SCHOOLS

Urban Schools Connectedness between School Families and Communities



Urban Schools Connectedness between School Families and Communities

Introduction

Are elected school boards equal to the challenges of twenty-first century school governance? Eli Broad, a leading educational philanthropist and founder of the Broad Prize for Urban Education, has argued, “I believe in mayoral control of school boards or having no school board at all. We have seen many children benefit from this type of crisis intervention…You should craft legislation that enables school board members to be appointed by the mayor… [And] limit the authority of school boards.” Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B(Kathryn , 2007). Fordham Foundation, has written, “School boards are an aberration, an anachronism, an educational sinkhole... Put this dysfunctional arrangement out of its misery.” The most popular alternative is the call to disband elected boards and give their authorities to school boards appointed by the mayor.

The nation's nearly 15,000 school boards are charged with providing the leadership, policy direction, and oversight that can drive school improvement. Nationally, about 96 percent of districts have elected boards, including more than two-thirds of the nation's 25 largest districts. However, after decades of largely ineffectual reform, it is far from clear that school boards are equal to the challenge. Broad, Finn, and others believe schools require more accountable and disciplined leadership than elected school boards can provide.

The most popular alternative is replacing elected big-city school boards with boards that are, in some fashion or other, appointed by the mayor(Thomas, 2005). Today, major cities that feature some form of mayoral control, rather than an elected school board, include New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Brown University professor Kenneth Wong, an expert on mayoral takeovers, has noted, “Urban mayors are very different now than the mayors of 30 to 40 years ago. They've become more concentrated on [improving] quality-of-life issues in their cities…And the way they're doing it is by becoming more directly involved in the operation of schools.” (Jonathan, 2005)

Those who have studied mayoral board appointment are generally equivocal about the idea. Political scientists Jeffrey Henig and Wilbur Rich published an authoritative volume on the politics of mayoral control and concluded that “granting a stronger formal role to mayors is likely to reshape the school reform agenda, but precisely how it will do so depends upon numerous factors.” They explain, “Reform of local school districts should aim to unite elected officials and professional administrators in a partnership for effective management”— but just what that means in practice is unclear. Michael Kirst, professor emeritus at Stanford, has observed that “the impact of enhanced mayoral influence on instruction remains tenuous and unclear,” but he sees little support for a “return to school board-dominated regimes in any of the cities that [have] moved toward greater mayoral influence.”

The irony is that today's school boards took on their contemporary shape during the Progressive Era, roughly 1890- 1920, in a concerted effort to expunge “politics” from schooling. Jim Cibulka, dean of the school of education at ...