Campaign To Keep Schools Under Mayor’s Thumb

Press Releases

September 3, 2008

(From The New York Times, September 1, 2008)

By JENNIFER MEDINA and ELISSA GOOTMAN

Close allies of the Bloomberg administration have set up a political organization to campaign for renewal of the landmark state law giving New York City’s mayor control of its public schools, hiring a veteran operative and planning to raise up to $20 million for television advertisements, lobbying and grass-roots organizing.

The group, called Mayoral Accountability for School Success, is officially headed by three well-known and respected city figures, among them a nun lauded for her work with struggling students and a popular Harlem minister. But it is backed by top City Hall and Education Department officials, for whom persuading Albany to extend mayoral control is the No. 1 goal for the school year that starts on Tuesday.

The group filed papers in recent weeks to become designated a 501(c)(4), a nonprofit that can lobby and participate in political campaign activity. The move is the first salvo in the pitched battle expected to unfold between now and the end of June 2009, when the 2002 law giving Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg authority over the nation’s largest school system is set to expire.

Renewal is crucial to Mr. Bloomberg’s legacy, since he has staked his reputation on overhauling the schools and has repeatedly argued that without City Hall at the wheel, the system would be doomed to fail.

As more than one million children return to city classrooms this week, every achievement, development or mishap is apt to be scrutinized as evidence of mayoral control’s success or struggle. The debate will also be watched nationally, as educators and politicians across the country look to New York as a model for how to reform an urban school system.

“You want to make sure you get your message out, that parents and others know what’s at stake,” Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said in an interview to explain why the new nonprofit group’s advocacy was needed. “People who are happy with their schools right now, they should understand that if there is a change in governance, that will affect their schools. And therefore they should engage in the democratic process.”

But for all of the new group’s trappings of a mass movement — organizers are hoping it will become known by the acronym MASS — the fate of mayoral control could likely lie with three men: Gov. David A. Paterson; the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver; and the State Senate majority leader, Dean G. Skelos.

Governor Paterson has been supportive of the mayor’s education efforts, as have Mr. Skelos and his fellow Senate Republicans. So perhaps the most important — and unpredictable — players are Mr. Silver’s Assembly Democrats, who have voiced repeated critiques of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein’s management of the schools.

Although Mr. Silver has indicated that he does not want to return to the former system — in which an appointed Board of Education names a chancellor to preside over 32 community school districts, each with its own superintendent and board — he has also voiced skepticism of keeping power concentrated in City Hall.

“As we review the issue of mayoral control, we are mindful of the real concerns of parents regarding the lack of parental input,” Mr. Silver said last week in a statement. “I anticipate an open, collaborative review process that will involve parents, educators, the community and other stakeholders.”

In the coming weeks and months, lawmakers are expected to hold dozens of hearings on mayoral control, and several groups will issue lengthy reports dissecting its effects, starting with one assembled by Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate, which is to be released as early as this week.

As the mayoral control conversation heats up, the parallel chatter over whether Mr. Bloomberg and the City Council should consider overturning term limits could complicate things by making a policy debate personal.

“It makes it that much harder to imagine the abstract issue of mayoral control if we’re going to be continuing to talk about this particular mayor,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee and lobbying group that supports mayoral control.

But others noted that Albany gave control of the city schools to Mr. Bloomberg specifically, after denying similar power to his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

“If it’s not Michael with the hand on the rudder, I would say that you’re open for a much broader renegotiation of mayoral control,” said Merryl H. Tisch, a member of the State Board of Regents who has supported Mr. Bloomberg but also publicly criticized some of his changes. “I think people have confidence in the job that he’s done.”

In addition to the management overhaul, the mayor has altered the face of the New York school landscape by breaking traditional high schools into small, focused, thematic programs; expanding the number of charter schools; and pushing to tie student performance on standardized tests with pay and promotions for teachers and principals.

While scores on state tests have steadily climbed, particularly in the elementary grades, middle school results have been largely flat on the exams known as the nation’s report card; graduation rates are up slightly since the mayor took over.

