Professor of Political Science & Education, Teachers College

Testimony of Jeffrey R. Henig

Professor of Political Science & Education, Teachers College

Professor of Political Science, Columbia University

Public Hearing on

Bill 17-001 “District of Columbia Public Education

Reform Amendment Act of 2007"

Before

Vincent C. Gray, Chairman

Committee of the Whole

Good Morning Mr. Chairman, my name is Jeffrey Henig, and I am a Professor Political Science and Education at Teachers College and Columbia University. In addition, for twenty-five years I was on the faculty of GeorgeWashingtonUniversity as a member of the Department of Political Science and, for twelve of those years, as director of the GWUCenter for Washington Area Studies.

I have had occasion to research and write about DC politics generally and about the specific issue of school reform. One of my co-authored books—The Color of School Reform—focused on similarities and differences in the way race and politics influenced education politics and policy in Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, and Washington DC. My last book was a co-edited volume titled Mayors in the Middle, which included chapters on six cities (including DC) as well as overviews on the issues behind the movement for mayoral involvement. I’m pleased to be invited to return and to share some of my reflections on the issue currently facing the Council and the District’s citizenry.

* * * * *

Fashions in educational governance come and go. At one time in American history, mayoral control of schools was the norm in large cities. Education was a department within municipal government, in much the same way as might be policing, fire protection, public works. Reformers of the day deemed that a failure. Mayors, it was decided, were too much creatures of the political machines that often dominated local politics. They used their position of authority to turn the public schools into a source of patronage: teacher jobs were pay-offs for party workers; contracts to build new schools were allocated to businesses that provided campaign support or kickbacks. The Progressive reformers of the early 20th century pushed hard to separate the education system from general-purpose government. They did this by creating separate school districts with their own decision-makers, often elected on a special election day, and often with dedicated revenue streams.

During the past 15 years there has been a small but growing counter-movement.

In a series of highly visible cases of governance reform, large cities including Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit,[1] New York, and Oakland have moved in the opposite direction. They have moved from totally elected school boards to systems in which the mayor appoints some or all of the school board members.

What accounts for this renewed interest in mayoral control of schools? Is it well grounded in theories of governance and empirical evidence, or is it just the latest fashion? And if there is reason to believe that mayoral control can make sense for some cities, are there reasons to think that it will be a good fit for Washington, DC?

As I’ll emphasize in my remarks, the book is still out on many of these matters. There are sound reasons to believe that mayoral control can be a catalyst for initiating and sustaining reform in school districts that are troubled and floundering. But the contemporary experiment with mayoral reform is still in its relative infancy. While some mayors appear to have used their added power to jumpstart change, it is not yet clear whether the changes will bear out at the so-called bottom-line of test scores. And, significantly, the nation has almost no experience yet in what I will refer to as “second-generation” mayoral control: in none of the major cases that are talked about has there yet been a succession to a mayoral administration other than the one that initially took on the responsibility. While in some senses DC seems well suited to make the switch, there are aspects of the local system, history, and culture that suggests that a transition to mayoral control might be especially contentious and its successes far from assured.

One thing I can state with confidence: formal mayoral control in and of itself is not a panacea. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for bringing about lasting and meaningful change. Many districts that retain a separate school system are doing well. Mayors can take a leadership role in school reform without necessarily demanding formal power to do so. And formal mayoral control--if absent a clear and appropriate vision, managerial capacity, and a supportive political environment—can be ineffectual, a distraction, or even leave matters worse than they were before.

I’ll structure my short presentation to address several points:

1)Why is there momentum among large central cities for the idea of mayoral control of schools?

2)What’s the early evidence about the consequences?

3)What might be some important things to worry about before following suit?

4)Is there anything about the District’s particular case that makes it either a better or worse candidate for mayoral control?

Why is there momentum among large central cities for the idea of mayoral control of schools?

Frustration with public education runs high across a wide swathe of the nation—regardless of whether the system is urban or suburban, governed by a mayor or elected school board. There is a broadly shared sense that at least since 1983 –and the famous report on A Nation at Risk—whileschool reform has been on the agenda, performance has been stagnant or worse.

