Give “Hizzoner” the Schools
A story in Friday’s Indianapolis Star reveals the IPS taxpayers could face a 37 percent increase in their property tax bills. The money is going toward school construction and other costs. The District has had to do some cost cutting, which includes the layoffs of teachers. As we complain about underperforming students and out of control budgets, I honestly think it’s time to rethink not only the way we operate schools but who runs them. We need to put the Mayor in charge of the schools. Think about it for a second.
What is a school board? It’s a group of people who got elected in May who nobody knows. A school board can raise your taxes and there’s no real accountability. It can under-perform when it comes to educating your children, and there’s no real accountability. How do you get accountability? Put one person in charge, the Mayor.
Now I’m not talking about Bart Peterson, per se. But I do think having the Mayor’s office in charge of schools means there is one person to point to when assigning credit or blame. It’s been done in other places: New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Chicago and Cleveland. Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest school district, the mayors there are looking at taking power from local school boards and shaking things up. The results have been mixed, but at the very least there is accountability.
I would rather have one person in charge and running an organization that educates my kids and spends my money than a bunch of nameless officials. We spend a lot of time talking about reforming schools. True change starts at the top. And it’s time to give the Mayor’s office control of the school district.
September 5th, 2006 at 11:41 am
I’m not sure I understand. As you note, IPS and most other school districts are operated by an elected school board, which hires/fires the superintendent, makes (or at least has an up-down vote) on a multitude of other decisions, large and small, such as personnel, curriculum, expenses, budgets, etc. School boards are comprised of private citizens who have “day jobs” and who don’t derive much income from their position on the board, but if you know anyone who has been on a school board, you know that it is an involved, time consuming activity.
So what would be the result of the shift? It seems unlikely that in addition to what is already a more-than-full-time job, Bart Peterson and his successors would personally assume all of the duties currently executed by nine people or however many IPS board members there are. What would probably happen is that Peterson would appoint one or more school commissioners to handle the day-to-day approval of contracts and personnel decisions that are currently the province of the elected school board. Or, he would pick the superintendent and empower him or her to make all the decisions with the mayor serving as a rubber stamp. Essentially, we would end up with an appointed school board instead of an elected school board, or a superintendent who isn’t really accountable to anyone on a day to day basis. Sure, there would be direct accountability of the mayor to the voters. But unlike a school board, the performance of IPS would be only one of a bundle of issues and duties that might turn an election. As you note, the results in other cities are “mixed.” That’s probably a fair assessment of IPS in recent decades. Some decline, some improvement in some areas, overall decline, whatever. In addition, it would move the school evaluation process directly into the political process. Regardless of what is happening in the schools, an incumbent mayor will feel the need to talk up IPS and the challenger will rip IPS, regardless of the situation on the ground.
Maybe a compromise position would be to allow the mayor to appoint, say, 3 of 9 school board members, which would give him an opportunity to influence IPS but would also allow the influence of direct democracy.
It seems to me that you are speaking in platitudes. If we just think about it “for a second,” it will be obvious that adding IPS to the mayor’s already substantial list of duties will make IPS a substantially better school system than it is under the direction of 9 fairly anonymous but directly elected board members. Why is this so obvious? It’s pretty obvious to me that a change in the hierarchy will not result in the mayor in Indianapolis personally performing all of the tasks now performed by the school board.
P.S. It’s also worth noting that the IPS district boundaries are not the same as the boundaries of the Consolidated City of Indianapolis. The majority of people eligible to vote in our mayoral elections do not live in the IPS district. Particularly if the mayor’s office were to return to the Republicans, actual IPS stakeholders, even if overwhelmingly dissatisified with the mayor’s operation of the schools, would not, on their own, have the power to vote the mayor out of office. That makes it a different equation than cities like Chicago and NYC, where the district boundaries are essentially the same as the city boundaries.
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