In this interview, Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, responds to questions about school board governance and mayoral control of school districts. Hess recently penned "Assessing the Case for Mayoral Control" (www.aei.org/publication28511) and has written widely about school boards in works including "School Boards at the Dawn of the 21st Century" (available at www.nsba.org/site/docs/1200/1143.pdf).
1. First of all, when did mayors first start this process of "taking over the running of schools?"
In some cities, like New York City and Detroit, there have been periods of substantial mayoral involvement in education, both formal and informal, dating back to the late 1800s. But today's systematic efforts to promote mayoral control are really a phenomenon that started in the late 1980s, with Boston as the trailblazer. In the late 1980s and early '90s, frustration with the 13-member elected school committee reached a crescendo. In 1989, Boston voters passed a referendum to give the mayor control of the schools. In 1992, the mayor first appointed a majority of the board. Despite tensions, mayor Thomas Menino and his hand-picked superintendent Thomas Payzant, forged a strong working relationship. Mayoral control smoothed and sped enactment of Payzant's reform efforts, and in 2006, his tenure was capped by Boston's winning of the Broad Prize for Urban Education. Chicago's governance reforms, launched in 1995, were another early and much-studied instance of mayoral takeover.
Led by reformers who looked to Boston and later Chicago, the push for mayoral control started to spread in the past decade. Today, mayoral control is increasingly common in big districts. The proposals range from those that offer mayors nearly complete control, as in New York City or Chicago today, to those that are more conditional. For instance, Detroit adopted mayoral control for a five year period starting in 1999 and Washington, DC, operated for a few years in the early 2000s with an awkwardly designed "hybrid" board that included both mayoral appointees and elected board members under mayor Anthony Williams.
2. Now, who really evaluates school boards? Do you think the average taxpayer really knows enough about education to evaluate an entire school board?
In theory, of course, it's the voters. In reality, though, a very small percentage of the public actually participates in school board elections--often less than 10 or 15 percent of registered voters. Consequently, single-purpose, elected boards are more likely to respond to the immediate desires of the most interested parties. This means that teachers associations, aggrieved neighborhood groups, and other self-interested actors tend to exert disproportionate influence; research suggests that teacher's union influence is head-and-shoulders above anyone else. Stanford political scientist Terry Moe has done the best work on this question, carefully researching board politics in California. He has found that school board candidates endorsed by the union win 76 percent of the time, while others win just 31 percent of the time.
Also, it is incredibly hard to evaluate board elections in the first place. There are few reliable indicators, and their nonpartisan and "off-cycle" status (this is why so many board elections are held in March or April) makes them even more difficult to follow. Moreover, since we don't have good measures of efficiency or even of meaningful school performance, it is tough to gauge school quality--much less how well a board is doing. In fact, the scant research on the topic (conducted primarily by the University of Chicago's Christopher Berry) suggests that measures of student achievement have little or no impact on whether board members are reelected.
3. It seems that there is a lot of turn-over on these school boards. Even I have been asked to apply, which may show some desperation on the part of the citizenry. Who, if anyone keeps data on school board turnover?
There is some data on this topic, but it is pretty limited. The best national data is probably from my 2001 National School Boards Association study "School Boards at the Dawn of the 21st Century," which reported findings drawn from a stratified random sample of more than 800 school districts. I found that 18 percent of board members surveyed had served more than ten years, 30 percent had served six to ten years, 41 percent had served two to five years, and 11 percent had been on the board for less than two years. Forty-three percent of board members definitely intended to seek another term, 22 percent were not going to run again, and 34 percent were unsure. When asked about the number of incumbents defeated for reelection in the previous four years, just 11 percent of respondents indicated that three or more had been turned out while 47 percent reported that none had been beat. Beyond the data in this study (which is available at www.nsba.org/site/docs/1200/1143.pdf), I am not aware of any more current or more systematic data on board turnover.
4. Is there anyone who has written about the behavior and the history of school boards--how did they first get started and is the "school board" an anachronism in this day and age?
