaraigosa was more vague, vowing to make the mayor’s office “ultimately responsible” for the schools without offering any specific plan.
Villaraigosa won the contest, but as he continued to study the issue other politicians jumped on school reform:
- State Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, gutted one of her pending bills to craft a vehicle for Broad’s mayoral control crusade. Only one city remained in the crosshairs: Los Angeles.
- Los Angeles City Controller Laura Chick (another Villaraigosa ally) staged a press conference in December to propose that she conduct an audit of the district — and then demanded to see district records under the state’s Public Records Act just a week later.
- Assembly Member Keith Richman, R-Northridge, ended the year with his own call to break up the district into 14 to 20 smaller pieces.
The ground continues to shift in 2006. Romero, for example, has transformed her bill yet again, this time making it a vehicle for a state study of mayoral control of urban schools in general, with a focus on Los Angeles.
“Some folks in the Legislature want to do something,” JoAnn Yee, CSBA Director for Urban Education and Outreach, said with a note of exasperation. “The message they’re sending out to people is that all the people in the state should have the civic right to elect their school board members — except the residents of urban areas.”
Unfortunately, though, misguided reform measures often amount to nothing more than feel-good, quick-fix remedies that mistake bombast for meaningful change — while abdicating the state’s bottom-line responsibility to adequately fund the public schools and then let educators do their jobs.
Building on success
And the Los Angeles Unified School District is doing its job. This is a district, after all, whose constituents gave the leadership a nearly $4 billion vote of confidence last November. Added to three previous bond measures, that gives the district — the nation’s second-largest — a $19.2 billion building and renovation program that will add 160 new schools and refurbish many more existing facilities.
LAUSD is also making progress in the most important measurement of all: student achievement. Like urban districts in general, Los Angeles started with a relatively low ranking in California’s Academic Performance Index, the foundation of the state’s accountability system for public education. But LAUSD has been on a steady upswing, consistently outdistancing the rate of progress in the state as a whole.
Elementary school scores rose 196 points — more than 37 percent, to 719 — from the first API assessment in 1999 to the most recent in 2005, the district announced as the current school year began. That nearly doubled the rate of increase statewide, which rose 19 percent to 755.
Middle schools gained 129 points — up more than 25 percent — in Los Angeles over those six years, compared to 90 points (14 percent) across the state. Los Angeles’ senior high scores were up 90 points (16 percent), compared to 75 points (12 percent) throughout the state.
“These numbers show a trend over time that demonstrates progress in all three school levels. The jump from where we started six years ago to where we are now is impressive,” LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer said in announcing the gains. “It is clear that we must still implement programs to move up our API scores at all levels, but we are encouraged with the trend.”
There’s no need to rely on Romer’s word alone. An independent audit by the Council of the Great City Schools found much to praise in those results and others.
“The Los Angeles Unified School District has made substantial progress over the last five years,” the 300-plus page report said. “It has moved forward most noticeably in improving student achievement, particularly in reading and math. All of the district’s academic indicators are moving in the right direction: the API, the California Standards Test, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. LAUSD is now one of the faster improving urban districts in California.”
Or consider the findings of the nonprofit Rand Corp. in another independent study prepared for the Commission on LAUSD Governance, a 30-member panel established last year by the school district and the Los Angeles City Council; CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin serves on the commission.
Rand’s interim report, released in December, outlines some of the changes the district has made to boost student achievement:
- 2002: The school board adopts the Open Court reading program for grades K-5 and requires all elementary schools to use it.
- 2004: The school board adopts a full-day kindergarten policy; 374 schools now have full-day kindergarten.
- Also in 2004: The school board adopts the innovative Small Learning Communities Policy, which is being implemented throughout the district.
- 2005: The school board requires all students entering ninth grade in 2012 and thereafter to follow a college prep curriculum.
“To address the student achievement gap, the board has approved a district-designed action plan,” the report also noted. “This plan includes ... equal access to the highest-quality teachers and administrators, professional development for certificated staff on culturally responsive and culturally contextualized teaching, increased parent and community engagement, as well as ongoing (internal and external) monitoring and reporting.”
Those reports were not whitewashes. The Council of Great City Schools, for example, included nearly four dozen specific recommendations in its 307 pages. “In general, however, the council’s proposals suggest that a greater emphasis is needed on integrating functions than reorganizing them,” the report said.