Many citizens and analysts believe that the problem is not due to a lack of options--there are ideas and proven strategies out there –so, therefore, the problem must be in the way the system is structured to allow it to carry on blithely as if nothing was wrong

It is as much out of the sense of frustration and a desire to shake up the decision-making as it is the specific arguments for mayoral control that account for a good deal of the support for governance reform. This is the same kind of frustration and desire for change that is fueling a range of other proposed solution: among them vouchers, charter schools, private management, high-stakes testing, and No Child Left Behind.

That said, there also are some strong arguments based on theories of organization and governance about why mayor control could be better (not simply different).

One prominent argument is that putting one person in charge improves coordination and democratic accountability. Contemporary mayors are also said to have deeper understanding, than traditional school boards, of the urgency of maintaining a well-educated workforce in order to stay economically viable in the face of global competition. It is said that mayors are more daring and have more experience and skilled staff in areas of fiscal management and data systems. Mayors, it is argued, are better situated and more politically adept at pursuing external (federal; foundation) sources of funding and at building electoral support. Last but not least, because they also stand over the other agencies of government, mayors are said to be better able to mount coordinated responses to the needs of children and families, to link school-based strategies to youth activities, parks, social service delivery, law enforcement, and community development.

These theoretical rationales get added potency and credibility by the existence of a few high-profile cases in which mayoral control seems, at least at first blush, to be working well. Boston and Chicago were two of the case studies that were cited in the early years; today it is New York City that is the Mecca that new mayors all visit to provide the insights and anecdotes that they can use in order to sell their vision to the folks back home.

What’s the evidence about the consequences?

I hope I won’t seem simply evasive and indecisive when I say that the ultimate answer is that it is simply too early to tell.

At least initially, there are some signs that shifting to mayoral control can make a difference in some areas and activities that are generally presumed to be precursors of genuine increases in learning. When the mayors involved care about education and are willing to devote time and attention to school reform, there is preliminary evidence that that are able to keep the issue visible and raise it on the local agenda. There is also some reasonably good evidence that—at least in places in which the school board historically has been ineffective, amateurish, or even corrupt—the move to a stronger mayoral role has led to improved financial oversight and better management systems.

As for what happens inside schools and classrooms, the evidence so far is more sketchy. In Boston, Mayor Menino used his influence to bring to the superintendency a proven educator--Thomas Payzant-- and to provide him with the time and maneuvering room to undertake systemic reform initiatives that were not especially radical in their conception but which require attention, resources, and time to take hold and mature. New York’s experiment is more recent and has been somewhat more dramatic and controversial. Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein have overseen a number of broad changes including elimination of localized community school districts, institution of a uniform curriculum across the city, centralized professional development, elimination of social promotion, and enthusiastic adoption of the small schools philosophy. Parents, community advocates, and the teachers’ union have been unhappy with the manner in which many of these things have been done, which they have seen as high-handed and in some instances ill-advised. But as far as whether more learning is taking place, it is still to early to say. Test scores have been nudging upward, especially in the younger grades, but that is the case in a number of large central city districts that have not adopted mayoral control as well. And low and languishing middle school scores and continuing high drop-out rates lead some critics to worry that some of the very strategies that push up test scores among younger children may contribute to problems in the later grades.

What might be some important things to worry about before following suit?

Governance structures do not hire, pay or train teachers. They don’t make sure children go to school ready to learn. They don’t devise curricula, draw up lessons plans, look children in the eye and understand what motivates them, stand in front of a class and guide it through the learning process. If governance arrangements are relevant it is because of the things they either facilitate or undermine.

For struggling and complex urban school systems, what matters are vision, capacity, and sustained political support. A central question, then, has to be whether mayoral control is more likely to augment or undermine these.

Structural reform should not be done willy-nilly. Governance arrangements are part of the basic rules of the game upon which communities build their political and civic lives. Change is often a good thing, but changes in the basic rules of democratic decision-making are different than are policy changes initiated within those basic rules. Imagine if the Washington Wizards showed up every game night and were handed a new rulebook that altered the height of the basket, the diameter of the three-point arc, the number of points earned for a free throw. Rational planning, negotiations over priorities and compromises, proper sequencing of short- and long-term strategies all depend upon there being some consistency in the institutional parameters.

