Secretary Duncan’s public endorsement of mayoral control in New York City this month comes on the heels of months of controversy for the city’s chancellor Joel Klein, whose tenure seems to be endangering not only NYC’s mayoral control but the viability of Mayor Bloomberg’s entire reform agenda. The allegations driving the calls for Klein to quit have little to do with whether Klein is right, and everything to do with who he is. “He’s a great litigator, he’s probably the smartest person I’ve met,” Randi Weingarten says, “But his view is it’s my way or the highway.” In systems with mayoral control in particular, conventional wisdom and leadership style matter as much, if not more, than winning policy arguments.
School systems are essentially “people [administrators] working with and through people [teachers] to influence people [students].”* For better or worse, politics are inherent in any school system, especially one which gives so much power to one directly-elected mayor and his hand-picked chancellor. These kinds of problems led authors William Sharp and James Walter to advocate participatory decision-making for urban superintendents in their 2004 book The School Superintendent: The Profession and the Person. Neither individual nor group decision making will advance the best reforms: while individuals are subject to bias and overconfidence, groups are impossibly slow at deciding. Perhaps most importantly, participatory decision-making can allow Bloomberg and Klein to preserve the executive power they need to effect real change while cultivating the social capital with teachers, parents and students to keep their political agenda from falling apart in the mean time.
One person in the position to learn a lot from Klein’s troubles is DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Kevin Carey is right to reject Nick Kristof’s questions about Rhee’s bedside manner: union leaders are hard-headed, and Rhee’s staffing policies should be judged by public debate, not by backroom placation. Still, Rhee’s challenges on discipline, attendance and standards will still be there even after the immediate fight over firing is fought and won. Whether legitimate or not, decisions to withhold information about the budget or firing her own children’s principal run the danger of appearing arbitrary and capricious. By letting teachers set some (but not all) of the agenda and making obvious that she values their input, Rhee can make the person-to-person connections she needs to overcome her image and preserve the political prerogatives of her office. In particular, Rhee will have to build systems to protect against truly arbitrary firing and create a rigorous system of professional development (the first signs of which are here) in the District before she pushes for greater firing rights. Fear, in this case, will not motivate teachers to get better but only motivate them to dig deeper into cynicism and complacency.
Rhee knows she can’t fix DC alone: she frequently makes statements like “teachers are the solution” to urban education woes or teachers are “the agents of social justice” in the District. By forming personal relationships open to mutual criticism with as many teachers as she can, Rhee can avoid the breakdown in trust, confidence and collaboration which have derailed Klein’s agenda.
* Ellen Goldring and William Greenfield, “Understanding the Evolving Concept of Leadership in Education: Roles, Expectations, and Dilemmas,” in The Educational Leadership Challenge: Redefining Leadership for the 21st Century, ed. Joseph Murphy, Vol 101, no 1, Yearbook of the National Society of Education. (
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