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.
