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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll talk now about one of the issues facing the New York State Legislature and every parent of a school-aged child right now, as well as every public school teacher in New York City. The legislature is considering whether and how to renew mayoral control of the New York City public schools. The roots of this issue go back more than 20 years when the mayor of New York actually did not have the power to set a lot of education policy because control was all split up on the old Board of Education, which had both mayoral and borough president appointees.

Then also, there were 32 elected local school boards in the neighborhoods around the city, which also could make policy and were not under the control of the mayor. Because of corruption on some local school boards and failure to educate enough kids sufficiently overall, the politics gradually shifted to where the state accepted mayoral control because as they saw it, finally, someone would be truly accountable for educational outcomes in the city.

It took effect in 2002 when Michael Bloomberg was mayor. Earlier mayors had wanted it too. In 2012, when Bloomberg was still mayor, he said this about mayoral control to a National Conference of Mayors. This is about a minute and a half of Bloomberg in 2012.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Now the attacks on education by ideologues on the right and on the left must be met and must be fended off by the sensible center, and that is the people that you are here with today, the mayors. Mayors are pragmatists and problem solvers, not ideologues. They don't have the luxury of being on both sides of an issue. They have to be explicit as to where they stand. They can't say, "Oh, I voted for it, but I didn't vote to fund it." They have to go out there every day. Somebody did that. It's like saying I'm pro-choice but not for women. [laughter]

Mayors are where the action is. Mayors are where the rubber hits the road. Mayors do things. They pick up the garbage and they educate the kids and they keep crime down. They make their city's economics work and track people and increase life expectancy and do all the things that we would want them to do. They are expected to make hard-headed decisions based on the facts and not on special political interests.

That's what I think the mayors have done on so many issues, from illegal guns to immigration to climate change. That's what we have to do on education, including accountability measures like teacher evaluations and sensible plans to either improve or find other careers for those teachers who just aren't getting their students to move ahead and getting what they need. The students need to participate in the great American dream.

Brian Lehrer: That was Mayor Bloomberg's take in 2012, and he cites there one of the policies that drew the most backlash. He wanted to fire a lot of teachers. Today, as the mayoral control law expires and the state legislature considers if and how to renew it, public hearings are taking place. We'll play a clip in a little while of an opponent of mayoral control from one of those hearings in the Bronx a few weeks ago.

Let's bring in our guest. It's Clara Hemphill, who is the founding editor of insideschools.org, a free online guide to New York City public schools sponsored by the group Advocates for Children of New York. She wrote several book-length guides for parents to the best New York City public schools. She was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for Newsday, and she is the author, just last year, of A Brighter Choice: Building a Just School in an Unequal City. She was last on for a book interview for that. Clara, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Clara Hemphill: Thanks. Good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: I gave a little bit of prehistory. Can you tell us more about who controlled the New York City public schools before the mayor was put in charge in 2002 and what some of the strengths and weaknesses of that system were believed to be?

Clara Hemphill: Oh, happy to. By the way, the InsideSchools is at the New School. It used to be at Advocates for Children, but it's been at the New School for quite a while now.

Brian Lehrer: [unintelligible 00:04:31].

Clara Hemphill: The debate goes back actually more than 20 years. It goes back more than a hundred years, and the question is, what role do parents have in deciding their children's education? Is it better to have centralized control with professionals in charge, or do you want community control with members of the community and parents in charge? In the 19th century, there was a ward system, which was a kind of community control.

At the end of the 19th century, the school system became highly centralized in reaction to corruption in Tammany Hall. Then, during the Civil Rights Movement, the pendulum swung back towards community control, and that was in reaction to the central board's unwillingness to respond to demands for desegregation and racial justice. Starting in 1969, we had a decentralized system. It was really a hybrid system, but we had, as you said, 32 school districts with elected school boards that had significant control.

The idea was to give Black and Latino parents more of a say in how their districts were run. Some of the districts ran well, but others, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, didn't work well at all. Mayor Bloomberg persuaded the state legislature to give him control of the schools. He said that was necessary for equity. Now what you're seeing at some of the public hearings is the public sentiment is swinging back towards community control.

