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Where To Go with Mayoral Control


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Mayor de Blasio at school (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


Mayor de Blasio's mishandling of the public school pandemic response has led to calls to reform or replace mayoral control of New York City schools.

Almost six years ago, I wrote in these pages advocating the case for mayoral control based on the still-valid theory that quality education depends on maximum funding based on the Mayor's control of the city budget and the need for political accountability to drive instructional improvement. In this way, mayoral control is consistent with the system of elected school board members in districts across the country where elected officials determine the schools' budget and financing, negotiate union contracts, and appoint a Superintendent (our Chancellor). Here, all of those powers reside with the Mayor. Merging fiscal and operational control, once separate provinces of the Mayor and Board of Education, is key to efficient and effective school governance.

But strains on this system, apparent earlier, have become open wounds under Bill de Blasio. He has concentrated power in City Hall rather than delegating decision-making to the educators housed steps away at Department of Education headquarters in the Tweed Courthouse. While the Police Commissioner is allowed a high degree of professional determination over law enforcement, DOE operations under a feckless Chancellor have become an extension of City Hall, with high-level staffers lacking education backgrounds routinely assigned by the Mayor's Office to the Chancellor’s. 

Education in the city has become the political pawn of a single individual, unchecked by other governmental structures. This is at least partly because the DOE is not technically a mayoral agency, subject to normal checks and balances by the City Council and Comptroller, but a quasi-independent authority subject to State Education Department regulation. The Mayor's theoretically indirect control stems from his appointment power of the Chancellor and a majority of the Board of Education, re-named by Mayor Bloomberg the Panel on Educational Policy. But de Blasio and, before him, Bloomberg, have redesigned this appointive power to assert autocracy. The City Council has no direct authority over the DOE, relegated to passing reporting requirements rather than statutory controls.

What’s to be done?

Other Models' Weaknesses
I believe there is a better way for mayoral control to work, using a strategic management approach to maintain its budgetary and accountability advantages while delegating instructional policies to educators at Tweed, in the districts, and to parents through parent associations and Community Education Councils. But this opportunity to remake mayoral control may never have been possible and likely has been permanently lost to the closely-held paradigm embedded over the last 20 years by Bloomberg and de Blasio.

The oft-proposed reform of eliminating the Panel for Educational Policy’s mayoral majority with more members with fixed terms appointed by the Borough Presidents, Council, and others is a cure likely worse than the disease. Most recently promoted by teachers' union President Michael Mulgrew, the model is much like the old seven-member Board of Education, which had five members appointed by the Borough Presidents and only two by the Mayor. That system was abandoned in 2001 in favor of mayoral control, an apt testament to its failure to produce either adequate funding or educational quality. In addition, the members' fixed terms allowed them to become independent political actors, without accountability even to their appointing officials. 

Replacing an appointed board with an elected body of similar size mirrors many of these same problems through its lack of budgetary and collective bargaining independence, with the additional wild cards of one-person-one-vote seat allocation and the likelihood that our heated education culture wars would produce a volatile mix of political factions, a frequent and paralyzing phenomenon in other districts with resulting operational and educational dysfunction.

Moving further backward in the city's school governance history, community control remains a fervent wish among some, promising a degree of local self-determination never fulfilled after the teacher strikes of 1968. But the demise of community control demonstrates its impracticality. We are one city and bound educationally whether by union contracts, city funding, and most of all the need for city-wide solutions to issues of equity and diversity. Balkanizing control among our still-existing community school districts is a dream at odds with political and fiscal realities. 

With these alternatives failing historical and theoretical tests, the key to improving New York City school governance may be hiding in plain sight. As education historian David Tyack pointed out in his classic analysis, there is no "one best system" to solve our educational problems. Each era produces the governance that best fits the circumstances of its time, fitting into its unique socio-political framework.

