“Mayoral Control: Are We Better Off Now?”

Parent Watch, WashingtonDC

December 13, 2006

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters

Almost four years ago, just after the schools in NYC were put under Mayoral control, I wrote an article about my fear that now, without any checks and balances, the system would become even more irrational and arbitrary in its decision-making than before, and even less receptive to the input of parents, teachers, and others who had a real stake in ensuring that our schools actually did improve. I will quote:

“The central Board of Education has been eliminated, and the community school boards are to expire at the end of the school year. Without a workable structure for public involvement, the school system will be even less accountable than before, with all power concentrated in the hands of two men -- the mayor and the chancellor -- neither of whom have ever had children in New York City public schools. Most worrisome is the lack of any process to guarantee that decisions be openly discussed and are the result of solid research and evidence.”

Certainly, the Board of Education was flawed, as were many of the community school boards. Their decision-making was too often political and unresponsive to parental concerns. But at least their existence and procedures allowed for the possibility of public engagement. Now, there is a real danger that the system will become even more arbitrary, secret and political than before.”[1]

Now four years later, we can answer that question with some certainty.

After the Mayor was given control of our schools, the reorganization of our entire public education system was achieved with suchrapidity, secrecy,and a lack of public input that it was breathtaking. Ten working groups were formed to address all aspects of the schoolsystem, from curriculum to staffing and organizational structure, whose members whose identities were kept secret until freedom of information suits were filed. These committees operated without formal charge, and although DOE officials repeatedly said there were parents and classroom teachers on them, they refused to say who they were. Sure enough, when the FOIL requests were finally answered, there were none.

The rapidity and number of changes overwhelmed the ability of parents and others to protest. Districts were dissolved and new regional structures were built. In a little noted interview that Chancellor Klein gave in December 2003, he explained that the suddenness and number of these changes were purposefully made to produce “creative confusion” in the system:

"By doing the reorganization and actually causing some creative confusion in the system, it does make it harder for people to just rock back….I think in eight years you can expect the system will make adjustments."[2]

In thisinterview, he referred to Jack Welch, former head of General Electric, who was enlisted to lecture to leaders at DOE after the Mayor took control and whohas espouseda variant of this notion, which he called “creative destruction.”Creative destruction as practiced by Jack Welch at GE calledfor divesting companies and subsidiaries and acquiring new ones, on a rapid and massive scale of experimentation, with the hope that this will lead to higher profits. This might have worked for GE shareholders, but it has been a particularly heedless approach when children’s lives are at stake.[3]

In an article published in 2003 about the reinvention of our schools by these corporate mavens, Carmen Fariña, later our Deputy Chancellor, commented: "Jack Welch said one thing that really struck me…You can't allow an organization to grow complacent. When you find those kinds of organizations, you have to tear them apart and create chaos. That chaos creates a sense of urgency, and that sense of urgency will ultimately bring [about] improvement."[4]

Well, we have certainly had plenty of chaos here in NYC; whether we had real improvement is another story altogether. In the words of a long time parent leader,

“Never has an administration been so unreceptive to parents and parent organizations, despite all the hype by the “Department of Education” to the contrary. In this pastyear the chancellor and the mayor have attempted to eliminate the independent elected parent bodies (PA/PA’s and Presidents’ Councils) in our schools and districts and replace them with employees (Parent Coordinators and Parent Support Officers), who ultimately answer to them. Without consultation, radical changes were made to the regulations governing everything from class trips, zoning, PA/PTA’s and President Councils, to deciding what beverages will be sold in every school building and what snacks are appropriate for our children to eat, right down to the “cookie cutter” methodology of how to teach all children….

Cuts to school budgets, more students in the classrooms, seasoned administrators and teachers leaving the system either through retirement, often earlier than they had planned, or finding employment outside the New York City Public School system, and a top heavy and bloated aristocracy at Tweed and the Regions, is what we saw happen this year and we foresee nothing better for the upcoming school year. We cannot even get a copy of a budget to show us where all the “savings” are in this new reorganization, and we understand that …our elected officials cannot get this information as well.”