Parents say they have no way to engage, that their suggestions and complaints aren't even heard, and that the Panel for Education Policy, which is what replaced the Board of Ed, routinely ignores the voices of their community.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to play a clip now of somebody who's on the Panel for Education Policy who thinks that control of the public schools should be removed from the mayor of the city of New York. Just give our listeners a little briefing on what this PEP, panel on education policy, is and how the mayor effectively controls it.

Clara Hemphill: Well, it's changed over the years, but now it has 23 members. The majority of members are appointed by the mayor. Although there are parent voices, the majority is still run by the mayor, and a lot of people say it's just a rubber stamp, it does whatever the mayor wants.

Brian Lehrer: Does it have any power anyway? If let's say some of the mayor's appointees were to line up against him on a particular issue, are they only advisory anyway, or do they have power to veto something the mayor wants to do?

Clara Hemphill: They do have power to veto something the mayor wants to do. They can veto contracts, for example.

Brian Lehrer: But the mayor appoints a majority, so that's unlikely to happen. Here's a 45-second clip of an opponent of mayoral control from the public hearing in December in the Bronx. The speaker is a member of the panel on educational policy, which the mayor mostly controls, as we've heard, but which also has some other members like the speaker here, Thomas Sheppard, who cites three specific objections to mayoral control.

Thomas Sheppard: One, every mayor and chancellor illegally overuses procedures like emergency declarations to circumvent community input on important issues such as estimated budgets. The refusal of the mayor and chancellor to comply with the Class Size Reduction Law passed by the New York State Legislature last year with no ability by the community to hold either of them accountable for that decision. Three, the mayor's supermajority on the PEP routinely takes action in opposition to the positions of education councils and school communities especially in matters such as significant changes in school utilization.

Brian Lehrer: Clara, are Thomas Sheppard's objections representative of why opponents of mayoral control oppose it?

Clara Hemphill: Over the last six weeks or two months, there have been a lot of voices like Tom Sheppard's. Hundreds of parents have been turning out at these hearings, and there are a lot of complaints along those lines. I must say that a lot of the complaints that I've heard are about the particular mayor we have right now, Mayor Adams, and not necessarily about the governance structure.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Is that what we heard there? I guess, for example, the one that he cited as number two, that they haven't been implementing the law that the state legislature passed, mandating smaller class sizes in New York City, that's such a big deal. Are they actually bucking it at City Hall?

Clara Hemphill: I think they are actually bucking it at City Hall. The question that some people want to know is, why is the state legislature dictating what we should do in our schools? If you really want a parent voice, it's not Albany that's telling you what to do. I wanted to say a little bit what it was like before 2002, and the big question with mayoral control is, who appoints the school's chancellor?

The mayor appoints the police chief. The mayor appoints the fire chief, the head of hospitals, the Department of Health. Should the chancellor also be appointed by the mayor? Before 2002, the Board of Education appointed the chancellor, not the mayor. What happened--

Brian Lehrer: Then we should back up and say what the Board of Education was, right? Because it was a board with several heads. The mayor did not control the Board of Education. It had some mayoral appointees, and it had appointees from each borough president, who might have had a different interest than each of the borough president and from the mayor. That's one of the reasons that the critique was, nobody's really accountable for the success of the kids in the public schools because the Board of Ed was a multi-headed monster. Yes?

Clara Hemphill: That's correct. Power was spread out among different people in groups, the mayor, the chancellor, the Board of Education, which as you said, was seven members; five appointed by the borough presidents, two by the chancellor. Then there were the individual school boards, and it was hard to figure out who was responsible. The school board elections, there were very, very low turnouts, so it was easy for special interests to win.

Some districts had effective leadership, some didn't. Teachers' unions might endorse candidates. Religious leaders ran and made sure that Jewish and Catholic schools got their share of funds. The chancellor used to have fights with the mayor. It was impossible to get anything done under Giuliani. He forced out several chancellors, four in his eight years in office. What's really important is that the mayor decided the size of the budget, but the chancellor decided how the budget would be spent.

As a result of this, the mayor consistently, this goes way back before Giuliani, it goes back decades, the mayor consistently starved the school system of money. He wasn't going to get either credit or blame for the schools, but he controlled the budget. I think one of the benefits of mayoral control-- Before that, the mayor didn't want to get a blank check to the Board of Ed.