City Control
When, in 1989, the United States Supreme Court declared the old Board of Estimate unconstitutional, Borough Presidents' budgetary powers were eliminated in favor of the more representative City Council which, until then, had been a mostly vestigial body. In response, the city's elite, distrustful of the newly-empowered Council members, wrote the 1990 City Charter revision to create a strong Mayor system. We live with that system today.

But the Council now is a mature body, having secured public respect over three decades by responsibly exercising its Charter mandates. Perhaps it made sense in 2001, when mayoral control was established, to cut out the largely untested Council from a stronger role in school governance. But today, the measure of the Council has been taken and it has developed a strong reputation for educational advocacy and policy acuity, as well as a culture of consensus that might keep it from the culture wars and procedural paralysis of a less representative, non-mayoral-majority Panel for Educational Policy (PEP). The past two Council Speakers have shown respect for their limited role in education by appointing able Education Committee Chairs who, in turn, held the Mayor to close account through public hearings and greater data-based transparency.

It may be time to reward this record and improve New York City school governance by recasting mayoral control as city control, aligning educational governance with other city services. There are important advantages to this concept, perhaps most importantly to give a powerful voice to individual community interests now lacking in the Mayor's hegemony over the Department of Education or through a slightly enlarged PEP. This check on mayoral power might be the missing ingredient in attenuating executive political interests not by watering them down, as with the Mulgrew plan, but on the constitutional model, balancing executive power with legislative constraints.

The State Education Law establishing mayoral control is already largely consistent with replacing the ineffectual PEP with an independent City Council acting as the Board of Education. Section 2590-g, "Powers and Duties of the City Board," clearly states that "except as otherwise provided by law, the board shall exercise no executive power and perform no executive or administrative functions." Thus, the Council stays in its policy lane, leaving executive functions to the Chancellor and the rest of the DOE in line with separation of powers principles. 

Some tweaks and more substantive revisions will of course be needed. For example, the City, not the Council, should be the employer of record for DOE personnel under Education Law § 2590-g (2). As I have suggested elsewhere, the Council should be able to hold hearings before rendering advice and consent over mayoral nominees for Chancellor after a more transparent search process. But how wonderful to put the Education Committee in charge of vetting DOE proposals for "standards, policies, and objectives proposed by the chancellor directly related to educational achievement and student performance"; "regulations proposed by the chancellor"; and "all school closures or significant changes in school utilization," including charter school co-locations under Education Law § 2590-g (1)(a, c, h, respectively). These, as well as other oversight functions, are deserving of greater public scrutiny than possible under unilateral mayoral control.

Advantages and Dangers of 'City Control'
This shared governance largely maintains the related education funding and accountability advantages of mayoral control. Voters would now hold local City Council members responsible, in addition to the Mayor, for fully funding schools. The Mayor could no more pawn off responsibility for education than he or she might try to disown police, fire, or other city agencies subject to similar Council powers. At the same time, with a Chancellor and major policies requiring Council approval, that body could no longer serve as mere gadfly but would have to take ownership of the success or failure of our public schools. By its approving the Chancellor's appointment, Council members would have skin in the game when questioning educational policies, perhaps leading to less adversarial hearings of less heat, more light.

This is not to say that there aren’t substantial dangers in this as yet-untried arrangement, which would be unique in the nation. The Council can be an ungainly body and its new education responsibilities would require a degree of discipline and timeliness not ordinarily found in large deliberative bodies. Particular burdens would fall on the Education Committee Chair to hold numerous hearings and filter reasoned recommendations to the full Council for approval. Grandstanding is a given and the chance of the Council being captured by dominant political interests is also present, though probably not any greater than is currently the case under mayoral control. Most important, the agility of mayoral control to deliver system change could be stymied by ungainly shared decision-making. 

Day-to-day operation of the Department of Education would see little change under this arrangement. After all, the current PEP meets only once per month and while its meetings are long on procedure, there are usually few matters of substance, however important. It will take time for the DOE, the Mayor, and the Council to negotiate such new terrain, balancing oversight against micromanagement, promoting educational quality over political expediency. 

