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28 C H A P T E R TWO The New-Style Education Mayors IN THE 1990S, CHICAGO’S MAYOR RICHARD M. DALEY and Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino represented the vanguard of a new style of education mayors that put education performance at the forefront of their agendas for economic growth and civic renewal. Over the course of the past decade, mayors in Cleveland, New York, Providence, and several other cities have taken over leadership of their cities’ schools. Other mayors have identified education as a central issue. In Ohio, the Ohio Mayors’ Education Roundtable has expanded from the eight to the twenty-one largest districts in the state (Edelstein 2005). In the 2005 Minneapolis mayoral race, education was at center stage, with the challenger, Peter McLaughlin, saying he “would have an Education Cabinet and seek a nonvoting mayoral appointment to the School Board” (Russell 2005). Education was a major issue in the 2005 New York City mayoral race as well. Mayor Bloomberg used education to launch his campaign against his opponent (Cardwell and McIntire 2005). Education was also at center stage in the 2005 mayor’s race in Cincinnati (Pierce 2005). During the race, one of the candidates (a sitting Ohio state senator) introduced a bill in the state senate to allow for mayor-appointed school boards in Cincinnati.1 To be sure, not all mayors are interested in taking on education as a top priority. Constitutional tradition and statutory limits tend to maintain institutional separation between city hall and the school board. Political considerations also displace education from the mayor’s core focus. Even in a city like Baltimore, with its long tradition of mayoral control, Martin O’Malley focused more on public safety and improving city services during his first term (Orr 2004; see also Cibulka 2003, Orr 1999). This serves as a caution that The New-Style Education Mayors 29 “contemporary mayors do not necessarily have to construct a school-focused electoral coalition or governing coalition” (Orr 2004, 29). But even if mayors are not initially interested in education, given the importance of schools to a city’s economic, social, and cultural vitality, voters may begin to expect mayoral involvement. Mayors may have little choice but to confront the education question: “What are you going to do about the schools if you win in November?” In this chapter we provide an overview of mayoral control as it has been enacted in twelve cities. Though other scholars have emphasized the informal roles that mayors play in their cities’ schools, we focus on those cities whose mayors have been given legal control of their public schools. This type of leadership radically departs from the informal roles and partnerships that have long characterized mayoral involvement in urban education. Table 2.1 presents basic demographic data about the set of cities in which mayors have gained legal control over the public school system. We locate each of these cities in one of three distinct categories. First, one set of cities moved from a traditional elected school board to either a full or partially mayorappointed school board, and they continue to keep those mayoral appointments in place, as of 2005. This first group includes eight cities: Boston, Chicago, New Haven, Providence, Harrisburg, Oakland, Cleveland, New York, Jackson, and Trenton.2 Second, two cities—Baltimore and Philadelphia—have moved from mayor-appointed school boards to a city–state joint-appointment governance arrangement. Third, two cities—Detroit and Washington—have tried mayoral control but have reverted back to traditional governance arrangements. In 2007 Washington once again moved to mayoral control. We discuss the cities within each category to gain a sense of the context in which mayoral control has taken hold and in which it has been combined with state governance or been abandoned. The discussion here is meant to serve primarily as background for the in-depth quantitative and qualitative analyses we present in subsequent chapters. For readers interested in more detail on a particular city, we have provided references to more detailed case studies. THE FIRST GROUP: FROM ELECTED TO MAYOR-APPOINTED BOARDS The first group of cities comprises those in which mayoral control has largely taken hold. Though mayoral control has been relatively recent in Hartford , most of the cities in this first group moved toward mayor-appointed school boards during the mid-1990s. Boston and Providence have the longest histories with this form of governance. Boston’s mayor gained the authority to appoint school board members in 1989...

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