First Of Two Parts

Wednesday, January 21, 2004

By Carmen J. Lee and Eleanor Chute, Post-Gazette Education Writers

Task force members charged with improving the Pittsburgh Public Schools are considering giving the mayor more power over the district. If they do, Pittsburgh could join some of the most troubled school districts in the nation that have turned to their mayors for help.

Relations among members of the Pittsburgh school board -- shown here at an April 15 meeting -- remain strained at best. It was that bad blood that caused The Heinz Endowments and the Grable and Pittsburgh foundations to suspend their funding of the district last year, resulting in an immediate loss of $3.5 million. (John Heller, Post-Gazette) Part Two: Mayors in the Schools: In shambles, Cleveland schools turned to mayor

In Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Washington, D.C., mayors have been given more control over school boards, primarily in an effort to stop years of bickering.

The results have been mixed, but the trend shows no sign of abating.

"In the last 10 to 15 years, mayors are sensing that the public is concerned about what they call quality of life, and public schools are right at the center of this debate and concern," said Kenneth Wong, a professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University who has studied mayoral control of schools.

While the vast majority of the nation's 14,000 school districts still have elected school boards, about 20 of the largest have boards in which all or some of their members are appointed by local or state officials, most often the mayor.

Even in cities where there hasn't been a mayoral takeover of the school board, mayors are becoming much more involved in the schools, said Audrey M. Hutchinson, a director at the Institute for Youth, Education and Families of the National League of Cities.

Mayors "can bring disparate groups together because they're the chief executives of their cities," she said. "They're the one person in the city who can pull people together to talk about what's good and what's right for kids."

In Pittsburgh, Mayor Tom Murphy generally has been reluctant to support proposals for mayoral involvement in the school board. He created the 38-member Mayor's Commission on Public Education last year, after three foundations suspended funding to the school district. The commission's report is due next month, but Murphy won't comment on whether he'd be receptive to a recommendation that he appoint some or all school board members.

One of the ironies of the trend of mayoral participation is that 100 years ago, many urban schools were heading in exactly the opposite direction.

In that era, school systems were trying to sever their ties with state and city politicians because of their reputation for corruption and political favoritism.

But beginning in the early 1990s, the momentum shifted as state and local officials joined the scramble to find remedies for academically failing, financially struggling school districts across the country.

Time for a shake-up?

"There are particular times and certain circumstances in the history of a city where a governance change can shake up an organization that's in decline and unable to move forward," said Michael W. Kirst, a Stanford University education professor who has studied mayoral influence on public schools. "The mayor can do that, and there's no other force that can do that. No other civic capacity can do that. Electing school board members isn't going to do that."

Whether the Pittsburgh district needs that kind of shake-up is a matter of perspective. Still, relations among school board members remain strained at best. It was that bad blood that caused The Heinz Endowments and the Grable and Pittsburgh foundations to suspend their funding of the district last year, resulting in an immediate loss of $3.5 million.

Often a "triggering event," such as a teacher strike or a budget crisis, leads to the decision to give the mayor more control of a school district, Kirst said. "I would say in Pittsburgh, the triggering event would be the withdrawal of the foundation funds."

Pennsylvania legislators would have to amend state law to give Pittsburgh's mayor any control over how the district operates. That's what happened 2 1/2 years ago in Harrisburg, when that city's school district was designated poor-performing by the state because of financial and academic troubles.

Mayor Stephen Reed was permitted to take over the district and appoint a five-member board of control. The elected board was stripped of all power, except to vote on tax levies based on budgets approved by the board of control.

Another model exists in Philadelphia. For decades, Philadelphia's mayor appointed school board members, while the city council approved the tax levies and, more recently, contributed additional money from the city's general fund.

The mayor-appointment model wasn't enough to stem the decline of the Philadelphia schools, and so last year, the state took over the district and set up a five-member school reform commission. Under the new arrangement, the governor appoints three commissioners and the mayor two. City council still approves the taxes.

Pittsburgh school officials have often pointed to Philadelphia, with its history of troubled schools and financial crises, to argue against appointed school boards.

Taxing problem

In Philadelphia's defense, Pedro Ramos, a corporate lawyer and former Philadelphia school board president, contended that the major problem with the city's mayoral-appointed board was not that it was appointed. The problem was, he said, that school officials couldn't raise taxes, even as the district became poorer, enrollment increased and the city's population declined.

"The school district's needs were going up, the dollars were going down ... and an overextended tax base was supporting the city, county and school district," Ramos said.

He and others said that, in fact, the board members selected by Philadelphia mayors over the years often fit the profile of civic-minded professionals that experts say will make ideal school board members.

Besides Ramos, former Philadelphia school board members include Sandra Dungee Glenn, a foundation president who was appointed to the school reform commission; and Michael Masch, a former top budget official for the University of Pennsylvania. Gov. Ed Rendell recently selected Masch to be his state budget secretary.

The ability to target highly qualified people for a school board is one of the major advantages of a mayoral appointment system, said John DeStefano Jr., president of the National League of Cities and mayor of New Haven, Conn.

In New Haven, where the school board includes DeStefano and seven people he appoints, the members include business leaders and university professors, some with educational specialties.

"I'm able to appoint people who I guarantee you would not typically run for public office because it's just not their thing," DeStefano said. "They are leaders in their field. I think that's the opportunity."

