In the new year, state lawmakers will once again tackle the thorny question of whether New York City’s mayor can maintain control of the public school system.
The debate typically occurs every four years. But Mayor Eric Adams reportedly ruffled feathers in Albany in 2021, resulting in only a two-year extension of mayoral control. Now, with Adams facing an FBI investigation and many parents and elected officials outraged over his budget cuts to education, there’s added suspense about how Albany will respond to his governance of schools.
Here’s a primer on how the relationship between mayors and Albany politicians has defined New York City’s school system.
The history of mayoral control
“The history of education in New York is really a history of cycles of centralization and decentralization,” said Ester Fuchs, professor of public affairs at Columbia University, and an advisor to the mayor within the Bloomberg Administration.
Before the late 1960s, the city’s board of education governed the schools.
Black and brown parents frustrated by segregation and inequality within the school system then led a fight for more local control, culminating in the Ocean-Hill Brownsville teachers’ strike. In response, the city introduced 32 community-based school boards to govern alongside the Board of Education.
But over the next several decades, many residents and city leaders began to criticize the boards for corruption, “obstruction, and meddling.”
In the 1990s, some other U.S. cities began consolidating governance of schools under the mayor as part of a broader reform movement.
“Mayoral control as a movement was a reaction to failing public schools,” Fuchs said.
Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg campaigned on transforming the schools by shifting accountability. Assailing the old school board as a “rinky dink candy store,” Bloomberg in 2002 persuaded lawmakers to grant him control of the schools to enact a series of controversial reforms, including closing some…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply