Governor Andrew Cuomo may have given some Upstate mayors just the holiday present they were hoping for: you guessed it, mayoral control.
In a recent letter from a Cuomo aide to the state’s top education leaders, Chancellor Merryl Tisch and outgoing SED Commissioner John King, Cuomo indicates that he wants fresh ideas to boost academic outcomes around the state. Though some educators say that the letter is little more than an indictment of urban school districts, teachers, and their unions.
The letter poses several questions. Most importantly: Why is New York spending more on education than any other state and yet its outcomes are so poor? And how can only 1 percent of New York’s teachers receive unfavorable evaluations when such a large number of students perform so poorly?
The letter goes on to ask whether mayors in the state’s smaller cities – Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, for example – would benefit from controlling governance of their school districts. New York City has had mayoral control for more than a decade, and while former mayor Michael Bloomberg credited mayoral control with improving student performance during his term, there’s no significant evidence that it has any impact on student achievement.
Locally, Democratic Assembly member David Gantt has submitted legislation multiple times that would grant mayoral control for Rochester. That legislation hasn’t gotten much traction, however. In her campaign, now-mayor Lovely Warren said that she would not pursue mayoral control. When asked about it more recently, however, she gave a more nuanced response, saying that it is up to the governor and the State Legislature.
The letter also asks whether the cap on charter schools should be completely removed, whether financial incentives would improve teacher competency, and whether the probationary period for teachers should be extended before they can qualify for tenure. It’s currently three years.
Oddly, there’s no mention of the abysmal roll out of the Common Core curriculum or how state officials would prevent approving another charter school to an apparently unqualified applicant.
And it makes no mention of how to address some of the more intransigent challenges that urban educators face daily: chronic absenteeism, crime-ridden neighborhoods, substandard housing, food shortages, and crumbling city schools that lack the arts, music, and sports resources of their suburban counterparts.
The letter asks for unfiltered advice; how about holding the line on the constant changes to standards, testing, and bureaucratic busy work? How about funding schools according to the CFE court ruling?
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2014.
Mayoral Control?
Hmmm…
We know that our elected school board has failed miserably to improve Rochester’s public schools. Our public schools are the worst in the state, and our school district one of the worst in the nation.
We also know that those school commissioners keep getting re-elected, which suggests the voters aren’t much smarter than the students in our public schools.
While Mayor Warren did state that she would not seek mayoral control of the schools during her campaign, she promptly resurrected the Office of Special Projects after her election, and made Allen Williams commissioner of that office.
Allen Williams is known among “education circles” as favoring and promoting mayoral control of the schools, and this was long before Lovely Warren was elected mayor.
That might have seemed a bit, well, suspicious.
Now Mayor Warren states that mayoral control is up to the governor and the state assembly.
It IS different from her campaign statements.
The only problem is that Mayor Warren’s administration, so far, has been nothing but a series of gaffes, half-truths and untruths. The mayor ( and her staff ) spends way too much time pulling her foot out of her mouth to be entrusted with controlling Rochester’s schools.
We see that the school board has been failing unashamedly for decades. Getting rid of them, either as individuals to be voted out of office or by eliminating the board altogether is only part of the solution to the problem.
Mayoral control of the schools might be a viable option if a less power-mad mayor were in office.
We haven’t got one.
Steve Bathory
Does anyone, ANYONE, really believe that handing school control over to Ms. Warren and her cronies is a good idea?
If Duffy were still mayor, the idea of mayoral control of the Rochester schools might be a good idea. Given that Warren is mayor, it does not seem so. She has left a trail of incompetency and dishonesty in her first year of office, so why would anyone think she would do anything constructive? This is the same mayor that hired her uncle and had no idea he was speeding, the same mayor that was shocked when her appointees at the RHA fired the existing head in violation of his co nitrate and then hired one of her allies to replace him, the same mayor that pulled an Anthony Weiner when questioned about tweets from her accounts.
Scariest idea for the Warren administration imaginable.
Of course Mayor Lovely Warren wants control of the schools. Cuomo is merely asking why. It seems a recurring theme that our mayor is getting caught being less than totally honest.
With our poverty level over 34% and our children poverty level at 54% perhaps it is time to start accepting that these are the reasons our city schools are failing. This is exactly what the mayors of our city should be focusing on as this would improve our schools. Yet in the last 15 years poverty has increased more than 25%. If our mayors fail so badly to deal with poverty why would we trust them with the schools?
I think it is not surprising that both the Mayor and the Governor continue to cling to the fantasy hope that if we just have Mayoral Control, all education problems will fall by the wayside. This is in spite of the fact that little connection has been made between fundamental changes for education when mayoral control is adopted. One of the primary interests of mayoral control supporters is the continued belief and political agenda that views the corporate some get richer model must dominate education as well. Just look around—the role of development in Rochester and upstate in general relies on both tax breaks for investors and their political contributions to assure their continued dominance.
The corporate organized plan which threatens the current environment to ‘restore ‘ the Charlotte park and beach area has no real interest in listening to the City community at large. In addition to the stronghold the corporate community has, much of the say is given to local agencies Realizing the concentrated power that results — Why would we expect a value for meaningful citizen involvement? There is no mere coincidence that these two aspects are key to the fundamental problems related to economic inequality, racial oppression, separate but unequal segregated housing , feet dragging regarding moving to an alternative energy system and of course quality education for all. The real changes needed to address these more fundamental problems lies with our willingness to change what we do both politically and at the grass roots organizing level across the community. Bonnie Cannan