The next step in New York City's education "reform" will be perhaps the least democratic school board election ever held. In this unique election, only parents of currently enrolled public school students are eligible to serve and only a handful of parent "leaders" will be allowed to vote.
The "Community District Education Councils" (CDECs) to emerge from this odd process result from a legal settlement between Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Klein, and New York State legislative leaders last spring. Under that arrangement, the CDECs replace elected community school boards, themselves created in the turmoil of the late 1960s to "reform" what was then perceived as an overly-centralized system.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, most New Yorkers agree that the decentralization effort went too far. But in this early stage of the current reform effort, a queasy feeling is developing that the pendulum may have swung back too far in the opposite direction.
The CDECs will have little power, though they'll have input on a number of issues including zoning and the evaluation of the city's ten Regional Superintendents and 113 Local Instructional Superintendents. But all real decisions rest with Tweed (as Joel Klein's operation is now termed, after the old courthouse in which its headquarters reside). For Klein and the mayor, the CDECs give the illusion of parent and community involvement in the autocratic decision-making process that has quickly evolved since Bloomberg assumed control.
The CDEC electoral process would shame the old Soviet Politburo. Only parents of enrolled public school students are eligible to serve on the councils - nine for each of 32 CDECs (with two additional members appointed by the Borough President, plus a non-voting student member). And only the president, secretary, and treasurer of school-based parents' associations in each of the 32 community school districts, as well as citywide districts for high schools and special education students, are eligible to vote (each officer gets two votes). That breaks down to about 7,500 qualified electors casting ballots for about 300 seats, in a city with more than 4 million registered voters and school system with more than a million pupils.
Not surprisingly, enthusiasm for this quasi-election is invisible. Weeks before the filing deadline, only 54 people had filed to be candidates. At that point, the deadline was extended, and Chancellor Klein ordered each of the city's 1,200 "parent coordinators" (a new position the mayor created for each school, which pays nearly as much as a starting teacher) to recruit at least one candidate. Magically, more than 1,000 new applicants surfaced. But when public forums began to be held earlier this month, a majority of those candidates failed to appear to air their views to what were essentially empty rooms.
When the election is held on May 11, a laundry list of stakeholders will lose their franchise. What about parents of children not yet of school age? Don't they have an interest? Or the parents of private and parochial school students who may have fled the public system, but might return if the schools were fixed to address their concerns?
Most important, what of the ordinary citizen concerned about public education and paying taxes to finance it? Doesn't everyone have a stake in the schools? Didn't we once fight a war over "taxation without representation?"
Even if you accept the questionable premise that only current public school parents should have a right to vote, the Bloomberg/Klein plan falls short. Officers of any parents' association are given equal votes, whether they represent the smallest boutique "theme" school with maybe 100 students or a large high school with more than 5,000. Not quite "one person, one vote."
The real problem with parents' associations choosing the external leadership of the schools, however, is not that they are unrepresentative but that many of them are run by cliques - and the cliques themselves are chosen in undemocratic elections in which few parents participate. School officials privately acknowledge widespread thievery in the parents' associations but are unwilling to crack down. In a very few instances, prosecutions have resulted, such as the 1995 conviction of Madeline Vasquez, the P.A. president who set fire to an East Harlem middle school in a clumsy attempt to cover up her theft of the money the association collected for the school yearbook. She served six months in prison.
But for every incident of corruption that results in prosecution, scores go unreported. A few years ago, things got so bad that a Bronx school board member, Herbert Suss - elected by the public, not chosen by a clique - launched a probe. That effort was taken so seriously that the then-head of the United Parents Associations, Ayo Harrington, journeyed to the Bronx to lead an angry demonstration against any investigation into or reform of parents' association financial activities. Today, Ms. Harrington is a key aide to Democratic Assemblyman Steven Sanders, who chairs the State Assembly Education Committee and helped shape the Bloomberg/Klein plan that removes people such as Mr. Suss from participation in this election.
In sum, a handful of unrepresentative hacks, many of them ethically challenged, will choose the members of impotent school oversight bodies from a limited, unrepresentative group of candidates. In the end, only the consultants benefit: the Department of Education awarded a no-bid contract to KPMG LLP for a fat $1,422,846 to run this election, a cost of about $200 per voter. Nice work if you can get it.
But all of this suits Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein, who have systematically taken the reins of power over the school system into their own hands. This New Tweed Ring seems to believe that less democracy is better than more.
After last month's "Monday Night Massacre," in which Bloomberg summarily removed two of his own appointees to the citywide Panel for Educational Policy in order to insure support for his policy on social promotion, some New Yorkers are starting to wonder whether concentrating so much power in so few hands was a good idea after all. There is a dawning realization that mayoral "accountability" is limited. Mr. Bloomberg runs for reelection next year, but is then term-limited. That means he'll have four full, unsupervised, unaccountable years of reform or ruin, with no structure in place to nudge him back on track should things go wrong.
Andrew Wolf writes on education matters frequently for the New York Sun. His forthcoming book, The New Tweed Ring, published by Reed Press, will be published in the fall. Portions of this article first appeared in the New York Sun and are reprinted with permission.
