David Dinkins and New York City Politics: Race, Images, and the Media

8. THE TURMOIL OF SCHOOL POLITICS: Introduction

C H A P T E R E I G H T THE TURMOIL OF SCHOOL POLITICS Introduction N o crisis in large cities is more frustrating than the plight of public schools. Inner-city schools in New York are beset with a plethora of problems ranging from inadequate facilities, incompetent classroom teachers, and poor reading and math scores, to violence within the schools. The public seems to be most concerned about the low achievement scores of public school students. They are also alarmed by the increasing cost of schools. When Dinkins approached these challenges, he carried a certain prevailing image into the policy arenas. Although mayors are not elected to be de facto school superintendents, they cannot safely ignore school politics. School issues are too important to their broader constituency, and school activists have a way of being constantly in the news. Accordingly, city hall has attempted to engage or appropriate many traditional school issues such as fiscal decisions, school management, and safety. Since school politics is already a crowded field of stakeholders and interest groups, mayors have not always been welcome there. Indeed, hostile receptions are not uncommon. Why would mayors run the risk of degrading a positive prevailing image for a policy for which they have limited statutory responsibility? At the beginning of his administration , Dinkins offers an explanation of why he wanted to be an education mayor. 166 DAVID DINKINS AND NEW YORK CITY POLITICS Education is more important to me than I can express. We know that something like 90% of the new jobs in the service area require at least a high school diploma. If we don’t fix the system so our youngsters can get educated and trained for the jobs that are available, not only will they not realize their potential and be a drain on the tax base instead of contributing to it, but we are not going to have a labor pool in 10 or 15 years.1 Few would argue with his reasoning but in Black Mayor and School Politics, it was suggested that public schools are controlled by a “public school cartel” (PSC). The PSC was defined as “a coalition of professional school administrators, school activists and union leaders who maintain control of school policy to promote the interests of its members.”2 Public school cartels are not true cartels in the pure economic sense, but their behavior is similar. Members are able to monopolize effectively the provision of educational services and veto school reform that is at variance with their interest. Accordingly, the PSC is not likely to support mayoral actions if it perceives them as a threat to its control of the public school system. Within school politics the mayor is either an interloper or a bystander. An interloper injects herself or himself into decisions traditionally the province of the school board and the superintendent. In New York, this encroachment was met with some resistance. This chapter reviews reactions of the PSC to the encroachment of Dinkins. More specifically, I will discuss how the media interprets school politics and the reactions of the respective PSCs to these interpretations. In addition I will examine how the press frames the politics of public schools. Although the media will cover a mayor/superintendent con- flict, that is not where the majority of the school dynamics takes place. In most cities, the PSC is well organized, and its members do not regard the mayor or the superintendent as members of the cartel. As far as the PSC is concerned, both are outsiders. Nevertheless, the media views mayors and superintendents as having joint responsibility for school policies. In reality, mayors and superintendents lack the power to do much about what happens in a highly bureaucratized and traditionally oriented school system. Having one’s own appointees on the board does not insure policy compliance, nor do mandates reach the operational The Turmoil of School Politics 167 side of the system. Having one appointee on the board and a pliant superintendent can take conflicting school politics off the front page, but these two things do not make a mayor an “education mayor.” What Is an Education Mayor to Do? In recent times many mayors of large cities have begun to align themselves with the movement to improve school systems. School reform is one of those issues that most people can agree needs to addressed immediately. Some mayoral candidates...