Ask any Mayor what his or her top priority is for the long-term health of his or her city, and much more often than not they will say improving the quality of public schools. Mayors understand that a city cannot thrive with broken or even sub-par public schools. In too many of the nation’s urban areas students have a less than 50-50 chance of even finishing high school and educational achievement in the nation’s great cities remains far too low.
Yet despite the centrality of public schools to a city’s civic health, few mayors have any formal statutory authority over the public schools located in their city, as school systems in most states are run by independent local school boards. It is a paradox that vexes many mayors.
Mayors determined to reform education must either find ways of supporting school districts or take them over. Efforts to support school districts include building relationships with superintendents, advocating for resources, and publicizing successes. These efforts tend to keep mayors out of trouble (in other words, on the front page and off the op-ed pages) but with a few noteworthy exceptions, such efforts are low-impact in terms of improving outcomes for students.
Other mayors have assumed direct control over school systems, or sought control by supporting entire slates of school board candidates. But the prospects of truly reforming any large, entrenched institution are not good. Stanford’s Michael Kirst, who has extensively studied mayoral takeovers concludes that “it is difficult to link these governance shifts to improved instructional practices or outcomes.”
But there is a third way that gives a mayor a way to truly impact education while sidestepping the treacherous politics and problems of takeovers: Mayors can open their own public schools. Doing so does not mean walking away from other struggling public schools, but it does mean providing more high quality seats for students and introducing healthy competition into the public sector.
This is not just a theory. In Indianapolis, America’s 12th largest city, Mayor Bart Peterson is creating an entirely new sector of public schools. In 2001, the Indiana legislature granted the Mayor of Indianapolis the authority to issue public school charters to nonprofit entities as part of broader charter school legislation. Mayor Peterson, a Democrat who has served as mayor since 2000, enthusiastically embraced the authority and the idea of public charter schooling.
Public charter schools are independent public schools that are tuition-free, open to all children, and publicly financed. In Indianapolis, the first three Mayor-sponsored charter schools opened in 2002 and served 480 students. Today, 16 schools enroll nearly 3,900 students and one new charter school is scheduled to open this upcoming school year and another in 2008. When fully enrolled, these 18 schools will serve 7,900 students. While Mayor Peterson is currently the only mayor in the nation with the authority to sponsor charter schools, other mayors have seen the success and are approaching their state legislatures to obtain this power.
Around the country there are other independent entities, such as public universities and special charter school boards, that can authorizer charter schools. However, mayors bring unique characteristics to charter school authorization. Mayor Peterson has capitalized on these strengths to create a highly effective charter authorization system, which received Harvard’s “Innovations in American Government Award” in 2006 for its high level of rigor, transparency, and excellence.
First, a mayor is directly accountable to the community served by the school. Mayors have incentives to authorize only the best schools, and have a unique incentive to fulfill the authorizer’s obligation to hold schools accountable. In Indianapolis, Mayor Peterson has received more than 90 letters of intent to apply for charters but only 19 have been approved. And, one school has already been shut down for poor performance, demonstrating Mayor Peterson’s personal commitment to educational excellence as well as the political pressure and scrutiny on any mayor.
Second, mayors know their communities in a way other authorizers often do not. They understand the needs, the civic resources, and the subtle aspects of history and culture that make America’s cities so textured and complicated. Furthermore, a charter from a mayor bestows prestige on the recipient that is unmatched in a charter granted by another authorizer. This explains why charter schools in Indianapolis have attracted several of the community’s leading groups and citizens directly into the effort to provide better public options for the city’s students.