New Haven mayors have appointed board members for many years, and DeStefano acknowledged that the 21,000-student district was still low-achieving. But, he said, it was improving.

Yet the New Haven and Philadelphia experiences are one reason some experts contend there's nothing magic about having a mayor appoint the school board.

"Anybody who comes into the city and argues that one governance structure has been proven better than another structure in raising the academic performance of kids is just wrong," said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools.

"There is no one structure that has proven itself to be universally effective. ... It depends on the people and their ability to get on the same page."

Different models work

Recent studies of mayoral involvement in school districts have shown mixed results. In some cases, there have been gains in student achievement, primarily in elementary schools. In others, improvements have occurred in maintaining buildings or recruiting and retaining superintendents.

One successful example is Sacramento, Calif., where, in 1996, Mayor Joe Serna grew weary of school board arguments and deadlocks and formed a commission that interviewed school board candidates for the Sacramento City Unified School District.

Serna, who died in 2000, worked to get the top candidates elected and then stepped back into a supportive position, helping develop after-school programs and increasing community use of school buildings. In recent years, achievement and other conditions in the district have improvement considerably, Kirst said.

In Harrisburg, Superintendent Gerald Kohn gives his mayor credit for starting the momentum to turn around that district's schools.

Kohn said the mayor-appointed board included a deputy attorney general, a former assistant attorney general, a former assistant secretary of health, a former assistant secretary of education and the executive director of the local chapter of the NAACP.

Reed oversaw the superintendent search process and hired Kohn, giving him the authority to select his staff and restricting the board from being involved in personnel decisions. That prevented micromanagement, Kohn said.

Test scores have been going up, attendance has improved and private school students are transferring back to the public schools. The district also has received a foundation grant to start a preschool program and state money for a science and technology prep school.

"The governor had to ask Mayor Reed three or four times to take over the schools," Kohn said. "He did it because he wanted the neighborhoods to improve, and the neighborhoods won't improve without the schools improving."

Stanford's Kirst said schools in Chicago, Boston and Cleveland also were better off since their mayors were put in charge.

But he's critical of hybrid approaches in which the mayor appoints a minority of board members, and he doesn't believe the system has worked well in Washington, D.C.

And Kirst has personal experience in Oakland, Calif., where he and other members of a mayoral commission wanted the mayor, former Gov. Jerry Brown, to have the ability to appoint all school board members. In a political compromise, three members appointed by the mayor were added to the seven-member board.

A new superintendent helped the district make some academic improvements, but the Oakland schools are now bankrupt and recently asked California for a $100 million bailout, the largest in state history.

"It's just terrible," Kirst said. "There was tension between the people elected and the mayor's appointees. You ended up without anybody clearly accountable."

Broad view needed

Vanderbilt's Wong agreed that accountability was more fragmented with hybrid boards. But even so, he believes that hybrid boards are probably more effective than boards elected by district.

"The argument for an appointed body, even as a hybrid, has always been that you [as a board member] are more willing to deal with collective interests rather than with what your ward or district or constituency wants you to do," Wong said. With elected boards, "The ... individual members always go back to their own community first."

Nevertheless, there are examples of smoothly functioning elected school boards. One is the five-member board in Arlington County, Va.

The district, in a suburb of Washington, D.C., has about 19,000 students. Nearly 40 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, but many come from affluent families. Its racial makeup is 42 percent white, 34 percent Hispanic, 14 percent black and 10 percent Asian.

Until 1994, the Arlington school board, like others in Virginia, was appointed, in this case by the county government. Then residents approved a referendum to elect board members at large.

Board Chairwoman Elaine Furlow said she thought "there's nothing like looking a voter in the eye and being held accountable for what you've done."

"I think our differences [on the board] are amicable. We occasionally have 3-2 votes or 4-1 votes. Even when we do have them, we have worked through an awful lot of the differences before we get to the point of voting."

Local blacks concerned

In Pittsburgh, where residents fought in the 1970s to switch from court-appointed to elected school boards, there hasn't been much support to go back to appointed boards.

Some black school board members and community leaders say they were concerned that a mayoral appointed board would dilute black representation, which currently stands at three of nine members.

When former city Councilman Bob O'Connor held a public hearing last year on his proposal to add four members to the school board who would be appointed by the mayor, most speakers were against the idea and against any city government interference in school district affairs.

Then there are concerns about giving Murphy, in particular, a role in selecting school board members.

Thomas Murrin, former dean of Duquesne University's business school and co-chair of an advisory panel for Pittsburgh School Superintendent John Thompson, has been critical of how the city school board operates. Murphy has been "somewhat involved," he said, in selecting school board members because he's supported the campaigns of some members of the board's majority, including board President Darlene Harris.

As a result, Murrin said, he wasn't too confident in what Murphy's selections might be if he had that responsibility.

Whether a mayoral takeover can work, Kirst said, can depend on the competence of the mayor and the city government, and having a sense of vision.

Before getting involved in school business, Kirst added, any mayor "has got to know what he wants. It's a big banana to swallow."

Tomorrow: Cleveland and Washington, D.C. -- a tale of two cities and their school boards.

Correction/Clarification: (Published April 29, 2003) The task force appointed by Mayor Tom Murphy to study the Pittsburgh Public School district does not have the power to give the mayor control over district operations. The first paragraph of an article in Sunday's editions implied it did.

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