ERIC ED509593: When Mayors Use School Choice as a Reform Strategy

2006·0.32 MB·English

by  ERIC

When Mayors Use School Choice
as a Reform Strategy

by

Kenneth K. Wong
Brown University
Box 1938, 21 Manning Walk
Providence, RI 02912
Phone: [phone]
Email: [email protected]

Francis X. Shen
Harvard University
1737 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
Email: [email protected]

Lauren M. Pachucki
Vanderbilt University
Email: [email protected]

Paper prepared for the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Educational
Research Association, April 7- 11, 2006, San Francisco, CA
Wong, Shen, & Pachucki Mayors & School Choice Page 1
When Mayors Use School Choice as a Reform Strategy
I. INTRODUCTION
All political scientists who study education policy start their analysis with a similar
premise: “educational reform does not take place in political vacuum.”1 Studies of the politics of
school choice have focused primarily on state-level political dynamics (Mintrom 2000, Henig, et.
al. 2002, Wong & Shen 2004). This line of research makes sense since the charter school market
is initially created and subsequently altered by the state legislature. In this paper, however, we
break from this trend and focus our attention on local government and the politics of school
choice. Specifically, we examine the relationship between school choice and big city mayors.
Our preliminary analysis finds that mayoral positions on school choice is influenced not only the
existing legislation governing school choice in their city, but also by their city’s size and racial
composition.
Although the state legislature writes the charter school or voucher laws, mayors play
important roles in the legislative and policy enactment process. At the legislative level, mayors
can influence the type of laws that are enacted by working with state legislators and lobbying for
more choice options. At the policy enactment level, mayors can determine how choice options
play out in their city. From school location to financial support, city government and the city
school district can have large impacts on how school choice operates.
A first preliminary question is defining “school choice” for the purposes of this study?
Our definition is important because school choice is a phrase that encompasses a variety of
reforms which are not homogenous. Mayors diverge on these different strands of school choice.
Many mayors, for instance Mayor Menino in Boston and Mayor Murphy in Pittsburgh, are in

1 Stone, et. al., p. 20.
Wong, Shen, & Pachucki Mayors & School Choice Page 2
favor of charter schools but opposed to public school vouchers. In this study, we look for support
for any reform or policy proposal that increases choice options for families living in the city.
Expansion of choice options occur chiefly through three means: (1) improved partnerships with
private school options, (2) more charter school options, and (3) school vouchers. We use the term
“school choice” as a convenient way to refer to all three policies, though we recognize that they
may not be so easily lumped together.
A second preliminary question about mayoral involvement in school choice is whether
mayors desire to be involved in education issues generally, and further whether mayoral desire
lines up with formal powers in the mayor’s office to manage the schools. The traditional mode of
education governance, with school districts insulated from city government, is still the most
common arrangement in the United States. In the past decade, however, mayoral appointed
school boards have taken hold in some of the nation’s largest cities, e.g. Chicago, Boston, New
York, and Cleveland. Today, other underperforming urban school districts are looking at
mayoral appointed school boards as a policy reform that may turn around their schools.
In order to contextualize mayoral interest in school choice, it is useful to provide a brief
review of recent developments in mayoral governance and urban education.2 The 1990s saw the
emergence of a revolutionary new style of mayor, interested in taking a strong leadership role in
their city’s school system. Two mayors, Chicago’s Mayor Richard M. Daley and Boston’s
Mayor Thomas Menino, have been on the forefront of this revolution. On October 25, 1996,
Mayor Daley visited the city of Boston and made a joint appearance with Mayor Menino. The
topic was public education. Both mayors made it clear where they stood on the mayor’s role. “As

2 For more detailed analysis, see Wong, et. al. 2006, Henig & Rich 2004, and Cuban & Usdan 2003.
Wong, Shen, & Pachucki Mayors & School Choice Page 3
President of The U.S. Conference of Mayors, I believe that education is the greatest challenge
facing our cities today," Daley said.3 Menino agreed:
“Mayor Daley and I share a very important philosophy. Neither one of us is
willing to wash our hands of public education. We refuse to let our schools fall by
the wayside and join the chorus of politicians saying the failure of the schools
isn't their fault. No, Mayor Daley and I believe that when it comes to educating
our kids, the buck stops in the mayor's office.”4

