So how is that mayoralcontrol-of-the-schools thing working out? The question is moving to the fore as parents in New York start to grapple with Mayor de Blasio’s agenda for education. It’s going to get hotter, because the law that gives the mayor control expires next year.
This question fairly jumps out from Eva Moskowitz’s appeal to the state education commissioner to fight the denial of co-location to one of her Success Academies. The filing is being made on behalf of 19 parents of current and prospective pupils of a Success charter school in Harlem.
What their brief puts in sharp relief is not so much the issues surrounding co-locating a charter school in a building also being used by a regular public school. What is so astonishing is the high-handedness, the l’etat c’est moi behavior of the de Blasio administration.
The charter at the center of the fight is called Harlem Success 4, which reports that 97 percent of its students are minority, 15 percent have disabilities, 80 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches and 12 percent are English Language Learners. Yet the school’s students rank in the top 1 percent citywide in student performance.
De Blasio revoked the co-location of Harlem 4’s middle school, known as Harlem Central, without following any public or semi-public process. Success Academies complains this is a violation of a New York law requiring any approval by the Department of Education come only “after an extensive process of public notification, input and review.”
That law, the brief notes, was championed by, among others, a public advocate named Bill de Blasio. He and others opposed the mayor having unilateral control over school siting. They objected that “community members” were “sidelined” while the Department of Education made “decisions about where and how to site schools.”
Now that de Blasio is mayor, however, DOE “completely ignored these legal requirements.” There was, Success complains, no review by the Panel for Educational Policy, no publication of any disclosures, nor any opportunities for public input as required by law.
Success says de Blasio has promised more public input into co-location decisions. “Yet, for Harlem Central,” it says, “he allowed none whatsoever.” Instead DOE conducted a review “behind closed doors” and “suddenly announced” it would be revoking “certain co-locations” based on “new ‘core values’ and purportedly objective criteria.”
The fact that all of the schools that lost their co-location were Success schools is suspicious enough. It’s doubly so given the Success school’s stellar performance. Success insists that “a reasonable observer” could conclude only that the revocation of these Success’ co-locations “did not arise from a rational basis in fact.”
The de Blasio-Moskowitz feud is good enough for a B-grade movie — Jessica Chastain, maybe, as the crusading school entrepreneur and James Cromwell as the misanthropic mayor. But de Blasio’s performance is raising the question of whether mayoral control itself should be reformed.
Not that there weren’t good reasons to end the Board of Education system (the schools were in a crisis when Bloomberg came in). It’s one thing, though, to hand the schools over to a cool technocrat like Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a high-octane lawyer like Joel Klein, as New York did in 2002. It’s another to give control to a mayor who’s a crony socialist.
Certainly there were those who foresaw this problem, including one of the savviest critics of the Bloomberg schools, Andrew Wolf. He spent the Bloomberg years warning that the issue was not who controlled the schools but the lack of standards and the failure to get testing results in time for teachers to adjust — and, importantly, curriculum.
When I called Wolf this week, he warned that the current controversy is dwarfed by a larger issue. “We should be evaluating the past 12 years, determining what works and what doesn’t. Instead we are getting bogged down in dividing up school buildings, mediating fights between regular schools and charters, same with Pre-K,” he e-mailed.
No one suggests that ending mayoral control is the only option, and no one wants the status quo ante. Wolf does want a more independent Panel for Educational Policy and principals answering to a district superintendant. He wouldn’t undercut the charters; he’d focus on the other 95 percent of the system, control of which — and Gov. Cuomo surely knows this — is a jump ball come June 2015.