Posted January 24, 2000 Too Much Democracy By Charles Mahtesian No big-city school system needs an overhaul quite as desperately as the District of Columbia’s, yet last week the city council missed a crucial window of opportunity to do exactly that. Rejecting Mayor Anthony Williams’ plan to create a five-member appointed school board answerable to him only, the council instead cast a preliminary vote for a meek compromise proposal to shrink the school board from 11 elected members to seven. The reason for thwarting the mayoral takeover, one council member solemnly intoned, is that the city “cries for more democracy.” The unpleasant truth, however, is that the District needs an elected school board like it needs another bomb threat. While the city might cry out for more democracy, the deeply troubled school system requires the opposite. It is in desperate need of accountability, not more political actors. Before the federal government stepped in to supervise the schools several years ago, the D.C. mayor and the city council set school funding levels, while the school board and school superintendent handled policy and administrative matters. That structure proved a miserable failure. With governance authority diffused across city government, each body easily sidestepped responsibility for the deterioration of the schools. The new council plan virtually ensures the same result. Worse still, it ignores strong evidence that, within dysfunctional urban school systems, the only way to guarantee accountability is to centralize school powers in City Hall. Over the last few years, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and Detroit have all come to that conclusion, offering new, wide-ranging powers to the mayor in response to a deep and growing frustration with listless and unresponsive school administrative bureaucracies and the gridlock caused by a combination of inadequate funding, mismanagement and political infighting. Each city’s approach is a little different, but all share the same underlying idea — that the answer to the riddle of big-city school governance today is not to open the process to more voices, but to fewer. Detroit’s mayoral takeover is still too fresh to evaluate, but in Boston and Cleveland there is reason to believe the experiment is working. Bad principals are more easily removed. Mayor-appointed school boards are staying focused on policy, not personnel matters and politics. In Chicago, Mayor Richard M. Daley’s appointed management team has disallowed social promotion, eliminated a $1.3 billion projected deficit and signed a four-year teacher contract with a no-strike clause for 18 months. More important, every single voter in those cities knows whom to blame if the schools fail to improve. That hasn’t been the case in the past in the District of Columbia, nor will it be in the future, thanks to the council’s recent vote. Under the new plan, regardless of the democratic sugar-coating, when the feds return control of the school system back to the city sometime over the next year, the reality is that the lines of accountability will be no clearer than before. Now that’s something worth crying over. Charles Mahtesian is a staff writer for Governing magazine. Agree? Disagree? Want to expand on a point? E-mail us at mailbox@governing.com, and we'll post your comments here. Please include your name, location, government or business title or job description, and a daytime phone number (for verification purposes). Previously in View: The Art of Apology: politicians and regret (posted January 18, 2000) The State vs. the Wild, Wild Web: regulating the Internet (posted January 14, 2000) Back from the Dead: party control in the South (posted January 11, 2000) Welcome to Governing.com (posted January 2, 2000) Copyright © 2000, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.