The Education Mayor: Improving America's Schools

4. Integrated Governance as a Strategy to Improve School Performance

76 C H A P TE R FOUR Integrated Governance as a Strategy to Improve School Performance IN TODAY’S CLIMATE OF OUTCOME-BASED PERFORMANCE accountability, one question stands out above the rest: Does mayoral control improve student performance? Student achievement is the first thing people think of when they consider education reform. And when standardized test scores are reported each year, they draw citywide interest. In the summer of 2005, for example, upon release of recent New York City test scores, the City Council questioned whether the test score gains claimed by the mayor’s office were in fact the result of the governance change. As the chairwoman of the City Council’s Education Committee put it, “It’s very important that before we celebrate, we understand exactly what kind of phenomena we’re talking about” (Saulny 2005). We are in agreement that before integrated governance is widely adopted, we must have a better understanding of the relationship between mayoral control and student performance. In this chapter, we address the issue head-on. We argue in this chapter that when mayoral control is examined from a cross-district and multiyear perspective, we see that mayors can make a significant, positive difference in raising the achievement levels of students in their cities. We find that an education mayor can bring about positive change of about a 0.1 standard deviation in elementary reading and math. We also find that giving the mayor the power to appoint a majority of the school board is associated with a 0.2 standard deviation increase in high school reading and mathematics. Though other demographic factors continue to play a large role in determining student success, governance arrangements clearly matter. Integrated Governance as a Strategy to Improve School Performance 77 President Bill Clinton once said that “politics is not about miracles; it’s about direction” (Meyer 1999, 54). Similarly, our analysis in this chapter suggests that mayoral control is not about miracles but about positive, significant movement amid a barrage of forces that for many years have prevented urban school districts from prospering. Though mayor-controlled districts still rank toward the bottom of their states in achievement levels, mayors may be laying the groundwork for a long-run push back to the top. On what evidence do we base these hopes? We said in the previous chapter that it is not enough to simply look at district performance from one year to the next and make conclusions about whether mayors are effective educational leaders. More complex statistical procedures are needed to account for the many other factors that may be influencing the change in student achievement levels. We spend the first part of this chapter introducing the complexities of the statistical procedures we use. With the methods introduced, we spend the remainder of the chapter presenting the evidence for our case. By examining the statistical relationship between elementary reading and mathematics achievement, as well as high school performance, we find support for our contention that mayors can indeed improve student performance. STATISTICAL METHODS In this section, we present the details of our analytical approach. We discuss how our theories about mayors and their likely paths of influence can be evaluated using statistical procedures. (For readers interested in the more technical details of the analysis, we have provided a technical appendix at the end of the book.) How Does Mayoral Control Affect Achievement? The first step in setting up a proper evaluation of mayors and educational outcomes is to ask exactly how mayors are likely to affect student performance. It might be helpful here to think about what mayors are not doing. Mayors are not jumping into the classroom, choosing the books for students to read, or poring over school budgets to see if more money should be spent on supplies . Mayors are operating at a systemwide level. In what we describe elsewhere as a politics of partnership, mayors are providing a political shield for the school district central office to operate with less partisanship influencing decisions . Because they operate at districtwide levels, we need to think about outcomes at the district level. We also need to recognize that mayoral influence may not be immediate. Unlike a new superstar teacher who may walk into a classroom and raise student achievement in a month, mayor-led reforms 78 CHAPTER FOUR are designed to be long term and systemic. Because of this long-term vision, our...