Mayoral Control?
In spite of claims by the Detroit City Council that Mayoral control of Detroit Public Schools is a dead issue, New Detroit is rallying forces to bring renewed pressure on the Council. We hope the Council has the wisdom to resist this anti-democratic effort.
Why are people pushing to shift control away from the elected school board? Surely it cannot be because this particular Mayor has shown himself to be an exemplary executive. A close look at Mayor Bing’s major decisions shows a man with a penchant for surrounding himself with cronies, mismanagement of the police force, failure to follow the basic consent decree governing it, and turmoil in the transportation system. The man didn’t even get EPA clearance for the houses he planned to knock down.
By what stretch of logic has New Detroit, yet another unaccountable foundation, come to the conclusion that the move to mayoral control will “make sure our children get the education they deserve so they can find a better future?”
This is nonsense.
The very best that can be said about Mayoral-controlled schools is that it is too early to tell. Supporters like Kenneth Wong of Brown University admit, “there is a long way to go before (mayoral-controlled) districts achieve acceptable levels of achievement.” Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute concluded after a review of previous studies that mayoral control is at best “inconclusive.”
The only thing that every researcher agrees about is, as David Hursh of the Warner School of Education says, mayoral control represents “a decline in public input, a decline in accountability, a lack of debate over what schools should be doing.”
At a time when we need serious rethinking and broad discussion about what kind of education will develop creative citizens who will be called upon to solve problems yet unimaginable, with ideas and tools not yet created, foundations and business elites are trying to eliminate any possibility for this public conversation.
They are acting as though everyone agrees that Mayoral Control has been proven to work. These same elites, who proclaimed the value of data driven decisions while trying to shrink our city, are now pretending data is irrelevant to their desire to control our children.
Last week we shared the conclusions of careful, peer-reviewed research into the two school districts with the longest history of mayoral control. In both cities, New York and Chicago, the test scores used to claim success were clearly manipulated. New York tested a narrow range of standards and test results stayed the same from year to year. In Illinois, the state got more students to pass by lowering the passing score.
When we look at National Tests that are not subject to such easy manipulation, both cities look terrible and show little progress. This is especially true for African American and Latino children.
Even the Chicago business elite who backed Mayoral control concluded in a June 2009 report that the effort was an utter failure. They said: “ [M]ost of the improvement in Chicago’s elementary school scores over the past decade appears not to be due to real improvement in student performance. It appears to be due to changes in the tests,
most notably those made in 2006 when a new testing company was brought in and a new State test was implemented, with new formats and test substance, and lower cut scores (most notably in 8th grade math) along with new testing procedures.”
The Chicago Tribune acknowledged that Mayoral control has not led to progress. Responding to Mayor Daley’s boast that Chicago was on the way to “becoming the best urban school district in the nation,” the editorial said, “They must be teaching some new kind of fuzzy math at Chicago Public Schools. More children passed because the state board had lowered the passing score for eighth-grade math from the 67th percentile to the 38th.”
Data does not support a shift to Mayoral control. By what right or reason do these foundations and the forces that support them lay claim to our children’s future?