Despite the please of parents and advocates, the only proposal that came out of Mayoral control related to class size was a promise to limit middle school classes to 28. Not surprisingly, the administration failed to follow up by funding the program and average class sizes went up in these grades instead of down.[5]

In a survey last December of over 500 parents and education advocates, the overwhelming majority responded that the administration should focus on reducing class size, while only 4% agreed with the Mayor’s current priorities for our schools.[6]

One of the worst changes in policy that resulted from the ceding of absolute power to the Mayor is the policy to hold back children in 3rd, 5th and 7th grades, on the basis of their test scores. This end to “social promotion” might work as a political soundbite, but was imposed despite morethan twenty years of solid research, including a previouslyfailed program in NYC, showing that this policy actually harms rather than helps children and leads to higher dropout rates. Indeed, the consensus on the destructiveness of grade retention is so overwhelming that Shane Jimerson, dean at UC Santa Barbara, calls it “educational malpractice.”[7]

Imagine that the Mayor decided all on his own that a certain surgical procedure should be used in all the public hospitals in the city, even though the professional consensus was clear that the procedure would lead to much higher rates of complication and mortality. Would he be able to impose his views on the practice of medicine? I think not. So why should it be any different in the field of education? If Mayoral control had not occurred, including the transformation of the Board of Education to a Panel with three Mayoral appointees that were fired right before the vote happened, this policy could never have passed muster.

So why did the governance change occur, and why did too many sit back and allow this to happen, without fervent or organized protest? Honestly, many of us were tired of petty squabbling between the Mayor, the Chancellor and the Board of Education, with each of them blaming the others when things didn’t improve. At least, we figured, if one person was responsible for the schools, he couldn’t try to displace responsibility onto someone else.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t worked. Instead, the Mayor and the Chancellor continue to shift blame for every problem that occurs, onto incompetent administrators, lazy teachers, uninvolved parents, and the “culture of complacency” that we areall supposedly instilled with. Indeed, one of the Chancellor’sfavorite mantras is that anyone who criticizes the changes madeis a defender of the status quo, despite the fact that many of us, parents, educators and advocates alike, have been fighting for fundamental improvements to be made in our schools long before he moved back to New York City.

The other reason many favored the change in governance was that since the Mayor controlled the budget for schools anyway, he already had much of the power. Perhapshe would more adequately fund our schools if he knew he was going to be judged on the results.

So has this worked? Again, unfortunately, no. The only items that increased in this year’s education budget was a rise in $200 million on spending on charter schools, more “safety” measures, including more police in our schools, and more spending on private schools for special education students. The spending on educational services for our regular public schools was flat.

In February of 2005, the City Comptroller released a letter, calling into question widely-publicized claims by DOE officials that their restructuring efforts had led to cost savings of $200 million that had been redirected to the classroom. Instead, the City Comptroller found that the head count of the central administration at Tweed had increased, and that New York Cityschools had suffered a net loss of over 2,000 teachers in two years, with no improvement in the teacher-student ratio. Comptroller Thompson added that “DOE fiscal reporting practices have become markedly less transparent since the Department's restructuring. …DOE has misapplied certain units of appropriation to report expenditures, commencing with FY 2004, in a way that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to track its use of public funds.[8]

An analysis by the Educational Priorities Panel found that rather than reducing the bureaucracy, DOE had made huge cuts to special education services, and percentage of spending devoted to instruction has steadily declined during the Bloomberg administration.[9]

Large contracts awarded by DOE routinely bypass the City Comptroller’s office.[10]In 2005, DOE distributed $120 million in no-bid contracts, ten times the amount given out before Mayor Bloomberg took office. Moreover, these no-bid contracts were awarded without any form of public review. [11] The number of employees making $180,000 or more has grown to 29 - up from just two in 2004 – each of them earning more than the Police Commissioner. Soon there will more than 200 administrators at the Department of Education making more than $150,000, four times the number thanjust three years before.[12]

And this doesn’t even count seven consultants from the company Alvarez and Marsal – who are earning more than $1 million each for 18 months of work – another no-bid contract that has been questioned by our city comptroller, our public advocate, and the City Council, to no avail.[13]

For other city agencies, no-bid contracts are rare and public hearings are required, to ensure transparency, lack of favoritism, and cost-effectiveness. But the Mayor and Chancellor have argued that even under Mayoral control, the Department of Education remains a state agency, and thus solely under the jurisdiction of state law.

Under the same rationale, the DOE has refused to abide by any of the environmental regulations required of other city agencies. The DOE also refuses to abide by legislation passed by the City Council that forbids the bullying of gay students, and has said that they will ignore any legislation that might overturn the Mayor’s ban on allowing students to carry cell phones to school. In our city, after 9/11, many parents see this as a basic safety issue and are furious that the Mayor should try to interfere with this necessary lifeline of communication between parent and child.

The lack of accountability in the spending of education dollars under Mayoral control has been particularly egregious in the area of class size. Since 1999-2000, the state has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in categorical grants for districts to hire additional teachers to provide smaller classes in grades K-3.An audit from the State Comptroller’s office, released on March 15, 2006 found that in 2004-5, the NYC Department of Education had formed only twenty additional classes over the baseline year of 1998-99, that is, since the state-funded program began.[14] This means that DOE only created 1.3% of the additional classes claimed, with each one costing the taxpayer over $4 million.

