This is our pandemic! We are facing a huge deficit and our kids continue to fail in school. We really need to face the truth and make hard changes. Our diverse society challenge anyone who is in the classroom. Teachers are facing kids & parents who don't speak english and can barely write coherently. Until we challenge ourselves to face the truth and require parents to held accountable, little will change. It's just our society is unwilling to hold this discussion!
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But the teachers union voiced indignation over the pick. Union president Marilyn Stewart accused Daley of cronyism, "an act of disrespect" to career educators. She noted that the new schools chief would not be qualified to teach in the system. "Just because you've been to a dentist," she scoffed, "doesn't mean you can be a dentist." (Daley's earlier picks for school boss, Duncan and Paul Vallas, were also unorthodox, at least by the measure of traditional school politics. Neither were career educators. But Duncan had worked as a top aide at school headquarters before taking over the top job. And Vallas had at least a brief stint as a teacher.)
Critics have also taken aim at the very system of mayoral control, arguing that such a concentration of power at city hall can lead to abuse. In New York, where the legislature is considering whether to extend mayoral control, some teachers and parents complain that oversight panels are mere puppets of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and that any dissent is quelled.
Those complaints might sound familiar to a student of education history. Going back to the early 20th century, scholars say, corruption and favoritism flourished under mayoral-controlled districts. "You couldn't get a job in the schools without checking with the mayor," says Professor Robert Koff, of Washington University in St. Louis. Chicago Mayor William Hale (Big Bill) Thompson, who controlled the city's schools in the 1920s, ranked among the most brazen. "Even the school custodians gave a kickback to city hall in exchange for their raises," says Jim Carl, an expert on education at Cleveland State University. Independent school boards were created as a Progressive Era hallmark designed to curb such corruption. "But it hardly did away with patronage," Carl says.
But as urban school districts have floundered for generations, with families fleeing to the suburbs for better schools, many education experts now regard mayor-controlled districts as a way to establish accountability. And Duncan has been stumping for the idea in speeches around the country. "At the end of my tenure, if only seven mayors are in control, I think I will have failed," Duncan said this spring to a group of mayors and school superintendents.
The Chicago schools were considered virtually a lost cause when the Illinois Legislature shifted control to the mayor in 1995. Robert Bennett, the secretary of education during the Reagan administration, had labeled Chicago's the worst classrooms in the nation. "The schools were a disaster, just poison," said Paul Green, a professor at Roosevelt University. "Some of them didn't even have toilet paper."
At the time, Republicans controlled both chambers of the Illinois Legislature. "They thought they were handing Daley a dead-bang loser of an issue," Green said.
Daley, adopting a bottom-line, business-oriented approach to the schools, changed the title of the top job from superintendent to chief executive officer. He put his budget director, Vallas, in charge, and ended the practice of "social promotion." In 1997, a whopping 25 percent of eighth graders were held back. Until then, more than 90 percent of eighth graders were being passed along, even with poor grades and scores.
Backers of mayoral control point to successes in Chicago, where 64 percent of the students met or exceeded state standards on achievement tests in 2008, compared to 36 percent in 2000. Under Duncan's leadership, test scores improved overall, and the city revamped dozens of schools, typically dismissing administrators, teachers and staff in underperforming schools, and starting over from scratch.
In his fifth-floor office in city hall, Daley told NEWSWEEK that the teachers union for too long had operated as if it only had "to answer to God."
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