Ms. Tisch said a supporter of the mayor approached her this summer to discuss the idea of raising money to campaign for continued mayoral control of the schools. She said she advised him “very strongly” not to “get down and dirty” with negative advertisements aimed at specific legislators, a tactic pursued by some charter school supporters two years ago.

While backers of mayoral control embraced the new organization, some said privately that they were frustrated that the push had not begun earlier.

The new group’s three-member board — legally required for the filing of a 501(c)(4), according to federal Internal Revenue Code guidelines — is made up of Geoffrey Canada, who runs Harlem Children’s Zone, an antipoverty organization that also operates charter schools; the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, which has extensive education and development activities; and Sister Paulette LoMonaco, executive director of Good Shepherd Services, a nonprofit group that has helped create several transfer schools for high school students who have struggled at traditional campuses.

Running the operation as executive director will be Peter Hatch, 38, who worked as a senior adviser to Senator John Edwards in his 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, has handled Congressional races for the Working Families Party and served as chief of staff for Councilman Bill de Blasio. Global Strategy Group, a large New York-based political consulting and public relations company, has been approached to create possible advertisements.

Mr. Canada, who has publicly advocated mayoral control of schools since Mr. Giuliani’s administration, declined to say which private foundations he had already approached — or received commitments from — for money, but said he expected to appoint more board members and potentially hire more staff members. Through formal lobbying in Albany, television ads and a Web site, for starters, the group will try to spread the message that any effort to dilute the mayor’s authority could have devastating consequences.

“There is no question that the mayor came in and said, ‘I am in charge’ — I think that level of accountability really sent shock waves through the system,” Mr. Canada said. “My biggest concern right now is, ‘Will the next mayor be able to continue the movement of education in the current direction?’ I am really terrified that we might slide back to the bad old days.”

Mr. Canada is among dozens of philanthropists, business leaders and other supporters whom Mayor Bloomberg has invited to City Hall for a breakfast briefing on the school system Wednesday. Chris Cerf, a deputy chancellor, is expected to serve as an informal liaison between the Department of Education and the new group.

Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott said that he and other City Hall officials would have no formal role. “We didn’t ask for this to be created,” Mr. Walcott said, adding that he thought it would be an “extreme benefit.”

While many of the top policymakers support the broad concept of mayoral control, the perception among many parents and teachers that the Bloomberg administration has stifled dissent and left them feeling powerless has led to a call for more checks and balances.

For example, Ernest A. Logan, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the city’s principals’ union, said he planned to ask Albany to write into the law the establishment of an independent organization to analyze data pertaining to the school system, similar to the city’s Independent Budget Office.

Assemblyman Mark S. Weprin of Queens, who has been a critic of Mr. Klein, is one of many who would like to see another independent body have more authority over the school system.

“There was a desire for control, but what we have instead is a haphazard bureaucracy that has destroyed all the local school districts,” Mr. Weprin said. “There’s isn’t a structure anymore where there’s somebody on the local level who knows the local schools.”

In the interview, the chancellor said that many of the mayor’s initiatives — like grading schools A through F, closing dozens of failing schools and giving principals more freedom — would have been blocked had the mayor’s authority been circumscribed. He pointed to the moment in 2004 when the mayor fired two of his own appointees to the policy panel just before a meeting in which they were to vote against his plan to hold back third graders largely on the basis of test scores.

“All these things that people say, ‘checks and balances,’ are basically fundamentally an effort to impose different policies,” Mr. Klein said. “In the absence of mayoral control, I assure you, you’ll have paralysis.”

Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a business group that pushed hard for mayoral control and has raised millions of dollars for some of Mr. Bloomberg’s education initiatives, said she hoped legislators could be persuaded that any shortcomings of the current system could be addressed within the current law.

She said the city’s leaders should “listen to the concerns of the groups that are most vocal in opposition to mayoral control and address the issues they are raising administratively.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said she hoped for a “real policy debate” over control of the schools rather than a “shouting match.”