After 20 years of mayoral control, a fair test of its advantages and disadvantages can be declared though never finalized. There can be no doubt the current system has staunched the school system's previous unaccountable complacency and its pernicious reciprocal weakness, chronic mayoral underfunding. But severe problems of unilateral control and increased politicization haunt today's education policy-making. 

Whether more political involvement will improve the situation is an open question. Traditionally, though, the American way of solving this conundrum is checks and balances between elected executive and legislative branches. No governance structure is determinative of sound education policy, but it may be time to adopt this solution by including the City Council's broad representation of popular interests in schools decision-making.

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David C. Bloomfield is Professor of Education Leadership, Law, and Policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. On Twitter @BloomfieldDavid.

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New York Must Not Exacerbate Disparities Again: Key Considerations for Equity in Covid Vaccination


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Covid field site (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


There are many high-stakes questions to be sorted out in the design of the coming covid vaccination distribution program. But there’s one issue that’s not receiving enough attention: How can we design a plan that avoids exacerbating pre-existing racial inequities and instead meaningfully advances equity?

It’s essential that we answer this question — now.

Vaccine distribution will be the most complicated implementation challenge of this pandemic, even more so in Black communities and other communities of color. We need to ensure that every aspect of the program is structured to avoid short-changing these same marginalized communities yet again.

Throughout this pandemic, Black, Latino, and indigenous communities have suffered from inadequate and inequitable resources. Hospitals in low-income areas have been under-staffed and under-supplied. Testing has been far more accessible in affluent communities. 

Unfortunately, COVID-19 vaccine trials have followed this same disturbing pattern. Black Americans only made up 8% of the Pfizer trial participants. The Moderna trial fared better at 13%. But both fell short of the portion of COVID-19 fatalities among Black Americans: 19%.  

Even more worrisome is the possibility that Black, Latino, and indigenous communities could be underrepresented in the early distribution of the vaccine, further exacerbating the pandemic’s racial health inequities.

There is general agreement that early prioritization should go to health-care workers, followed by residents of congregant settings, and then essential workers more broadly. But the way each of these categories is defined has huge implications for equity.

The health-care worker cohort should, of course, include those who directly provide care to patients, like physicians and nurses. But what about the many other job categories in hospitals? Cleaning staff, translators, cafeteria workers, and security guards all have contact with COVID-19 patients. The same is of course true for home health aides. And all are far more likely to be people of color. Excluding them — or any covid-facing worker in a health-care setting — would be profoundly unfair. 

Similar questions arise with the congregant setting cohort. Clearly residents and staff of nursing homes should be included in this group. But what about jails, where rates of infection among detainees and staff have been alarmingly high? Or crowded homeless shelters, which are known to be high-risk for transmission? Here again, excluding groups in these more marginal settings would disadvantage populations that are disproportionately people of color.

There are questions about the essential worker cohort as well, which rightly will almost certainly include people who work in transportation or on essential infrastructure such as wastewater treatment facilities. But what about those who work in supermarkets, laundromats, food delivery, or restaurants? These low-wage workers have been performing essential functions throughout this pandemic while exposed to the public — and are far more likely to be people of color. They must be included as well, for their own sake, and for the general public that depends on their work.

Once vaccination distribution moves to a broader public phase, decisions about the locations in which vaccines are administered also have implications for equity. The default option is to primarily use hospitals and chain pharmacies. But there are fewer of both in low-income areas. To reach the broadest number of Black, Latino, and indigenous people, vaccination programs should be set up in a variety of accessible local settings, including churches, community centers, public housing developments, and schools. 

It is also critical that there be no barriers to receiving the vaccine based on an individual's immigraiton status. Preliminary plans from the Trump administration would require patients to present a form of ID that is a proxy for citizenship in order to be registered in the vaccination database. This would have disastrous consequences, and cannot be a standard that is used in New York.