Nearly a decade has passed since Mayors Daley and Menino made these proclamations. In that
decade, many U.S. mayors have followed suit by stepping up their role in public education.
Some cities, such as Cleveland and New York, have adopted the Chicago/Boston model:
granting the mayor the power to appoint a majority of the city’s school board members.
Across the nation, other mayors are also discussing their role in education. In Ohio, the
Ohio Mayors’ Education Roundtable has met five times, and expanded from the 8 to the 21
largest districts in the state.5 In the 2005 Minneapolis mayoral race, education was center-stage,
with the challenger Peter McLaughlin saying he “would have an Education Cabinet and seek a
nonvoting mayoral appointment to the School Board.”6 Education was a major issue in the 2005
New York City mayoral race as well. Mayor Bloomberg’s first attack on his opponent was on the
topic of education.7 Education was also center stage in the 2005 mayor’s race in Cincinnati.8
During the 2005 mayoral campaign, one of the candidates (a sitting Ohio state senator)

3 Quoted in: Brown, Mike. 1996. “Boston: Daley, Menino Say Mayors Key to Better Public Schools,” Press Release,
The United States Conference of Mayors. Online:
http://www.usmayors.org/uscm/us_mayor_newspaper/documents/10_28_96/documents/Boston__Daley__Menino_S
ay_Mayors_Key_to_Better_Public_Schools_111396.html.
4 Id. Emphasis added.
5 Edelstein, Fritz. 2005. “Ohio Mayors' Education Roundtable Meets for Fifth Time,” U.S. Mayors Newspaper, U.S.
Conference of Mayors. Online:
http://www.usmayors.org/USCM/us_mayor_newspaper/documents/09_12_05/add_roundtable.asp
6 Russell, Scott. 2005. “Schools become big issue in mayor's race,” Southwest Journal, Friday, September 23, 2005.
Online: http://www.swjournal.com/articles/2005/09/23/news/news13.txt.
7 Cardwell, Diane & Mike McIntire. 2005. “Mayor Accuses His Opponent of Wavering on Education Policy Over
the Years,” New York Times, September 26, 2005.
8 Pierce, Margo. 2005. “A City That's Good for Kids: Mayoral candidates discuss education and youth,” Cincinnati
City Beat. Online: http://www.citybeat.com/2005-08-03/news2.shtml.
Wong, Shen, & Pachucki Mayors & School Choice Page 4
introduced a bill in the state senate to allow for mayoral appointed school boards in Cincinnati.9
To be sure, not all mayors are interested in taking on education as a top priority. Martin
O’Malley, elected Mayor of Baltimore in 1999, focused more on public safety and improving
city services.10 This serves as a caution that, “contemporary mayors do not necessarily have to
construct a school-focused electoral coalition or governing coalition.”11
But even if mayors are not initially interested in education, in this new climate of
accountability voters may begin to expect mayoral involvement. In the 2005 Cleveland Mayoral
race, education was a central issue, “often competing with voters' questions about job creation
and crime.”12 This suggests that once the role of the mayor is institutionalized, schools become a
central issue regardless of the individual in the mayor’s seat. Mayors may have little choice but
to confront the education question: “What are you going to do about the schools if you win in
November?”13 Faced with questions like this from voters, and faced with school districts in dire
need of improvement, urban politicians and policymakers may find school choice options an
attractive path for reform. The analysis in the paper is devoted to assessing, both theoretically
and empirically, when it is mayors may be most likely to support school choice reform.

