Mayoral Control on the March!
There were a couple of interesting articles in the Seattle Times last week relating to the nascent effort towards mayoral control of the Seattle School District (which I’ve previously blogged about here). In the first Mayor Greg Nickels is calling for a summit to talk about the future of the district, and board member (and new board president!) Cheryl Chow has an odd quote:
The oddity of this is that the most recent round of troubles came about precisely because the board couldn’t get any traction on Raj Manhas’ plan to save money by closing schools. The bitter irony is that there’s every chance that the levy scheduled for February might flop precisely because of the bad press that the school board has generated, a result which would make Seattle’s recent round of budget difficulties look tame.
The second article, Nickels Urged to Take Some Control of Schools, is a good overview of what mayoral control could mean for Seattle and what the impact has been in other city districts around the country. A quote I’ll throw out for my friends from the Big Apple:
The notable omission there is New York City. See, even over here we know what Bloomberg is doing over there isn’t very good. ;-)
“If the summit is going to be to educate and get some discussion on how the city can pull together and go to Olympia to state the case that we are being underfunded, that would be great,” she said.
The oddity of this is that the most recent round of troubles came about precisely because the board couldn’t get any traction on Raj Manhas’ plan to save money by closing schools. The bitter irony is that there’s every chance that the levy scheduled for February might flop precisely because of the bad press that the school board has generated, a result which would make Seattle’s recent round of budget difficulties look tame.
The second article, Nickels Urged to Take Some Control of Schools, is a good overview of what mayoral control could mean for Seattle and what the impact has been in other city districts around the country. A quote I’ll throw out for my friends from the Big Apple:
Rolland and several others are urging Nickels to follow the lead of Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia, where mayors gained power to abolish the elected school boards and appoint some or all-new board members, handling the mayors greater control over the public schools.
The notable omission there is New York City. See, even over here we know what Bloomberg is doing over there isn’t very good. ;-)
posted by Ryan at 1:33 PM
1 Comments:
Shouldn't Seattle Schools be the poster-child for what a well-funded school looks like?
After all they have all the money that accompanies wealth (grandfathered levy lid, grandfathered salary schedule and low cost-per-thousand levies) AND the the money that accompanies poverty (LAP and Title I funds).
They have economies of scale and purchasing power like nobody else.
In addition, their costs are lower--more sellers of services, lower transportation costs due to density, more supplemental services available and charity & social programs galore to pick up slack in student needs.
So why are they not the model of success for the "money is all that we need" crowd? Instead, in an unnoticed irony, their problems are supposedly caused by unsufficient funding.
Amazing!
Oh, and then we get news like this:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003471767_johnmarshall11m.html
Is anyone thinking that the problems have more to do with factors unrelated to mere resources?
jl
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