Extending mayoral control is the only real choice

As state Senators and education “reformers” play politics with the governance of the New York City school system, I am reminded that most New Yorkers don’t remember when our schools were just hopeless and no one had the power to fix them.

Beginning in the 1960s, the school system began a steady decline. For several generations, many students were cheated out of a decent education.

Of course, the damage was done not just to the kids, but to the whole city. More than a million people, most of them middle-class parents, left the city in the 1970s, largely because they would not send their children to failing public schools. Our neighborhoods fell apart and many of our leading employers relocated to the suburbs.

Throughout this period, the school system was overseen by a seven-member Board of Education, with the mayor having two appointees and each borough president having one.

I served as one of only two members of the board appointed by Mayor Koch. It was one of the worst experiences of my life, and I quit in disgust after only 12 months on the job.

If you did not live through it, it is hard to imagine how dysfunctional the school board system was. It was not unusual for the mayor to announce an education priority one day and have the schools chancellor announce exactly the opposite a day later. Budgets, labor agreements, appointments and important education policies were all a subject of negotiation (more like horse-trading). In the process, no one paid much attention to what was happening in the classrooms with teaching and learning. Most chancellors lasted less than two years on the job, fighting the mayor and various board members every step of the way.

In desperation, leaders of government, education, business, labor and advocacy groups agreed that it was necessary to establish a new governance system for city schools that put responsibility and authority clearly in the hands of the mayor. This was not done to aggrandize the mayor, but rather because parents, employers and voters deserve to know who to hold accountable when schools fail. The state wisely enacted what has proven to be a rational and effective way to manage the nation’s largest school system.

We can disagree about whether Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña have the right approach to school reform. But we cannot go backwards. We have seen how badly a system that dilutes the clear authority of the mayor has failed our city and students in the past. There is absolutely no reason to believe that it would be different today.

Yes, education is still a highly political topic, as seen in the pitched debates over charter schools, testing and co-location of multiple schools in one building. But these struggles are at the margins compared with the meltdown that characterized the entire system for the 40 years before the governance reform that established mayoral control.

Right now, the biggest threat to continued progress in improving our schools comes not from local governance, pedagogy or budget issues, but from those who want to dilute mayoral control in order to punish de Blasio for reasons that are more political than substantive. Holding more than a million students hostage to partisan politics is simply not acceptable.

The Legislature must extend the current mayoral control law, hopefully permanently, before it expires on June 30. Anything less would throw our school system into chaos.  

Richard Beattie is the senior chairman of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and the founder and chairman of New Visions for Public Schools.