Arne Duncan Advocates Mayoral Takeover of Big-City Districts
This from Politics K-12:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan grew up in a school system dominated by mayoral control. He's said he loses sleep at night over Detroit Public Schools."Best left in the hands of mayors" is not much of an argument. Duncan will have to do better than that. Kentucky has avoided this circumstance largely, I suppose, because there has yet to be any push for it.
And he's weighed in on New York City's governance structure, declaring that the city's public schools are best left in the mayor's hands. Now, as if the education secretary doesn't have enough going on, he's wading even further—and more dramatically—into the thorny issue of local control and school governance by declaring that more big-city mayors need to take over school districts. And if the numbers don't rise, he said according to Libby Quaid's Associated Press story, he will have failed as secretary." ...
1 comment:
"Kentucky has avoided this circumstance" because the Kentucky Constitution makes schools a State responsibility. City officials are not State officials, but elected school board members are legally deemed to be State office holders. The entire statutory system on public schools would have to be amended to permit mayors of any size city in Kentucky to have any control over school districts. The cities referenced by Secretary Duncan are those where the law already provides for the schools to be a department of the city government.
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