Brookings Press Blog

'When Mayors Take Charge' editor discusses the NYC school system

Joseph Viteritti on the success and room for improvement of mayoral control over public schools

The ideas espoused within editor Joseph Viteritti’s When Mayors Take Charge: School Governance in the City offers an innovative solution to the problem of public school governance. The Teachers College Record, a journal of analysis and research published by Columbia University’s Teachers College, recently produced a video in which Viteritti went into greater detail about the claims found within the book. According to Viteritti, the advent of mayoral control over public schools has begun to gain popularity, but many cities must now judge whether those who have already taken the step have proven successful. Using New York’s public school system as a case study, Viteritti outlines in the video the findings of a study conducted in preparation for the state legislature’s June decision to either renew or eliminate the 2002 law that handed the city’s schools over to its mayor. Viteritti’s conclusions show that mayoral control, while effective, does require certain checks and balances on the mayor’s power and increased accountability between the mayor, schools, and citizens.

Joseph Viteritti is currently Blanche D. Blank Professor of Public Policy at Hunter College, CUNY and chairman of the Department of Public Affairs.

- Learn more about When Mayors Take Charge

What happens when mayors take charge of schools?

School governance in the city

Public schools have been a source of contention when deciding who controls what in school districts. The Economist and The Detroit News take advice from Joseph Viteritti, editor of When Mayors Take Charge: School Governance in the City, in their reports on mayoral control of public schools. When Mayors Take Charge investigates cases of mayoral control in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C. The Economist's "Mayoral control of schools in New York: Political prisoners" asserts that “lawmakers in Albany are not thinking about New York’s children or any of their constituents at the moment.” Correspondingly, The Detroit News comments in "Mayoral control of Detroit schools debated" that “parents and constituents are frustrated with what they perceive to be the incompetence of the 11-member school board they fought to elect, ending the 1999-2005 mayoral control.”

Viteritti pools insight from leading experts on how to tackle the factors behind the development of mayoral control and possible ways to improve the system as well its prospects for the future. He is the Blanche D. Blank Professor of Public Policy at Hunter College, CUNY. He previously served as special assistant to the chancellor of schools in New York and as senior adviser to superintendents in Boston and San Francisco. He was also recently the executive director of the Commission on School Governance in New York.

In When Mayors Take Charge, the urgent problem of low-performing urban schools is expertly sliced and diced by a band of historians and political scientists. Policy elites and street-level reformers need to know that mayoral control does matter to democratic participation and managerial efficiency but not necessarily to students' test scores. —Larry Cuban, Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University

- Learn more about When Mayors Take Charge

- Read the articles from The Economist and The Detroit News

Should Mayors Take Over Schools?

Wall Street Journal article looks at the pros and cons of mayoral control

City schools have been the weakest link in American education, driving middle-class families into the suburbs and contributing to a learning gap between the races. Activist mayors in major cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. have responded by taking control of their public schools. The Wall Street Journal examines this practice in the article “For More Mayors, School Takeovers Are a No-Brainer.” The piece quotes Joseph Viteritti, editor of When Mayors Take Charge, who says:

"There's no compelling evidence that mayoral control improves performance." Still, Mr. Viteritti, a former New York schools official who headed a commission on mayoral control, says the arrangement can spark needed change in a troubled system.

- Read the Wall Street Journal article

- Learn more about When Mayors Take Charge

The Cost of Education

New Brookings books advance innovative analysis of educational possibilities and problems

What are the economic and social consequences when students drop out of high school or receive an inadequate education? How have standard-based reforms affected children in poverty? New Brookings books on American education policy present two distinct approaches in order to tackle these questions. Standards-Based Reform and the Poverty Gap provides an up-close look at student achievement in the classroom. In The Price We Pay, experts contextualize educational failure within a broader framework by addressing its impact on income, health, crime, and public assistance programs.

Standards-Based Reform and the Poverty Gap highlights how children’s economic backgrounds inform student performance. By examining our experiences with earlier attempts to close the performance gap in education, it confronts the pending reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Acts, producing timely analysis regarding the possibilities and problems of NCLB.

The Price We Pay examines educational shortcomings and the fate of at-risk youth who are excluded from opportunities available to those with an adequate education. Through data and empirical techniques, education policy experts offer a precise examination of the economic burden that occurs in a post-high school scenario, for adults without the academic foundation and necessary skills set to be financially independent. Together, these two volumes introduce innovative evaluations of the educational system and its critical role on both a societal and economic level.

- Learn more about Standards-Based Reform and the Poverty Gap.

- Learn more about The Price We Pay.

Lessons Learned

New book explores the implications of students’ performance in math

Educators must once again prepare students to meet acceptable performance standards dictated by national testing. Increasingly, students’ proficiency in mathematics is deemed particularly important as a result of the vital role technology plays in today’s world. For more than four decades, international assessments conducted by the International Association for Evaluation of Educational Achievement have measured how well students are learning mathematics in different countries. Lessons Learned, edited by Tom Loveless, presents a comprehensive analysis of testing results and educational methods.

The authors, all experts on international assessments, dig beneath the national scores to investigate pressing issues of practice and policy. What overarching lessons have we learned from forty years of testing? How have popular reforms influenced learning? How do U.S. math curricula compare with those used overseas? And does school size really affect learning? By evaluating these questions and others, Lessons Learned moves beyond the competition for international ranking to find strategies, both in and outside the classroom, that can improve student achievement in mathematics.

- Learn more about Lessons Learned.

All Together Now

John Edwards’s plan to integrate schools draws from work of Brookings Press author Richard Kahlenberg

A Washington Post editorial last week discussed John Edwards’s ideas to integrate schools.

“On his poverty tour last week, former North Carolina senator John Edwards moved the debate forward in a useful way, endorsing a plan to focus integration efforts on income rather than race -- in other words, to promote schools that are economically diverse. This is not a new idea, but especially in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, it is a timely one.”

Much of the Edwards plan is based on the work of Brookings Press author Richard D. Kahlenberg. In his book, All Together Now: Creating Middle Class Schools Through Public School Choice, Kahlenberg provides a plan for promoting economic and racial integration among public schools.

Economically integrated schools, the book argues, will do far more to promote achievement and equal opportunity than vouchers, standards, class size reduction, or any of the other leading education proposals on the left and right that seek to make “separate but equal” schools work.

- Learn more about All Together Now.

- Of related interest: Rescuing Brown v. Board of Education: Profiles of Twelve School Districts Pursuing Socioeconomic School Integration, a report from The Century Foundation by Richard D. Kahlenberg.