A referendum on mayoral control
Whether or not you agree with the job that Gabriela López, Faauuga Moliga and Alison Collins have done while serving on San Francisco’s school board, they and their colleagues were democratically elected by the public. Voters had their say. If the Feb. 15 recall election succeeds, however, the public will lose their say, including those who support the recall campaign.
Instead, Mayor London Breed would be kingmaker and would choose who sits on the school board in place of the three recalled members. This is an undemocratic process. Having the mayor appoint this many school board members at one time is a backdoor test run for mayoral control over the city’s schools.
This is a problem, because mayoral control is a governance structure that has not worked in favor of students in any number of cities where it has been used. School boards under mayoral control have no definitive track record of helping to improve student achievement, which should be the North Star for determining any school board’s governance.
A 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute on three cities that were under mayor control — Washington, D.C., New York and Chicago — found that academic gains were seen only by white and high-income students. The widening racial achievement gap, churn of mostly experienced teachers driven by test-based accountability and a focus on marketoriented policies have diverted attention from the need to address socioeconomic factors impeding learning.
Furthermore, researcher Jane Hannaway of the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank, testified before a D.C. City Council hearing in 2018 that cities that previously had mayoral control of their school districts — Boston in 1992, Chicago in 1995, Detroit in 1999, Philadelphia in 2001 and New York in 2002 — had shown that “there is little about governance reforms, per se, that lead to greater student achievement” and that the connections between governance structure and student achievement is “simply spurious.”
Washington has been under mayoral control since 2007. During this time, its public schools have been plagued by racial achievement gap that saw white, higher-income students doing far better than Black and brown, low-income students in math. Numerous scandals came to light,
including highly publicized cheating scandals related to the district’s testing and data obsession and demand for teachers to show higher test scores. During at least one year before the scandals were revealed, onethird of students graduated despite having excessive absences, and many of those improper graduations were linked to higher-than-deserved test scores. Teacher and parent frustrations are high, yet voters don’t have a say in who operates the schools. City Council members and others who have pushed to end mayoral control say unchecked power and lack of accountability have created a topdown system insulated from oversight.
Meanwhile, Illinois recently reversed course and passed a law to reinstate an elected school board for Chicago public schools, which had been the only district in the state under mayoral control. After 25 years of constant friction between the mayor, educators and families, Chicago’s school board will be a elected by 2025.
Johns Hopkins University researcher Deborah Land, in Review of Educational
Research, wrote in 2002 that there is “not yet convincing evidence that appointment of school board members produces more effective governance or greater academic achievement.”
And there has been little if any subsequent research finding the opposite.
Financial disclosure forms for the San Francisco recall effort reveal the deep pockets of some of the key funders of this effort, including venture capitalists Arthur Rock and former PayPal Chief Operating Officer David Sacks.
Why would they be involved in this? To be on good terms with the mayor, perhaps? Or could they be interested in privatizing public education? We don’t know for sure what the motivations are. But when voters lose control over who sits on their school board, these are the types of questions they need to start asking themselves.
In 2020, Rock and several other like-minded billionaires and procharter school groups poured money into the Oakland school board election. Now their preferred candidates
dominate the Oakland school board.
Parents and voters deserve a board that answers to them, not to unelected appointees who kowtow to the whims of City Hall. We may not agree with every decision that our elected school board members make. But if we don’t like the job they’re doing, we get to vote them out when their terms are up. It doesn’t matter whether you like or dislike the mayor in question. The crucial point is that when board members are duly elected, parents and voters have control over the governance of our schools.
As San Francisco schools face steep budget cuts, an independent school board will be crucial in determining how much our schools will lose, what programs will be saved or lost and how the decisions will affect students and their education. Public voice is essential for these monumental choices. There needs to be checks and balances, something that doesn’t exist when school board members serve at the pleasure of City Hall.