Duncan: Mayors Need Control of Urban Schools

This from the Chicago Tribune:

WASHINGTON - Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday that mayors should take control of big-city school districts where academic performance is suffering. Duncan said mayoral control provides the strong leadership and stability needed to overhaul urban schools. Mayors run the schools in fewer than a dozen big cities; only seven have full control over management and operations. That includes Chicago, where Duncan headed the school system until joining the Obama administration. Speaking at a forum with mayors and superintendents, Duncan promised to help more mayors take over.

"At the end of my tenure, if only seven mayors are in control, I think I will have failed," Duncan said...

Citing that Baltimore had seven different superintendents iun the past decade, Duncan asked,

And you wonder why school systems are struggling," Duncan said. "What business would run that way?"

Duncan told the Associated Press that urban schools need someone who is accountable to voters and driving all of a city's resources behind children.

"Part of the reason urban education has struggled historically is you haven't had that leadership from the top," he said. "That lack of stability, that lack of leadership is a huge part of the reason you don't see sustained progress and growth," Duncan said.

It is unusual for a Cabinet secretary to weigh in on local matters. Yet Duncan has been emphatic on the subject, calling for mayoral takeover of Detroit public schools and for New York lawmakers to renew the law giving Mayor Michael Bloomberg control over his city's schools.

Duncan said it's impossible to have a great city without great schools that provide a skilled work force to bring and keep jobs.

It remains to be seen how Duncan's message will be received this weekend when he is scheduled to address the National School Boards Association, which represents local school boards that control districts across the country and opposes mayoral control.

Mayoral control is worth considering in about 400 of the biggest school districts, said Kenneth Wong, a Brown University professor who studies the issue. Those districts enroll about a third of the nation's 50 million school children.