And then there is what may be the biggest challenge of all: building confidence in the vaccine among communities that have a century-long history of abuse, exploitation, and neglect by the medical system, in particular around vaccines. Communities of color still experience discrimination and bias in health-care settings today.

To overcome the trust gap, there must be total transparency about COVID-19 vaccine safety, efficacy, and side effects. Additionally, there must be a well-funded, culturally-responsive, multilingual outreach campaign to share this critical information with Black, Latino, and other communities of color. Local community organizations must be mobilized for on-the-ground outreach, at a scale that is more robust than the campaign to promote participation in the Census.

The federal government will be imminently rolling out guidelines on key aspects of the vaccination distribution process. But it will be up to state and local governments to tailor these plans to the needs of their local communities.

It is critical that here in New York City, and across the country, we design a fair and equitable vaccination program that ensures that no one is left behind. Lives depend on it.

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Dr. Uché Blackstock is a Board-certified emergency medicine physician, the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, and a Yahoo! News Medical Contributor. New York City Council Member Mark D. Levine represents parts of Manhattan and is chair of the Council’s Health Committee. On Twitter @uche_blackstock and @MarkLevineNYC.

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The Covid Mink Slaughter is a Symbol of Fur’s Inhumanity and New York City’s Inaction


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An activist at a City Council hearing (photo: John McCarten/City Council)


Word from European countries that they will be killing millions of minks because of coronavirus outbreaks jumping from animals to humans on farms is shockingly upsetting.

But the real offense here is that the minks were being farmed to be killed anyway for the fur industry and that atrocity doesn’t really garner headlines anymore.

By now the world is aware that zoonotic diseases – diseases that spread from animals to humans such as COVID-19, Ebola, HIV, H1N1, Mad Cow Disease and Avian flu – have caused millions of deaths worldwide and yet humans continue to treat animals as a means to a human goal and not sentient beings worthy of their own rights to live their natural lives undisturbed.

The origin of the COVID-19 outbreak last winter has been linked to wild animal meat markets in China where bats and other wildlife such as pangolins were stacked together in cages waiting to be bought by patrons and consumed. Trade in wildlife is a primary contributor to zoonotic disease outbreaks, as is habitat destruction that expels wildlife from their natural ecosystems and overdevelopment.

Denmark is the world’s largest exporter of mink furs. But the responsibility for the slaughter doesn’t end with that country. There are mink farms in other countries as well as in the U.S., where the coronavirus has killed more than 15,000 mink.

But again, these minks were doomed anyway, fodder for the trade in their pelts to feed a fur industry that should be shuttered for good.

The way forward to prevent more zoonotic diseases and the needless killing of millions of animals is to take concrete steps to end the exploitation.

In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Denmark’s leading fur auction house, Kopenhagen Fur, announced that due to the loss of minks for production it would shut its doors in a few years. The coronavirus was just one more nail in the coffin of an industry that was already on its way out. Many major fashion houses, retailers, and designers have already spurned fur, including Coach, Kors, Ralph Lauren, Gucci, Versace, Calvin Klein, Macy’s, and Nordstrom.

And yet, the New York City Council is sitting on a bill that would end the sale of fur in the city. Council Speaker Corey Johnson introduced the bill in 2018 and spoke forcefully for its passage at a health committee hearing but the bill stalled when it was met with opposition from the fur industry and some religious groups.

Declining to pass the bill sends a message to the world that the caging and killing of mink will continue and that humans will aid and abet commerce and trade that causes needless animal suffering and fosters pandemics such as COVID-19, which has already killed more than 250,000 U.S. residents. It’s time to pass the bill and ban the sale of fur in New York City.

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Priscilla Feral is the president of Friends of Animals, an international, nonprofit animal advocacy organization incorporated in New York in 1957. On Twitter @foaorg.

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