The Buck Stops With Bloomberg

With Mayor Mike Bloomberg now controlling New York City schools, a question facing school districts nationwide has returned to the fore: how should schools include parents and local communities in making decisions? Many worry that renewed central control, which in the case of New York and other cities replaces a community school board-based system, will disenfranchise parents and communities from educational choices. To the contrary, mayoral control, coupled with the growing movement to hold schools accountable for their curriculum and performance, can actually lead to improved parental (though not necessarily community) involvement — so long as school systems and state and city governments clearly delegate appropriate choices to local boards and parents’ groups.

New York City’s community school boards were doomed from the start. In the 1960s, liberal anger at a rigid, racist and unresponsive centralized school system led to the creation in 1969 of 32 community-controlled school districts to serve New York City’s 1.1 million school children. Three decades later, many citizens, fed up with rigid, petty and unresponsive community school districts that have failed to decrease racial disparities in educational results, demanded a return to centralized control, culminating in the recent takeover of the system by Mayor Bloomberg. 

The community school districts failed because “communities” were defined much too broadly. New York City’s size makes it an anomaly — its 1.1 million-child school system is larger than many states’ entire populations. And its 32 community school districts — with more than 30,000 children each — would still individually be among the largest 2% of the 14,890 districts nationwide. Indeed, the size of community school districts had much to do with their eventual failure. Parents failed to participate in, or even vote to elect officials for, a system too big and politicized for parents to have much involvement. The boards became refuges of political patronage jobs and replicas of the unresponsive bureaucracy they were supposed to replace.

Even proponents of community school boards acknowledge that the structure left much to be desired. Judy Baum, who spent years promoting the local boards with the Public Education Association, a New York advocacy group, argues that “having local boards with representatives of citizens has increased parent trust in schools.” But Baum also notes that the districts were not the right size to be effective. She said that political opposition to the boards from city and state government and cumbersome election laws that made it difficult for individuals not connected to existing powers to get on the ballot combined to prevent any improvements to the boards.

More fundamentally, the community school board structure never represented community control in the way advocates and most policy makers understood the concept. While New York’s “communities” represented arbitrary collections of tens of thousands of school children, the most successful community control programs have a more local focus. Head Start, the federal early childhood program for low-income families, organized and involved parents at each center, many of which hold only a few classrooms. While Head Start parents are uniquely pleased with the services provided, those same parents have much less confidence in public schools. While Title I, the federal funding program for low-income schools, technically requires schools receiving those funds to involve parents, such involvement is rare. Similarly, the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires schools to include parents in regular education planning for disabled children, but such involvement is often lacking or acrimonious.

The theory of parental and community involvement: Who is entitled to power over what?

School districts of all sizes and the state governments that oversee them grapple with proper dividing lines of power. Who sets the curriculum and the standards? How do the interests of immediate stakeholders of schools — children and their parents — balance with the interests of society at large?

Retired Yale Professor Seymour Sarason would have us start with the “the political principle,” described in his book, Parental Involvement and the Political Principle: Why the Existing Structure of Schools Should Be Abolished: “When you are going to be affected, directly or indirectly, by a decision, you should stand in some relationship to the decision-making process.”

Sarason’s point is a fair first principle, but requires more detailed explication to provide practical guidance. In short, the level of involvement to which parents are entitled declines as one moves away from school-level decisions to city, state or national policy. At the school level, families, teachers, administrators, and students (as developmentally appropriate) deserve inclusion. At a middle level (ranging from small local school districts to districts encompassing millions of children and entire states) tasks include administering budgets, personnel and hiring superintendents and principals, and only require local input on the most sensitive issues. Professional administrative staff can capably handle most of these items on their own.

At the most macro level are the fundamental political questions in which all citizens are entitled to have a say: What will schools teach? How will we measure their success? What will be the consequences for failure? Increasingly — and appropriately — these questions are being addressed on a state or a national level, in response to the movement for educational standards and accountability which requires common curricula and performance measures in schools to work. This is not to say parents should not have a role in making such decisions. Indeed, one would expect any organized lobbying by parents on the subject to have a large influence. Still, the larger national interest in such issues requires the decision to be removed from the local level.

Identifying the various levels of decisions helps define the difference between “parental involvement” and “community control,” terms often incorrectly used interchangeably. To the extent that “community control” advocates involvement of parents in school-level decisions, there is no conflict. However, the interests of the broader community — that our schools help develop intelligent individuals capable of constructive contributions to our democracy and economy — are best represented on a state or national level. A school’s impact on childless adult members of the community is too tenuous to endow them with a right to participate in local decision-making.

Changing the Culture

The question remains how to involve parents as partners with educators in their children’s schooling. Parents can and should be consulted about curricular, pedagogical and testing options and, particularly with younger children, involved in classroom activities and encouraged to continue them at home. But this consultation will only lead to parental involvement if parents have reason to believe that their voice can have an impact. Lobbying a community school board regarding curriculum rarely proved an effective use of a parent’s time. Talking to a principal willing to a listen or to a school-based management team (a school-specific body including parents, teachers, students and sometimes community members) would be more likely to provide results. Indeed, such teams — which Bloomberg has promised to use mayoral control to expand — are one of the most popular school governance reforms; the National School Boards Association has reported that more than forty percent of districts nationally, of all sizes, have experimented with this reform. The difficulty of making such teams truly effective should not be underestimated; the basic structure of such teams, however, holds more promise than the community school board model due to their school-specific nature.