When Bloomberg took charge, he poured money into the system. The teachers' pay increased by 43%, our schools' teacher salaries became more competitive with the suburbs so we had fewer teachers leaving, the graduation rates rose. We don't know whether that was because of mayoral control or it would've happened anyway, but it did go from 50% before mayoral control to about 80% now.

Brian Lehrer: A few more minutes with Clara Hemphill, author of the book A Brighter Choice: Building a Just School in an Unequal City, and a long-time observer and participant in the evaluation of schools in New York City. We can take a few phone calls in our remaining time. I wonder if anybody has a story about the history of control of the public schools before mayoral control or a take on the impact of mayoral control on the New York City public schools, or what the future of mayoral control of New York City public schools should be as the state legislature decides whether to renew mayoral control or decentralize the system somewhat.

212-433-WNYC for Clara Hemphill. 212-433-9692. Call or text. Roland in Charleston, South Carolina but has done a lot of work in Albany, I understand, you're on WNYC. Hello, Roland.

Roland: Hi. How are you doing, Brian? Thank you very much for taking on the subject. I was part of the firm that had the contract to conduct the school board elections before mayoral control.

Brian Lehrer: This is back in the 1990s would've been the most recent one of those, right?

Roland: Yes. We hired law students and graduate students to work in each one of the community districts. There was a lot of involvement. There were some districts where it was more than others, but there are two points that your listeners have to remember. You did not have to be a citizen to vote in the elections. That was very important. District 15 in Brooklyn, there was very heavy current involvement, community involvement. I [unintelligible 00:15:30].

Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] Just to further explain what you just said to our listeners, why you didn't have to be-- If you were a parent of a public school child, then your citizenship status in the United States didn't matter. You automatically got a vote for your local school board, right?

Roland: Exactly. I can understand Mayor Bloomberg because of his executive background and his career path thought that a strong mayor having control of the Board of Education would be a great thing. The king can do very well when the king is there, but when the king is not there anymore, you're back to why we had community control in the first place. One more point, the parental involvement, the community involvement was so strong.

I had moved to New York when I left the state legislature staff to do some things down here, and I was shocked at the amount of involvement around the city of a lot of second-generation parents who really got tremendously involved in the elections. If you look at the immigrants coming here, there's two things these people who are coming to America think about. One is housing. A lot of these people are coming from countries where the class disparity is such that you can never get the social mobility to have the American dream.

The other is education. If you don't believe that, drive around Queens and look at the number of SAT and LSAT and CAP Prep courses in Asian communities. These people, I remember when I worked at the legislative staff, I'm in Albany now, when bills come up pertaining to the [unintelligible 00:17:20] communities in Rockland County, education is a very, very important thing in America. It is the one thing that allows social mobility, from getting off the bus from Costa Rica or from Congo at Port Authority and having the next generation.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Roland, thank you. I'm going to leave it there for time.

Roland: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: I appreciate all that insight. Keep calling us. Here's a text message that's come in a few. One person writes, "In Jersey City, I wish the mayor had control." Writes this listener. "School Board of Education is inept, not accountable, just pushing more billion dollars in taxes." Another listener writes, "The simple solution--" More skeptical. Somebody says there's a simple solution. "The simple solution to dealing with New York City public schools is to mandate that PTA per school share their resources throughout the district or even pull it all throughout the entire city."

Clara, that's not an issue that directly relates to mayoral control, but it's certainly one we've talked about on the show and comes up with respect to unequal funding of public schools, that in the more affluent districts, the PTAs can just ask the parents for bigger donations and then they get all kinds of enrichment and things like that that the other schools don't get.

Clara Hemphill: Yes, I don't know whether that would work. I wonder if parents would continue to contribute to the PTA if the money was spread all over. I don't think that PTAs are the way to fund schools. I think tax levies are the way to fund schools. Getting back to the issue of immigrant parents, they can now vote for the Community Education Councils, which are the bodies that replaced the school boards.

The community education, one of the things that Tom Sheppard and the other proponents of change are saying is that we have to strengthen the power of parents in the Community Education Councils. I think that they now have the power to decide zoning lines, that is within the school district. Are there going to be-- what school are you assigned to according to your address, but that's it.

It seems to me that the law now is unclear, but it could be made to give the CECs power to decide things like school co-locations, or there are ways that you could give the CECs more power and therefore give the parents more power.

Brian Lehrer: Without ending mayoral control.