Readers might want to check out Michael Kirst's work; Mike is one of the leading authorities on education policy and has written about school boards and the evolution of mayoral involvement in education. A good volume is Larry Cuban's and Michael Usdan's, Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots, which considers issues of leadership by mayors and boards while studying reform efforts in six cities. Perhaps the single most useful volume on school boards is William Howell's 2005 book, Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics, which examines the origins, politics, and dynamics of school boards. For those really interested in where urban boards came from, a wonderful place to turn (for this, as for so much else) is David Tyack's 1974 classic The One Best System.
For the grad students and school board junkies out there, three additional volumes on school boards that deserve a closer look include Tom Alsbury's 2008 The Future of School Board Governance, Don McAdams's What School Boards Can Do, and 10,000 Democracies by Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer.
It is important to remember that school boards, as nonpartisan and "apolitical" entities, were a significant early 20th century innovation by the Progressives. They were supposed to clean up the politics, corruption, patronage, and incompetence so prevalent at the time. Early 19th century boards had been local and informal; worried about corruption and inefficiency, Progressive reformers sought to streamline boards and render them more professional and accountable. Over time, school boards took on a more corporate cast, with a governance approach modeled on corporate boards in which directors worked with an expert manager.
5. Now, in terms of turning over school boards to mayors, the first name that comes to mind is New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. But I think to myself, "Doesn't he have enough to do? Does he really have the skills and wherewithal to cope with the complex issues of education in a massive city like New York?" So, given that, what are a couple of key arguments in favor of mayoral control?
Great point. It is useful to consider this by asking why we might expect a Michael Bloomberg in New York or an Adrian Fenty in Washington, DC to support school improvement more effectively than a local board.
Seen this way, it's worth highlighting a few of the reasons that advocates think mayoral control makes sense. As the chief executive of the city, the mayor is able to build broad citywide coalitions of interests, rally business and civic groups, and counter the fragmented politics of urban schooling--by balancing the influence of unions and single-issue groups. Mayors are also positioned to coordinate the city's many services with schools, from youth facilities to health care to policing to libraries.
Mayors can provide more coherence, stability, and continuity than elected boards. Elected school boards--with their shifting membership, concern with public perception, and desire to demonstrate visible and rapid improvement--are prone to micromanagement and "change for the sake of change," without significant attention to implementation. Also, while most urban superintendents don't last even four or five years, mayoral terms typically are four years, with most mayors serving two or more terms--and some, like incumbent mayors in Boston and Chicago, serving more than a decade.
Mayoral control can mean more accountability and organizational discipline. A lack of electoral involvement makes it difficult for voters to hold their elected board representatives even loosely accountable. For troubled urban districts, replacing an ineffective board atop a dysfunctional system can offer an important opportunity to "reshuffle the deck," upend the routines and political understandings that can hinder improvement, and foster focused and responsible governance.
6. What are the key arguments against mayoral control?
First, of course, there is the concern about a loss of transparency. Malfeasance in recent years at private-sector firms from Enron to WorldCom have shown how an overly familiar board and governance culture can enable management to take shortcuts, cook the books, or adopt practices that do not effectively serve the interests of its constituents.
Also, some voices are likely to be marginalized or silenced under an appointed board. In urban districts with elected members, personal conflicts or accusations of micromanagement often reflect real tensions over resource allocation or the school system's direction. Appointed officials, buffered from political and constituent considerations, are more likely to leave significant distributional or value-laden issues unaddressed. Collegial boards may be reluctant to ask uncomfortable questions or raise unpleasant issues, with this deference coming at the expense of oversight.
Despite the widespread complaints about board dysfunction and micromanagement, it is not clear that superintendents view school boards as the hindrance that popular critiques suggest. Confidential polling shows that a significant majority of superintendents and school board members describe their working relationship as cooperative over contentious. Skeptics acknowledge that urban school governance is troubled but argue that mayoral control is unlikely to help and may bring unwelcome side-effects.
