Tom Vander Ark believes that Mayor Bloomberg of New York should be left in charge of the city schools. So do I. I said so in a report I wrote for the Commission on School Governance in New York and in a recent book that I published with the Brookings Institution, When Mayors Take Charge. In both places I supported a plan for mayoral control that would allow New York's chief executive to remain one of the most powerful educational leaders in the nation. But Vander Ark has a problem with my commentary in Education Week (April 8) suggesting that in order to function effectively mayoral control requires institutional balance, so that the mayor and schools chancellor can be held accountable for their actions and parents can have input in decisions made by school professionals. Checks & balances and public participation are fundamental principles of American democracy. Public school students learn them at an early age when they study American history and civics. Vander Ark thinks that it was such an institutional balance in the past that led to the decline of urban schools.
Vander Ark denies that putting an elected official in charge of city schools adds a new layer of politics to education. He does not like the proposal requiring the Independent Budget Office in New York to publish and analyze school performance data. Chancellor Joel Klein seemed to think it was a reasonable idea when it was suggested to him at a meeting with the Commission on School Governance. Vander Ark also rejects the idea that administrative decentralization is needed in big city school systems. He should know that Joel Klein has implemented three separate administrative decentralization plans since he became chancellor, and points with pride to a policy that put more power in the hands of school principals.
Vander Ark is somewhat dismissive of the work done by the Commission on School Governance appointed by New York City's Public Advocate (who is elected citywide like the mayor) at the request of legislative leaders. That Commission was composed of individuals with distinguished careers in public service, some of whom have children in the school system. For a year they heard testimony from a broad cross-section of New Yorkers about the experience with mayoral control. We learned a lot by just listening, and the people who came before us had every right to be heard. What we heard became the basis for our findings and recommendations.
Democracy does not stop at the schoolhouse door. For most Americans that is where it starts, and it ought not be feared.