Changing structures of governance is especially risky if it is based just on short-term factors and particular personalities. The New York State legislature was unwilling to enact mayoral control when Rudy Giuliani was mayor and asked for that power. They were willing to do so when the mayor was Michael Bloomberg. The citizens of the District of Columbia and a majority of members within Congress are encouraged by the style and energy of Adrian Fenty. But it takes no stretch of the imagination to predict how Congress would have reacted to a proposal to give control of DC’s schools to Marion Barry. Structures are designed to last—need to last—while individual leaders and administrations come and go. The next man or woman in the office may be less devoted to education, less skilled or less wise.

It is wise to consider, too, the possibility that a battle over governance change might be divisive and distracting. Driving the politics around mayoral control are not only theories about good governance; real-world consequences depend at least as much on the ways in which various groups perceive their likelihood of being heard and having influence under a familiar versus a new regime. Governance change alters the rules of the game. That can be good, but can also be unsettling. And some inevitably will fear they are being dealt the worse hand.

Efforts to institute mayoral control have often opened lines of cleavage in urban communities, between families with children and households without them, between long-term residents and newcomers, between business leaders and community activists, between black and white. In many older central cities, the school systems were among the first public agencies to become viable professions for newly empowered African-American residents. In some, like DC, the school system was one of the first in which minority residents won political representation. Against that backdrop, some within the African American community see elected boards as more responsive to them and their needs. They see mayor’s office as historically more oriented toward and accessible to the downtown business community or leaders at higher levels within our federal system. A little bit of conflict is not necessarily and always a bad thing. If the battles are short-lived and the pay-offs quickly materialize, they’ll be forgotten soon enough. But if the battle-lines simmer and remain; if progress is sufficiently slow that those on the losing side can convincingly claim that things were better before, then structural change can simply aggravate the very factionalism stalemate that it was meant to eliminate.

Is there anything about the District’s particular case that makes it either a better or worse candidate for mayoral control?

Analysts and journalists are reasonably good at describing how well policies like mayoral control are working in the particular places that adopt them. They are much less reliable in judging how well policies will work when transplanted from one place to another. The consequences that policies have depend on much more than how they are set down on paper. They can vary tremendously based on local context: the capacity and enthusiasm of local bureaucracies, the support of local constituencies, how the policies fit with local traditions and values.

There are several elements of the District’s situation that could make it a good candidate for a successful transition to mayoral control. First, there is a widely shared belief that the current system is not working as well as it should be for a substantial portion of the District’s children. Second, the new mayor is eager to take on this challenge and, significantly, made his interest in doing so a prominent strain in his campaign. It is difficult in multi-issue elections to pinpoint why voters vote the way they do, but Mayor Fenty can make a reasonable claim that his election represents something of a mandate to follow through on this initiative; at the very least he can convincingly claim that voters knew when they elected him that this was something he intended to do. Third, the existing governance arrangements—particularly the mixed elected and appointed nature of the school board—are themselves relatively new. The concrete has not yet had time to set, and parents, voters, educators, and others have not yet had time to develop strong loyalties and expectations.

That said, there are countervailing factors as well. First, although some feel things are moving too slowly, there seems to be a widely shared sense that the current superintendent is moving in the right direction. Second, Mayor Fenty is not the only elected official who can stake a claim to a mandate; citizens also just elected a new school board, and its chairman argues that they have a responsibility and the knowledge to steer effective reform. Third, and related to the first and second points, after a series of governance shifts and turnover in leadership, there are good reasons to try to establish some continuity; indeed, many observers of urban schools systems point to the rapid turnover among superintendents as a key factor contributing to what has been labeled the “spinning wheels” of school reform. Fourth, the elected school board has a special symbolic significance in the District as the first body to which residents were permitted to elect their own representatives in the modern era of local home rule. Finally, it is not known whether the mayor’s plan will clarify or simply reshuffle responsibility. The elected school board would not go away, its mission would be redefined to become more analogous to that played by state boards of education in other places. But the analogy is an imperfect one. In other places where there are elected state boards, they are chosen by a much broader constituency than that of any single district. In the DC case, the so-called state board would represent the same voters who select the Council and the mayor. Each will have a claim to local legitimacy and unless the division of responsibilities is extremely clear, there is a likelihood that they will find themselves standing on one another’s toes.