7. What does the research say about mayoral control and appointed boards?
For all the buzz that mayoral control in places like New York City or Washington, DC has generated, there is remarkably little evidence of any clear relationship between mayoral control and various outcome measures (in fact, it is equally difficult to draw clear links between board behaviors and particular outcomes). Part of the problem with evaluating mayoral control is the limited sample size, part is that districts that adopt mayoral control are self-selected and tend to pursue a variety of other reforms at once, and part is that the link between governance arrangements and bottom-line outcomes is tenuous and likely to involve a substantial time delay.
Most of the existing research consists of case studies of cities like Boston, Chicago, and Cleveland, where the findings are equivocal. As Stanford University's Michael Kirst has concluded in his numerous papers on the topic, typically, it is "difficult to predict" whether mayoral control will help. The handful of systematic studies from the 1960s and '70s on similar governance reforms report ambiguous results and generally find no different between elected and appointed boards in terms of educational outcomes or their responsiveness to public demands.
Kenneth Wong of Brown University and Francis Shen of Harvard University have done some of the most extensive recent research analyzing mayoral control. Their 2001 analysis examined multiple districts and concluded, with caution, that there were achievement gains associated with mayoral control. But their 2005 study, which examined finances and staffing in the nation's 100 largest urban districts, reported that mayoral takeovers did not improve financial stability. Over the decades there have been only a handful of systematic studies. If we go way back, we find that most of the research over time has reported murky relationships. In a 1978 study, Harvey Tucker and Harmon Zeigler found elected and appointed school boards were equally responsive to public demands. As far back as 1967, Thomas Dye examined 67 large cities and found no significant different between elected and appointed boards when it came to outcomes or district effectiveness.
8. What is the future of the American School Board?
Tough question. The problem isn't necessarily boards per se, so much as the way they have been structured and asked to operate. Boards operate in a way that fosters incoherence. It is pretty clear that that the Progressive Era aspirational model of a lay board overseeing a hierarchical system managed by the dictates of 1920s-style "scientific management" is not suited to today's challenges or opportunities. On the other hand, that doesn't necessarily point to abolishing boards in favor of mayoral control--it might make the case for reforming boards into bodies that have the incentives and tools to provide effective direction and oversight.
Before abandoning an ill-designed arrangement for a headfirst plunge into mayoral control, any community should first ensure that the proposal is sensibly designed, the mayor is equal to the task, and their game plan stretches beyond the next mayoral election. Mayoral control can be a useful step only if pursued with an eye to these larger governance questions. Calls for mayoral control are frequently notable for their lack of any deeper rethinking of the structure of urban education.
Either school boards should be reconfigured, with all the frustrations and messiness that implies, or shifted to something like mayoral control, which has its own problems and limitations, but also has potential to bring coherence and focus.
9. Okay, if a city is going to adopt mayoral control, what would be two or three keys to doing it right?
To begin with, transparency is essential. In the past decade, corporate America learned that overly cozy boards could fail to provide essential scrutiny. Regular public hearings and reports on district affairs are a vital part of the process and should not be brushed aside. Such benchmarks, monitoring systems, and reporting requirements should be established prior to the mayor assuming control of the schools--so that the ground rules and expectations are clear from the very start and not the product of post hoc wrangling.
In practice, such oversight requires more than legislative activity. Mayoral accountability will work best when local officials, civic leaders, and the media are prepared to ask hard questions and insist on verifiable measures of performance.
Of course, effective governance always requires a clear division of authority and responsibilities and a coherent and well-ordered strategy. With mayoral control, it is particularly important for leaders to agree, in advance, what metrics will be used to judge the success of their efforts. These have to include more than test scores and graduation rates--practical measures for improvement in teacher quality, transportation, student safety, construction, finances, and other key responsibilities should be established.
At the end of the day, mayoral control will only work where, as in Boston or Chicago, mayors put their reputations on the line and their political clout to work. Vague promises and grand plans won't cut it.
Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at AEI.