In the audit, the State Comptroller made numerous recommendations for improved performance and implementation on the part of the city. Nevertheless, in its response to the audit, submitted the day of the Mayoral election, DOE officials wrote that they refused to adopt any of these suggestions, claiming that their compliance was sufficient.[15]

And rather than more transparency, we get cooked statistics. While the Mayor and the Chancellor continue to claim that graduation rates have increased to 58%, their highest level in 20 years, the State as well as other independent organizations concluded that the real graduation rate is really closer to 43%.[16] The NationalCenter for EducationStatistics recently found that NYC had the lowest graduation rate of any of the hundred largest school districts in the county.[17]

The reason for this disparity? DOE does not count any of the thousands of special education students in segregated classes, nor thousands of students “discharged” from the system in their calculations – few of which actually graduate with a regular degree. Unfortunately, the numbers of these have been growing each year. For the class of 2005, there were almost 17,000 students “discharged” from the system and not counted as dropouts.[18]

So instead of more accountability, we have gotten less; instead of more transparency, we have gotten less, and instead of having a real input in the education of our children, parents and other stakeholders are even more disenfranchised than before.

If anything, the operation of our schools under Mayoral control reminds me of the Bush administration – replete with deception and executive power, untrammeled and unaccountable even to the law.

Whatever you do, whether you adopt Mayoral control or something else here in DC, I urge you to adopt a system in which parents are guaranteed a real voice in the education of their children, and that there are checks and balances to override the irrational exercise of authority. Because we do not have that here in NYC, and as a result, our children are suffering.

Charts for NYC’s graduation rate, as calculated by the NYC Dept. of Education, NY State, the Manhattan Inst., Education Week, and the National Center for Education Statistics.

Number of students “discharged” in each class, none of whom are counted in the graduation statistics by NYC.

[1]Leonie Haimson, “Smaller Classes, Better Communication,” Gotham Gazette, 23 September 02;

[2] “Klein: I can overhaul the schools -- just give me 8 years,” Staten Island Advance, Dec 07, 2003.

[3] A few years ago, Welch was quoted in the Wall Street Journal about this management philosophy: “A small company can only afford to make one or two bets or they go out of business. But we can afford to make lots more mistakes, and, in fact, we have to throw more things at the walls. The big companies that get into trouble are those that try to manage their size instead of experiment with itThe Welch quotation above is from Richard Foster, “The Welch Legacy: Creative Destruction,” Wall St. Journal, May 1, 2002: reprinted at: Jack Welch lectured to administrators at Tweed, and McKinsey were hired as consultants in redesigning the school system under Mayoral control. Creative destruction was a phrase originally coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter to refer to the speed in which capitalism created and dissolved wealth. Foster is a senior partner at McKinsey, and co-author of "Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market -- and How to Successfully Transform Them." Many McKinsey consultants,, long on management theory and short on educational experience, were subsequently hired by DOE. David M. Herszenhorn , “Not So Long Out of School, Yet Running The System,” New York Times,March 25, 2004.

[4] Mike France, “Can Business Save New York City Schools?, Business Week, June 9, 2003;

[5]See Independent Budget Office, “Despite Free Space in some Middle Schools, Many Packed Classrooms”, Newsfax no.122, October 31, 2003, available at

[6]See National Center for Schools and Communities, FordhamUniversity, 2005 Straw Poll of New York City Education Activists; located at

[7] See

[8] Comptroller William C. Thompson, Letter to Michael Bloomberg, Feb. 7, 2005;

see also, NY Times, “On How Much City Schools Cut Bureaucracy, a Rebuttal”, Feb.8, 2005; NY Daily News, “Ed Dept. savings called shell game,” February 8, 2005;

[9] Educational Priorities Panel, “Adding up the Numbers: The Education Budget under Mayoral Control”, Bulletin #2: January 20. 2006;

[10] NY One, ”State Lawmakers Consider Limiting Mayor's Control Of Schools Budget,” May 12, 2004,

[11] NY Daily News, “A no-bid bonanza”, Aug.21, 2006; Also, NY Daily News, “Schools hired guns' fat checks,” August 27, 2006,

[12]“Educrat pay hits 180G+ for 29,” Daily News, November 14, 2006;

[13]“No-BidSchoolContractsDrawCity Council’s Ire,” by David M. Herszenhorn,
New York Times, November 22, 2006; see also “Lawmakers Argue Against No-BidContracts, “
by Sarah Garland, New York Sun, November 22, 2006; at