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After Duncan, Bloomberg nudged, group revised control stance


This letter worked. The Citizen Union now supports what Mayor Bloomberg (and Arne Duncan) want.


by Elizabeth Green

The Citizens Union has backed away from a push to give fixed terms to members of the citywide school board, following lobbying from Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, according to sources familiar with the watchdog group’s stance.

Bloomberg has vigorously opposed fixed terms. He says he needs to be able to dismiss school board members at his pleasure in order to have real control over the public schools.

Members of the Citizens Union had previously voted to endorse fixed terms. But the position the Citizens Union, a nonprofit good-government group, will recommend tomorrow backs away from the fixed-terms power check. As a compromise, it would force the mayor to give 90 days’ notice before dismissing a board member, sources said.

Bloomberg reached out to the group after it briefed City Hall on the first proposal last week, urging board members to reconsider their stance. The group subsequently re-started its process of debating and voting on a position, sources said.

Duncan also weighed in during that period, writing a personal letter urging the group to preserve the mayor’s power over the schools, sources said. Duncan has previously said he supports mayoral control as a way to improve urban schools.

Teachers union president Randi Weingarten and the education historian Diane Ravitch, who has pushed for checking the mayor’s power with an independent school board, also made pitches to Citizens Union members, sources said. A member of the group who is a stronger critic of mayoral control recruited Ravitch to speak at a meeting yesterday in a last-minute pitch to counter the push by Bloomberg and Duncan.

The Citizens Union will announce the proposal at a press conference on the steps of Tweed Courthouse tomorrow at noon. The executive director of the Citizens Union, Dick Dadey, declined to comment in a telephone interview. “We’ll make that information available tomorrow at our press conference,” he said.

A spokesman for Bloomberg, Jason Post, also declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Duncan did not immediately have a response.




The Department of Education
Washington

June 8, 2009

Mr. Dick Dadey
Executive Director, Citizens Union
299 Broadway, Suite 700
New York, NY 10007

Dear Mr. Dadey,

Many thanks to you and to the Board of Citizens Union for your thoughtful deliberations of the questions currently under debate in Albany on governance of New York City schools. With 1.1 million students, the New York City public school system is the largest in the country: its success or failure is of national import, and the groundbreaking reforms New York City has implemented under mayor control are helping guide the way, nationally, on how to make urban education work for our children.

As former CEO of Chicago's public schools, I know just how hard it is to bring change to a large urban school district. And as President Obama's Secretary of Education, I can tell you that both the change and the resulting progress that has occurred in New York City schools over the last 7 years is truly remarkable. Given that, I have real concerns that what seem like minor tweaks in the decision-making structure could turn back the clock and halt progress, with profoundly negative consequences for New York City's students.

With that in mind, I wanted to strongly urge you against recommending "fixed terms" for Educational Policy--a change to the current governance structure that would make it impossible for the mayor to remove Panel members who do not share his or her policy vision. Fixed terms could create the real possibility that the Panel and mayor could diverge on important policy questions, bringing New York City back to the blame games, finger-pointing and excuse-making that ended when the New York State Legislature enacted mayoral control in 2002.

With some calling for an end to the mayoral majority on the Panel, I understand the appeal of fixed terms as a compromise position. Both proposals, however, ultimately allow for the same thing: the opportunity to stop--not just to inform, or debate, or bring sunshine to, but stop--an educational policy decision made by the mayor. If we believe that a system of mayoral control is the only chance we have of implementing real change in a school system like New York's--and I believe this strongly--any kind of separate, unaccountable decision-making body, even if it will probably agree with the mayor most of the time, is a step in the wrong direction.

Proponents of fixed terms commonly cite Mayor Bloomberg's removal of Panel members in order to win approval in order to win approval for his plan to end social promotion. Messy public relations, indeed, but just think if the mayor had been unable to do so: students would have continued to fall through the cracks, the mayor would have been able to blame the Panel for continued failures in the system, the Panel would have blamed back, and the dynamic would have been indistinguishable from the old New York City Board of Education. Fixed terms would have produced the wrong outcome.

The Panel's critical role is to create a moment of reflection in the decision-making process when voices can be heard and mayoral policies can be better informed and shaped. With careful, process-oriented legislative changes--an enhanced opportunity for parents to weigh in, for example--it can perform this role more fully. But for mayoral control to work and to avoid putting at risk the progress New York City has made, final decision-making must rest with the mayor in substance as well as in name.

Thank you again for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Arne Duncan
U. S. Secretary of Education


— Elizabeth Green
Gotham Schools
2009-06-11
http://gothamschools.org/2009/06/11/after-duncan-bloomberg-nudged-group-set-on-mayoral-control/

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