Can One Person Run the New York City Schools?

[Note: Enjoy the guest-post by education professor Jessica Shiller. Bio below - and welcome aboard, Jessica. - Eds.]

Recently, a middle-schooler testified at the New York state assembly in support of mayoral control of New York City public schools. He said, “The dishes are more likely to get washed if only one family member has sole responsibility for them.” He's right. When one person has the responsibility for doing something, it often gets done because we know who to blame when it’s not done.

The question is: are the schools like a set of dishes?

If you're not from New York City, it seems like Mayor Bloomberg is the greatest dishwasher in the world. The press shows him taking his responsibility seriously and prints his claims that the schools have been cleaned up. If you are from New York City, you know Bloomberg is not doing so great. Which gets to my point about dishes. One person doing dishes? Yes. Making decisions about schools? No.

Here are four reasons why:

1. With the mayor in charge of schools, the pressure is on him to show improvement quickly, but the numbers are not shaking out. Between false claims of how much test scores have improved, and stagnantly low high school graduation rates, NYC is still at the bottom of the nation in academic achievement. It's hard to call that improvement.
2. One person in charge has meant quick implementation of reforms, but now we are stuck with reforms that have made little gains. In the last 6 years, Bloomberg converted most of the city’s high schools into “small” schools, starting over 200 schools since 2002. By and large, this has not been a success. Bill Gates, the major funder behind this project, is shifting funding to other education projects, thus causing a major loss to the city schools.
3. It's true that, if there are complaints about the schools, at least we know who to blame. But how do we get that person to listen? In a 2004 decision over social promotion policies, the mayor fired members of the body, the Panel for Educational Policy, who had some power to disagree with him on the decision. In his honor’s own words: “Mayoral control means mayoral control, thank you very much. They are my representatives, and they are going to vote for things that I believe in."
4. It's also true that, if you don’t like mayoral control, you can vote the mayor out. Great: first you have to wait 4 years, and then? You may not get a new mayor you like any better. In the meantime, your kids have had four years of schooling you weren’t happy with, and you couldn’t do anything about it.

Still not convinced? Come visit some of the schools in the Bronx that I work in every day. You will see lots of hard-working people - children and adults - who don't believe Bloomberg's hype. They know better. They know that improving schools takes a long time, that you need lots of support, that high test scores don't mean that students learned anything, and that there are amazing educational moments going on everyday that go unrecognized because they are not quantifiable.

They also know that if you buy the hype, you miss what is real in New York City's schools.

Photo by andy in nyc