Who’s Minding the Schools?
By Jill Levy

By the time we go to press, elected officials will have hammered out the details of the NYC school governance legislation. The big questions, however, remain: What impact will this change have on our schools, the children and educational outcomes? How will our roles, responsibilities and professional relationships look in the future?

My career began in 1959 in a red, wood-frame school. My first memory of that forbidding place was on a hot, August day when my husband and I drove by, for the first time, to “scout it out.” My mother and her siblings graduated from that school, and I knew that the principal was renowned for her autocratic temperament. But I was unprepared for the terror that gripped me when I saw the dark structure with its dozens of broken windows. A few weeks later, I found myself teaching in one of 14 first-grade classes, managing 38 non-English-speaking children. I used orange crates for bookcases. The school had no library books, and the readers–don’t ask. I cherished and relied on my teacher guides, gifts from the central board.

School governance? I knew there was a Board of Education, and that the Board had a president, but what did the Mayor have to do with education? For my colleagues and me, education was simply a matter of day-to-day survival. When the Ocean-Hill Brownsville crisis ended in a decentralized system in 1969, classes remained overcrowded. School facilities continued to crumble. Non-existent supplies crimped lesson plans. And it was to get worse. We were heading towards the 1975 economic crisis, a financial disaster from which our schools have yet to recover. School governance became a popular refrain. NYC mayors came and went, each one castigating centralized or decentralized systems. While screaming for control of the schools, those mayors starved them of resources. Governors, too, came and went, but still NYC public schools were short-changed year after year. All fingers pointed at the Board of Education as the one major impediment to educational success. Ultimately, community school boards took the fall and in the 1990s, we stripped these elected bodies of most of their power over personnel and policy.

It hasn’t mattered. With all the tinkering, the adjustments, the finger-pointing, school buildings still continue to deteriorate. Overcrowding is rampant. The state’s list of failing schools continues to grow. We still have so much to do. We must attract and retain certified teachers and supervisors. We used to attract more than 100 candidates for principal and assistant principal positions. Now, we’re lucky to attract a dozen. We must do much more to encourage our school professionals to stay in the city system and not take refuge in the suburbs.

With change, extraordinary opportunities arise. But, if conditions in the schools remain unchanged, it is unlikely that changing who’s in charge will result in the widespread educational improvements we want to see. If principals cannot allocate resources the way they see fit, if schools do not have a reasonable supervisor–to-staff ratio, if we cannot attract and retain the best teachers and supervisors, our schools will continue to struggle. And in that case, who’s in charge of the Board of Education, who sits at the top of the heap, will not matter very much at all.#

Jill Levy is the president of the Council of Supervisors and Administrators (CSA).

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