The mayor should run the schools

Five hearings throughout the city over two months on the fate of mayoral control of the schools are complete. They were a predictable sham, a massive waste of time. We already knew that there were a few hundred squeaky wheels in a city of 8.6 million who hate having the city’s chief elected official accountable for the public schools. What’s the significance of that? If there were hearings on whether the city ought to maintain mayoral control of the police or even the sanitation department, advocates could probably scare up at least that many voices to say hell no.

It’s no surprise that the teachers union, which was at the apogee of its power operating behind the scenes when the schools were run by an utterly unaccountable Board of Education, wants to jettison the current system. It’s no surprise that community school board activists would prefer to have hyperlocal control, so that the most involved parents could exercise far more influence.

Back when 32 community school boards were elected, turnout hovered around 4% — and the panels became political fiefdoms for the connected few. Unsurprisingly, they also became hotbeds of corruption.

Sure, some parents in good faith think there ought to be stronger channels of communication, and more consultation, before major decisions are made. Nobody can argue against people in power listening and learning — but that dodges a key question, because well more than a million parents and guardians think they know what’s right for their kids, and they often disagree with one another.

In the end, someone has to make hard decisions for the common good. The current system, quite logically, charges a chancellor appointed directly by an official chosen at the polls by more New Yorkers than anybody else with hearing input and then making the vast majority of tough calls.

Mayor Adams is absolutely right, just as Mayor de Blasio and Mayor Bloomberg before him were. Mayoral control of the schools has been a huge improvement over what came before it, elevating education governance out of the backwater and into the public eye. Little surprise that graduation rates and test scores and just about every other meaningful indicator of student success are way up since 2002.

On this page, we’ve defended the system whether we liked or loathed the guy in City Hall because we believe that mayoral control — effectively making the big decisions about the schools subject to popular vote in a relatively high-turnout election every four years — is the closest thing to true popular control. Other systems of governance, in the name of giving the people and parents of New York City more power, actually give them less.

Gov. Hochul has wisely called for extending mayoral control of the schools for four years beyond its ridiculous umpteenth planned expiration this summer. That’s better than Gov. Cuomo, who routinely toyed with the power to try to gain leverage over his nemesis Bill de Blasio. But it’s still insufficient.

Mayoral control ought to be written into the law with no expiration date at all. If a future Legislature wants to alter it, fine; last we checked, they have the power to change laws. But few concepts are as proven as this. Mayoral control today, mayoral control tomorrow, mayoral control forever.