Clara Hemphill: Yes. I don't think anybody really wants to go back to the old system. I don't think anybody is defending it. Even the people who say that the old system gave a good voice to parents acknowledge that it was a very inequitable system. The District 15, which is Park Slope, as the earlier caller said, did-- Yes, District 15 did some great things, but the other districts in more low-income neighborhoods of Brooklyn did not do such good things.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a parent calling in. Sharon in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sharon.

Sharon: Hi there. I'll try to be concise although this opens up just a flood of words in me. I started getting active in my daughter's public school when she started in Pre-K, a wonderful, economically diverse school, PS 165, in District 3. Relying on parent volunteer time seems like a backward path to equity to me. It is hugely important to have parents involved in the schools, but for volunteer positions that are extremely demanding like the CEC, the Community Education Councils, those people are there at night from 6:00 till 9:00, ten o'clock at night regularly. That's just the meeting. Preparing for the meeting is demanding.

Even when the DOE attempts to pay people for participating in volunteering at the school leadership team, there's a little stipend. It's a couple of hundred dollars to attempt to make things more equitable. It's nothing compared to the amount of time that you've spent there.

Brian Lehrer: I wonder if you agree, Sharon, I'm going to read a text message from another parent who's been on their Community Education Council locally, and tell me if you agree with his take, building on the premise that you were just laying out that it's so much time that's involved and it's not necessarily the most effective path to equity. This person writes, "I was on the CEC in District 32, Bushwick, and it was offensive how much time and energy I was asked to commit to that volunteer position, even though the Department of Education didn't give a hoot about my opinion as a parent. I didn't seek a second term and few parents get involved because of this." What are you thinking as you hear that text?

Sharon: I often feel that one way the public school system attempts to tie up activist parents is by creating committee work for them to do which is extremely demanding, like the Title 1 Committee, the very detailed and burdensome requirements that don't actually lead to any kind of real input or influence.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, interesting. Sharon, thank you very much. One more. I think Daniel in Manhattan is going to go even further in critiquing mayoral control as it's applied these days. Daniel, you're on WNYC. We have about a minute for you.

Daniel: Hi, Brian. I had a daughter in school when Bloomberg took control. To me, it was a big disaster. He went ahead and made the principals the most important part of the whole system. Many of the teachers, the older ones, didn't care. They went about their way. The younger teachers were frightened of our principals. I went to two schools in Manhattan with my oldest daughter. Now I have twins that are going through art school and I see the same thing. I do have and I was on the student leadership team, I was on PTA, and boy, did I see a lot of corruption in PTA. That is just-- I'll never join that [unintelligible 00:24:35].

Brian Lehrer: What would be a better system in your view, briefly?

Daniel: Here it is. My idea is a better system is to break up the school system. It's over a million kids and I think they should give it to each borough and split up the tax base through each borough. Let each borough elect their own sub-chancellor. Let those people or through the mayor get another chancellor, the head chancellor, who could oversee it all. We should have a public advocate that we could elect citywide that will voice our concerns. [unintelligible 00:25:12].

Brian Lehrer: For education. Daniel, I'm going to leave it there because we're running out of time in the segment, but I appreciate your voice. Clara, interesting. There's nothing like it in the country where one school district has a million kids. If you go to the next bigger cities; Chicago, LA, the numbers are not anything like New York, so you get recommendations like that last parent caller who would rather see it be five-borough school districts, maybe more manageable.

In our last minute, does anybody talk about anything like that seriously in Albany, and what do you think will come out of the legislature this year as the current term of mayoral control expires and they figure out whether to renew it and how?

Clara Hemphill: I think they will renew mayoral control. Nobody wants to go back to the old Board of Education. I think they will have strings attached the way they did with both De Blasio and Adams. One of the strings attached with De Blasio was to expand the number of charter schools. Another one of the strings attached for Adams was to reduce the class size. I think what I would do is switch the mayoral elections to even years so that we had a higher turnout. One of the problems is that we have mayors who are elected by a really tiny percentage of the voters because the turnout is so low, but that's a long-term solution.

Brian Lehrer: Clara Hemphill, long-time New York City education journalist, and author of the recent book, A Brighter Choice: Building a Just School in an Unequal City. Thanks for all your insights and wisdom, Clara. I appreciate it a lot.

Clara Hemphill: You're welcome. Glad to be here.

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