This school report flunks

It was due to come out last year, but didn’t show up until this week. We are talking about the release of the state Education Department report on mayoral control of the NYC public schools. And we are also talking about the release of the film “Coup de chance,” the 50th movie by Woody Allen. We’ll get back to Woody.

According to the state law mandating the mayoral control review, “The commissioner of education shall issue a report to the governor, the temporary president of the Senate, and the speaker of the Assembly of its findings and recommendations on or before Dec. 1, 2023.”

But what Commissioner Betty Rosa published yesterday, April 9, didn’t reprint the law’s complete language, leaving off the words “on or before Dec. 1, 2023.” That little maneuver doesn’t make the report on time.

We don’t mean to be petty, but the failure to follow a clear directive on timeliness is typical of Albany, where the Legislature keeps blowing budget deadline after budget deadline. As for the substance of the report, it’s a compilation of the complaints of the loudmouths who showed up at five useless public hearings held over the winter and a wishy-washy review of various school governance models.

We’ll stand by what Churchill said: “that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” As the report says, “the vast majority of U.S. public schools are governed by elected school boards.” We tried that here with 32 elected community school boards. It was an ethical and educational disaster. Sometimes there was outright crime, other times there was nepotism and incompetence with elections where just about no one voted.

In his pre-crazy days of 1997, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani went to Washington to meet with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to persuade the Department of Justice to approve changes regarding the powers of the elected school boards (which DOJ did approve). He told Reno the turnout was only 5%, a strikingly low number that she wrote down.

Having the public vote for school boards and school budgets on the third Tuesday in May is the norm in New York State. It may work in Mayberry, but even there the candidates who run in those elections are typically tied to the local teachers union. Teachers unions are great, but like all unions they exist to advocate for their members. And remember that the students don’t have a union.

As for Allen’s latest, we haven’t seen it, but we did see and laugh hysterically at his fifth movie, “Sleeper” from 50 years ago with the line that the world was destroyed when “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”

Al Shanker was president of the city teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers. He was followed by Sandy Feldman, Randi Weingarten and the incumbent, Michael Mulgrew. Over the decades we’ve debated with all of them, sometimes agreeing and more often, not.

Whether it was back in 1973 or today, the UFT wants to run the schools. An elected school board means union control. Mayoral control means the person the public voted into power, the mayor, is in charge.

The Legislature likes to please the union and is holding out on renewing mayoral control. This weak report is worthless.