9 The bill was introduced as Ohio S. B. 146, “To amend section 3311.71 of the Revised Code to require that
management and control of any school district that has an average daily membership exceeding forty thousand
students, has a relatively high poverty index, and has been in academic emergency at least one of the four previous
school years be assumed by a nine-member board of education appointed by the mayor of the municipal corporation
containing the greatest portion of the district's territory.” Text of original bill online:
http://www.legislature.state.oh.us/bills.cfm?ID=126_SB_46.
10 Orr, Marion. 2004. “Baltimore: The limits of mayoral control,” in J. Henig & W. Rich (eds.) Mayors in the
Middle: Politics, race, and mayoral control of urban schools. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 27-58.
Also see: Cibulka, James G. 2003. “The city-state partnership to reform Baltimore’s public schools,” in L. Cuban &
M. Usdan (eds.) Powerful Reforms with Shallow Roots: Improving America’s schools. New York: Teachers College
Press. p. 125-146. Orr, Marion. 1999. Black Social Capital: The politics of school reform in Baltimore, 1986-1998.
Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
11 Orr, p. 29. For more on Baltimore, see: Introduction: The Evaluation of Baltimore's City-State Partnership to
Reform BCPSS: Framing the Context, National Trends, and Key Findings. By: Cibulka, James G.. Journal of
Education for Students Placed at Risk, Jan 2003, Vol. 8 Issue 1, p1-14. Westat. 2001. “Report on the Final
Evaluation of the City-State Partnership,” Westat, Rockville, MD, December 3, 2001.
12 Perkins, Olivera & Janet Okoben. 2005. “Candidates say persuasion key in controlling Cleveland schools,”
Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 02, 2005.
13 Ibid.
Wong, Shen, & Pachucki Mayors & School Choice Page 5
Mayors who gain control over school system may choose not to exclude school choice
from their strategic thinking. Instead, they can use choice to create internal competition to push
the system to perform more efficiently. Chicago’s Mayor Daley is clearly using this strategy in
his Renaissance 2010 plan. An alternative explanation is that mayors include choice because
African American parents may see choice as a way to improve the schooling quality for their
children in the inner city setting. We find some support for this in our empirical analysis. Yet a
third reason is the political security (incumbency) of mayors. When they are in office for
multiple terms, mayors may be more willing to take risks, including potentially alienating
themselves from union support. Conversely, mayors who are opposed to choice may be subject
to strong union politics. In fiscally stressed districts, mayors may also see choice as siphoning
resources from the public school district.
To begin exploring these and related hypotheses, we organize the paper into five sections.
Following this introduction, in Section II we build a theory about what factors would make a
mayor more likely to embrace school choice options. Drawing on the urban politics and politics
of education literatures, we argue that mayoral positions on school choice can be understood as a
combination of the city’s political economy and the mayor’s leadership style. In Section III, we
present our analytical approach for empirical analysis. We discuss the need for an index to
measure mayoral support for school choice, and conduct analysis on one aspect of this index:
public support for school choice or private school options as observed in recent state of the city
speeches. We employ a rare events logistic regression model to analyze the relationship between
support for school choice and a host of demographic, political, and economic factors. In Section
IV of the paper we present the results of our preliminary analysis, and draw on qualitative
evidence from cities in our sample in order to help interpret the findings. We find that mayors are
Wong, Shen, & Pachucki Mayors & School Choice Page 6
more likely to announce support school choice when their city school districts are larger and
have greater percentages of African-American students. This is consistent with the hypothesis
that mayors may see charter schools as a means to improve education for traditionally
underserved populations. In Section V, we conclude the paper by discussing potential policy
implications of our findings and mapping out directions for future research.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW & THEORY BUILDING
In this section, we first consider the historical context of mayors and urban education, and
then synthesize the options that mayors have in either supporting or opposing school choice.
Based on these first two sections, we develop a series of hypotheses about the demographic,
political, and economic factors that we believe will influence mayoral support for charter
schools, vouchers, and other private school alternatives.
A. Historical Context
Understanding mayors and schools at the start of the 21st century requires a look at
mayors and schools at the start of the 20th century.14 Urban school governance in the 20th
century was dominated by reform efforts that kept mayors and other political leaders from
interfering in public schools. Over the past 80 years, school governance has gone through three
phases, each of which can be broadly differentiated by the degree of mayoral control.15 The

14 Tyack, D.B. (1974). The One Best System: A history of American urban education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press. See also: Ravitch, Diane. 2000. Left back : a century of failed school reforms. New York: Simon
& Schuster.
15 For background on how the field’s understanding of school district politics has evolved, see: Eliot, T. 1959.
“Toward an understanding of public school politics,” American Political Science Review, 82, 1065-1087. Katz, M.
B. 1987. Reconstructing American Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Callahan, R. 1962.
Education and the Cult of Efficiency. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Peterson, P. E. 1976. School
Politics, Chicago Style. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bidwell, C. 1965. “The school as a formal
organization,” in J. March (ed.) Handbook of Organziations. Skokie, IL: Rand McNally, pp. 972-1022. Weick, K.
1976, “Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 21, pp. 1-89.
Rogers, D. 1968. 110 Livingston St. New York: Random House.
Wong, Shen, & Pachucki Mayors & School Choice Page 7
Progressive reform of the 1920s was designed to use “scientific management” to keep partisan
(mayoral) politics out of the school sector. By the 1960s, school boards and superintendents
allied with the mayor to manage intense conflicts over educational issues, many of them further
complicated by racial and income inequities in big cities. The emergence of accountability-
based reform during the 1990s created a new set of political realities for a more active mayoral
role.16 While reforms adopted in each of the three phases take on a process of incremental
accumulation, where previously enacted reforms were slightly modified and then layered onto
the current ones the role of the mayor has become increasingly visible and assertive over time.
The progressive-corporate governance paradigm dominated the reform phase that roughly
spanned the period from the 1920s to the mid 1960s. During the first quarter of the 20th century,
urban centers were growing rapidly as the manufacturing and industrial sectors created job
opportunities for waves of working class immigrants. The urban population, according to the
1920 U.S. Census, exceeded its rural counterpart for the first time in American history. In this
context of social and economic changes, public schools became a contested terrain. Political
scientists Edward Banfield and James Wilson (1966) characterized the reform politics as a
conflict between “private regarding” and “public regarding” civic culture. The working class
and immigrant groups, according to these authors, relied on community networks and precinct
captains of the political machines to gain access into the political and economic mainstream for
jobs, services, and other tangible benefits. Middle and upper income class groups, in contrast,
wanted an efficient governmental system accountable to the taxpayers at large. By the 1920s,
businesses and their progressive allies were able to institute far-reaching reforms to insulate the
school system from partisan intrusion.