School-based parental involvement (whatever the structure) makes sense for districts of all sizes. Smaller districts may have an advantage in that their existing structures have the ability to support community control effectively. Their district school boards draw from a pool of students, parents, teachers, and community leaders not much larger than a school-based team’s pool. Many of these smaller districts, especially those in New England, also have a rich tradition of town meetings and direct democracy. However, as is proving to be the case in successful mayoral control cities, the school district’s size has less impact on parental involvement than the policies and structures at the very local level — the individual school. Even a large school district can successfully involve families at the school level.

And even smaller districts need to pay careful attention to designing school-based teams, and managing local power dynamics, in order to succeed. A personal anecdote illustrates this point. I grew up in Bethlehem, New York, a 30,000-person upstate New York town. Fewer than 300 students graduated in my high school class, making the district one of the 85 percent of districts nationwide with fewer than 5,000 students. As a junior, I joined my school’s new “Shared Decision Making Team” as a non-voting student representative. It quickly became apparent that the lack of a vote was not the only reason that I had little influence over the team’s decisions. The administrators and the teachers union traditionally held decision-making power in the district and had no intention of sharing decisions with the broader community, whether students, parents, community members, or support staff. Under the scheme for the new team established by the school board, teachers constituted a majority of the new team, and the principal managed most of the meetings. Quickly, teachers on the team yanked any discussion of personnel policies off of the agenda, which proved a harbinger of things to come. The team discussed discipline and some curricular issues, but accomplished nothing besides some insignificant changes to the student handbook. Several years later, the team effectively disbanded.

True family and community involvement, whether through formal structures like school-based teams or more informal opportunities, won’t happen if the parties currently in power retain a monopoly on power. In the long run, those parties in power, especially educators, may suffer if they do not allow such involvement.

Educationally, such involvement can remove barriers between parents and educators and help extend learning beyond the classroom walls-by encouraging parents to read age-appropriate books related to classroom curriculum with young children or parents of older children to help them plan curricular choices. Such parental involvement makes educators’ jobs easier and produces better educational results — results that, as the standards movement becomes ever more pervasive, will likely increasingly be used to hold educators accountable.

How the politics of parental involvement harmonizes with the politics of mayoral control

Increased mayoral control has only come about through political means. Such means are necessary because mayoral control requires rethinking the central decision school boards have historically faced — how much control professionals should have. The debate over mayoral control has fully engaged the players in that debate — teachers unions, administrators, parents, other community members, and politicians operating levels above most local schools.

Like other cities that have pursued mayoral control — including Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago — New York’s move erodes the power of education professionals and bureaucrats, replacing politicized bureaucratic management with something more akin to private sector business management. This management style began in New York with former mayor Rudy Giuliani who cut thousands of administrative jobs and appointed a lawyer without education background as chancellor of the school system. In New York, as in other cities like Chicago, the move has drawn praise from a corporate community eager to see the city run more like a business. In March, Crain’s, a New York business newspaper, editorialized, “The reason for mayoral control is quite simple: accountability…[Board of Education] members use [their position] to make themselves important, only sometimes worrying about education.”

One might expect that the recent wave of corporate scandals, combined with ingrained community skepticism in primarily liberal cities like New York about running government like a business, would lead to a backlash against this new management style. But another component of business-style management — using common data to assess school performance — will likely create more opportunities for meaningful community involvement than the old model. Through local, state, and national gains over the past two decades — culminating in the recent law making federal funding contingent on statewide standardized testing — has moved the decision-making locus of fundamental questions of what schools will teach and how schools will measure progress to the larger political agencies developing standards. Having uniform standards at a macro level places a greater focus on individual schools and classrooms on the micro level.

Administrators are now held accountable for determining how test scores in Mr. Jones’s third grade class can best be improved. This focus of administrators matches up much more closely with parents’ strongest concerns about fundamental education performance, concerns that too often have been ignored by administrators concerned with more trivial questions.

Local accountability could also provide more room for innovation for teachers and principals, both groups that have been cautiously open to mayoral control. New York City teachers’ union president Randi Weingarten applauded the move, noting in a press statement that she expected the new board appointed by the mayor would “not micromanage the school system, but focus on larger policy issues,” leaving stakeholders at individual schools with their own spheres of influence. Similarly, principals’ union president Jill Levy told The New York Times that business-style mayoral control would lead to greater power at the local end: “Principals should be able to allocate their money, to run their schools the way they want, and then be held accountable.” Her vision stops short of endowing parent representatives with formal power, but granting principals more direct power over decisions at their schools would give parents a clearer avenue to bring suggestions and demands for action.

Where opposition remains, another New York City example indicates a possible solution. Bloomberg recently negotiated a new contract with the teachers’ union calling for significant raises in exchange for compromise on work rules. Future contracts in districts like New York with lagging teacher salaries — where divides between educators and parents are most acute — can include raises in exchange for the creation of structures allowing parental involvement.

What comes next

Mayors in many major American cities are gaining more control over public school systems. What occurs underneath that high level of decision-making remains an open question. Without formal structures for local involvement, parental involvement advocate Baum worries that “it’s not clear how parents can appeal any decisions without marching to City Hall. There are 1500 schools — [Bloomberg’s] going to go to every one of them?” Parents, teachers and administrators may fight over what local power remains. More likely, the new focus on standards and accountability will lead to a greater focus on individual schools, providing an opening for parents and those who support parental involvement to demand structural changes at a truly local level. Bloomberg and other leaders can do a great service to schools by anticipating this development and letting individual schools have control over appropriate decisions, so long as that allows both local innovation and formally requires that parents have a voice in these decisions.