Rand will update its report following additional research, but the interim version limits its scope to presenting a range of options for changing district governance, not making recommendations. The Commission on LAUSD Governance that requested the Rand study is expected to complete its own final report this summer.
That document will join an ever-growing stack of studies compiled on LAUSD. The district has agreed, for example, to an independent audit of its finances and operations as part of its new pact with United Teachers Los Angeles.
UTLA is a frequent critic of the school district, and it supported the mayoral campaign of Villaraigosa — a former organizer for the union. But it opposes a mayoral takeover of the district.
“I fail to see where replacing one bureaucracy with another helps the classroom teacher,” UTLA President A.J. Duffy told Los Angeles CityBeat, an alternative newsweekly. “If we’re talking, as the mayor does, about accountability, it’s easier to hold the seven board members accountable. ... They can be elected or unelected a lot easier than electing or unelecting a mayor.”
Practical outcomes
Which brings us full circle to the core value behind public education in America, the notion that this country will be governed with the enlightened participation of its citizens through the ballot box — a notion subverted by mayoral control.
“The fundamental question,” said Yee, the CSBA expert on urban education, “is, what is broken? And what is the relationship of the ‘fix’ to mayoral control? ... What is it that we gain that could balance the loss of an important democratic principle?”
So you introduce some quick fix: “Then what?” Yee asked. “Ultimately, you’ve got to drill down to, what are you actually going to do that will really improve student achievement?”
Some would find answers in the winners of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, the million-dollar national honor that the Broad Foundation has awarded annually since 2002 to an urban school district that has narrowed the achievement gap among its students. Three of the four recipients so far —Long Beach and Garden Grove, Calif., and Houston, Texas, and have elected boards of education; only Norfolk, Va., has an appointed board, and that is named not by the mayor but by the city council, preserving at least a vestige of the broader, more diverse representation that direct election by the voters ensures.
In fact, fewer than a dozen of the nearly 15,000 school districts in the United States are under the control of mayors, according to Bill Ouchi, a professor in the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. And the people who pay the taxes to support the schools like it that way — nine of out 10 oppose mayoral control, according to a Public Education Network poll.
But what about those mayoral takeovers in Boston, Chicago, New York and a handful of other cities? Did they bring about greater fiscal control or student achievement?
“The answer is, ‘sometimes.’ And ‘sometimes’ for a short term only, for long-term success is uncommon,” concluded a study by City Mayors, an independent group studying the problems of cities worldwide. “Mayoral takeovers are a relatively fresh phenomenon,” City Mayors’ U.S. research data shows. “It can safely be said that changes of the order required to turn around urban schools requires sustained long-term efforts that are not circumscribed by term-limited mayors.”
In other words, the jury is still out in Boston, Chicago, New York and elsewhere — cities that, for all their complexity, do not face the unique challenges of Los Angeles’ mix of ethnicities, languages, cultures, and physical and governmental infrastructure.
“Los Angeles has been making recent gains in achievement scores. The board is not totally dysfunctional and unable to do anything, and they’re building a lot of buildings,” Michael W. Kirst, a professor of education, business administration and political science at Stanford University, told the Los Angeles Daily News late last year.
“It’s not clear that they’re in the same conditions as these other cities, so it’s a hard call. They’d have to study it in great detail,” added Kirst, who also served on Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown’s team of advisers during that experiment in partial mayoral control.
As a member of the Commission on LAUSD Governance, CSBA Executive Director Plotkin will be closely involved in that study as the commission wraps up its work this summer. Plotkin is the only commission member with a statewide perspective; other members represent parents, teachers, the school district, the city and other communities within the district’s far-flung territory.
As with so much else in California’s tenuous atmosphere of politics and public finance, the outlook for local public school boards is cautious optimism.
“I know we’ll get through this political problem, and maybe this will end up providing greater focus on adequate funding for the public schools, which is at the heart of the problems of any complex urban district like LAUSD,” Plotkin said.
Political problems yield to political solutions, and politics is the art of negotiation, collaboration and coalition-building, the very skills that successful school boards — and mayors — need to develop. As Plotkin added, “True collaboration and building partnerships is much harder to do than to simply pursue the abstract notion of ‘taking over’ the school district.”
Brian Taylor (btaylor@csba.org) is a staff writer for California Schools.
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