(From the New York Post, May 8, 2009)
By JOE WILLIAMS
CRITICS of the soon-to-expire law that put Mayor Bloomberg in charge of city schools say it allows him to rule with an iron fist, shielding him from true accountability. But there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with him or the law. Rather, the critics — and all New Yorkers — should look in the mirror.
What is needed aren’t “tweaks” to the statute, as critics insist, but a five-borough commitment from all of us to do a better job of holding the mayor — whoever it is — accountable for what happens in our city’s 1,500 public schools.
Mayoral control is supposed to be coupled with mayoral accountability. That means holding the mayor’s feet to the fire over education issues — even if we like the man or woman in charge. It means frequent demands that we do better for our kids. It means raising the bar for what is acceptable for our children and families. It means turning up the heat, not giving the mayor a pass.
If we were to honestly grade ourselves as a city in terms of the job we have done holding the mayor accountable, does anyone really believe we deserve to pass?
The reason the mayor won control of the system in the first place was because there was a widespread understanding — including from the powerful United Federation of Teachers — that we had hit rock bottom as a school system and were harming the lives of the children under our care. This was 2002, and the city was ready for an educational revolution. What we got, instead, was what the mayor himself referred to as an educational “evolution.”
While a few vocal critics complained that the mayor was doing too much, too fast, those who felt our city needed much more, much faster, decided largely to sit on the sidelines.
When the mayor agreed to contracts that included 43 percent pay hikes for teachers but kept intact a ham-fisted teacher-evaluation system in which the best a child can hope for is a teacher considered “satisfactory,” why didn’t we send the mayor back to the drawing board? Business leaders, in particular, who had fought for mayoral control, appeared to be the first ones to go soft when it came time to actually hold Bloomberg accountable.
Mayoral control isn’t meant to be the end of the process, but the beginning. It’s our job to make sure it works. The problems critics cite — parents are shut out, the system is driven by press release, etc. — have little to do with the law itself; they are collective failures on ourpart to insist that this mayor do better.
Ironically, some of the best examples of how real accountability can work under mayoral control have been led by the United Federation of Teachers. Several years ago, after the city eliminated community school districts, the union noticed that the new system didn’t include the hearing offices for student suspensions. As crime began to soar inside the high schools, it was the UFT that highlighted the issue and made the connection between the managerial glitch and the uptick in violence.
After the story made headlines, the mayor did something we had never seen before. He stood up, took responsibility for a serious mistake that was harming children and teachers and pledged to fix it.
That’s what real accountability looks like. We don’t need tweaks in the mayoral control law. We need tweaks in our own attitudes.
There have been some extremely positive developments in education under this mayor, but it is up to us to make sure we hold him accountable for achieving the revolution our city needs.
Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, is the author of “Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education.”