Mayoral control in Chicago, DC and elsewhere

Check out the first hour of our terrific forum about Mayoral control elsewhere in the country, with Mary Levy, director of the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington DC Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, Julie Woestehoff director of Parents United for Responsible Education in Chicago, and Prof. Stefanie Chambers of Trinity College.

Video of part two of the forum, including questions from the audience is posted here; and part three is here.

Here are biographies of the three speakers; more information on the effects of Mayoral control in Chicago is topic is available through Julie's summary; Mary prepared a fact sheet on DC; and also a useful one-page chart about patterns of Mayoral control around the country.

What's going on with Mayoral control around the country?

On Friday, there will be a public discussion/forum on Mayoral control elsewhere in the nation; sponsored by the Parent Commission on School Governance. If you’ve come to one of our previous forums on governance, (see videos here and here), you know how good they’ve been. If you haven’t, it’s time you found out.

When: This Friday, Nov. 21 at 6:30 PM

Where: Judson Church Assembly Hall, 239 Thompson St. in Greenwich Village.

(Take A, B, C, D, E, F, or V trains to West 4th Street, or #6 train to Astor Place, or #1 to Sheridan Square)

What: A dynamite panel of experts including:

Mary Levy of Washington, DC: Parent advocate and Project Director of the Public Education Reform Project,Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs

Julie Woestehoff of Chicago: Executive Director, Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE);named one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Chicago by the ChicagoSun-Times in 2004

Stefanie Chambers of Trinity College: Associate Professor and author of Mayors and Schools: Minority Voices and Democratic Tensions in Urban Education

If you think that all that is wrong with Mayoral control is Michael Bloomberg or Joel Klein – guess what! You might hear otherwise.

For more information, email parentcommission@gmail.com or call 917-435-9329.

Who really deserved to win the Broad prize?

According to the just-released NAEP results, the city that really deserved to win the Broad prize as most improved urban school district in the country was not NYC, but Atlanta; however, lacking the Mayor’s political connections, supportive editorials in major newspapers, and well-heeled PR department, it wasn’t even nominated.

In fact, Atlanta was the only urban school district that has seen a consistent upward trend in all subjects tested by the NAEP--4th and 8th grade reading and 4th and 8th grade math--since 2002/2003, unlike NYC. Coming in a close second? Washington DC, which saw consistent gains in all subjects and years since 2003, except 8th grade reading, though it did make significant increases in even 8th grade reading since 2005.

Not only was the DC school system not nominated for the Broad award, though; its superintendent was fired and its governance system changed over to Mayoral control. Why?

To emulate the well-publicized, if illusory successes of the school system here in NYC.