16 To see how the older view was challenged, readers can see: Layton 1982. Burlingame 1988. Boyd 1976. Peterson
1976. Wirt & Kirst 1982. Mitchell 1988. Scribner 1977. LaNoue 1982.
Wong, Shen, & Pachucki Mayors & School Choice Page 8
The new model that originated from the Progressive era continues to dominate many
districts even today. The main features that are traceable to the reform of the 1920s include: the
school district is governed by a citywide, non-partisan, elected board that appoints the school
superintendent as its professional chief executive; its administrative hierarchy and delivery of
services are led by a professionally credentialed school superintendent and his/her professional
cabinet; its personnel policy is codified in details to guard against political interference;
schooling services (such as instructional time) are organized in terms of age-specific grade level
and subject matter knowledge; and its taxing authority is autonomous from city hall. In 1969,
Gittell observed that, “the most significant trend in education in New York City has been the
isolation of school administration from city government.”17
To be sure, the formal separation of school systems and city governments does not mean
that mayors were never involved in school matters. Scattered throughout Jeffrey Mirel’s (1993)
history of the Detroit school system, for instance, are examples of informal mayoral influence.18
In the 1930s, when the city had to address fiscal crisis, the mayor created a committee to
specifically address how to cut back teacher salaries. In preparing the school board for the cuts in
1932, the mayor “met informally” with school board members to gain their support for the
budget cuts.19 In a system where the mayor had little institutionalized power over the school
board, the mayor had to place more reliance on these informal means. But even with informal
contact, this insulated school system was able to build and maintain its own institutional rules.
Throughout the 1960s up through the 1980s, changing urban school politics created new
opportunities for mayors to mediate competing demands. Among the key factors contributing to

17 Gittell, Marilyn. 1969. “Professionalism and public participation in educational policy-making: New York city, a
case study,” in M. Gittell & A. G. Hevesi, (eds.) The Politics of Urban Education. New York: Praeger. P. 158
18 Mirel, Jeffrey. 1993. The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
19 Mirel, p. 100.
Wong, Shen, & Pachucki Mayors & School Choice Page 9
heightened school conflicts were racial tension over the pace of integrating schools, taxpayers
dissatisfaction with local property tax burden, readiness of teacher’s unions to strike when
collective bargaining failed, and the declining political influence of the urban population in the
state legislature. These challenges clearly outmatched the capacity of an independent school
board and its professional superintendent. As a result, mayors found themselves in a new role,
namely crisis managers. For example, Chicago’s mayor Richard J. Daley repeatedly involved
himself in bargaining with the teachers union to keep labor peace during the 1960s and the early
1970s (Grimshaw 1979). New York’s mayor John Lindsey was instrumental in decentralizing
the city’s school system. Mayors also lobbied on behalf of the autonomous school districts for
additional funding at the state capital. Intergovernmental agreements over an increasingly
complex federal grants-in-aid system often benefited from mayoral guidance. In other words,
mayors began to re-enter the realm of school governance during this second politically
contentious phase of reform.
By the 1990s, big city mayors began to see public education as an important investment
to improve the city’s overall quality of social and economic life. Evidence from a study by
Hopkins (2004) suggests that mayoral control is more likely to arise in cities that are lagging in
retail sales.20 Mayors, perhaps working with the business community, see schools as a key to
improving overall city performance. They want to improve safety, parks, schools, and
recreational services for families who live in the city. From a broader policy context, mayors
are increasingly skeptical of traditional strategies to turn around declining schools and depressed
neighborhoods. Instead, they are willing to take political risks and move away from their own
political party policy platforms. While mayors in previous decades wanted to control the school

20 Hopkins, Dan. 2004. “Risky Business: The role of economic insecurity in fostering mayoral control of schools,”
Working Paper, Harvard University. Online (accessed October 2005):
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dhopkins/.