The mayoral control New Yorkers really deserve

Twenty years ago, Mayor Bloomberg did something virtually unprecedented: He testified before a New York City Council Committee. The committee in question was the Education Committee, which I chaired at the time, and Bloomberg did so to address one of his top priorities: obtaining control over the city’s public schools, which were then managed by a board that was unaccountable to voters.

Four months later, Albany gave him pretty much what he wanted. While a Panel for Educational Policy (the PEP) would still govern the schools, Bloomberg would appoint most of its members.

I was optimistic this would lead to real change, particularly when Bloomberg appointed a world-class schools chancellor, Joel Klein, but while there was some change, Albany soon began clawing back the control Bloomberg had fought so hard to obtain.

In 2009, Albany restricted Bloomberg’s ability to open or close a school or even change the grades it served. Every such change would require a PEP vote even though this panel of ordinary citizens that met for a few hours a month was supposed to guide broad policy, not micromanage decisions on individual schools. Even worse, such a change would also require an “Educational Impact Statement” and a local hearing prior to the PEP’s hearing. To the uninitiated, these requirements may sound harmless, but such impact statements can be used as vehicles for litigation, and they were. The whole process moves at a glacial pace, which makes the impact on kids even worse.

A year later, the teachers union soon sued to prevent the city from shutting down 19 severely failing schools. Although it couldn’t be contested that these schools were failing their students miserably, that was simply deemed irrelevant under the law: They couldn’t be closed, a court ruled, because the impact statements purportedly weren’t detailed enough.

Then, in 2010, Albany took yet another bite out of mayoral control. If the city allowed a charter school to use space in an underutilized school building, not only would this have to be approved in accordance with the 2009 law, but any subsequent change in the amount of space allocated to that charter school would also require a PEP vote. Although the city’s public school buildings have more than 100 million square feet of floor space, allowing a charter school to use just one additional room would require taking up the time of a panel of volunteers that met for only a few hours a month.

Finally, just weeks ago, Albany made two critical changes that, if signed into law, will hamstring the city even further. Opening or closing a school or changing the grades it serves will now require that the PEP meet in the borough in which the school is located, which means up to five months of delay until the next such meeting rolls around. Add that to the two months needed to draft a bulletproof impact statement and hold a local meeting, and you now have seven months of process on top of the internal deliberations and community engagement that are needed to make these decisions in the first place.

Albany also passed legislation, awaiting Gov. Hochul’s signature, forcing the city to reduce its class sizes. That may sound great but since it’s very expensive, it drains money from other priorities. At the charter schools I manage, we already have larger classes than the district schools so we can afford a laptop for every student, robust programs in the arts, sports and chess, and dedicated science teachers who offer classes five days a week to students beginning in kindergarten. Similarly, Mayor Adams and Chancellor David Banks have initiatives they wish to pursue such as creating programs to address the needs of children suffering from dyslexia. The chancellor and the educators who advise him, not politicians in Albany, should decide how to allocate our city’s limited educational resources.

Those who manage our city’s district schools already face enormous constraints due to the union contracts that limit their ability to make critical decisions. When you add to that all of the ways that Albany is gumming up the works with unnecessary delays and constraints on the chancellor’s independence, the schools are becoming as unmanageable as they were when Bloomberg obtained mayoral control over them two decades ago.

If the mayor and chancellor are to have any chance of overcoming the terrible impact that COVID has had on student achievement, they must be given real control over the schools, not the faux mayoral control that Albany has foisted upon them. Hochul should refuse to sign the legislation before her and insist that Adams be given the same control over schools that Bloomberg had, and that he and our city’s students deserve.