An education mayor takes charge: the picture in New York

Education Next, Fall, 2005

Mayor Bloomberg was thus applauded when he made gaining control of this mess his top priority. He referred to the Board of Education as a "rinky-dink candy store" that was incapable of reforming itself. "I want to be held accountable for the results, and I will be," Bloomberg said.

As with any school reform effort, this one has not been smooth sailing for the billionaire mayor and his hand-picked chancellor, Joel Klein, a former head of the Justice Department's antitrust division during the Clinton administration. Every success appears to have a countervailing failure, or some sort of negative unintended consequence. Some critics have charged the new administration with doing too much too fast; others of doing too little, too late. "This is an evolution not a revolution," Bloomberg said, attempting to downplay expectations that conditions would improve overnight.

The willingness to admit that his team had screwed up on the school crime and safety, and then proactively do something about it, was what civic leaders had in mind when they called for "clear lines of accountability" in a school system that previously had none. So while critics will rightly debate and second-guess the administration's decisions, management styles, and personnel moves as they relate to schools, the point of this governing structure was that someone should be forced to feel the heat when things go horribly wrong in schools. When Deputy Chancellor Diana Lam got in deep water in 2004 for trying to secure a six-figure school job for her husband, Bloomberg was said to have personally called for her head, despite Klein's public expression of support for Lam when the story broke. This was about the buck finally stopping with someone, Bloomberg aides said at the time.

Previous mayors have had the luxury of distancing themselves from the city's troubled school system, hurling insults at school chancellors and school board members from the comfort of their podium at City Hall. Bloomberg not only tied his fortunes to the schools in a symbolic way; he physically moved the system's headquarters from 110 Livingston Street, a sprawling old building in Brooklyn, to the refurbished Tweed Courthouse directly behind the mayor's office at City Hall in Lower Manhattan.

But in November 2005 Bloomberg will be held accountable for the state of the schools in a way that no one in the city's history ever has: at the ballot box. To be sure, this new accountability system has been difficult to swallow at times, not just for politicians, but for parents and teachers as well. Bloomberg took considerable heat in the spring of 2004 after he fired two appointees from his own advisory Panel for Educational Policy because they unexpectedly opposed his plan to retain poorly performing 3rd graders. But the clear message from Bloomberg at the time was this: let me do what I think needs to be done with the schools, and if it doesn't work, you can vote for someone else in 2005. Essentially, top-down management was virtually ensured by the fact that the person at the top was the one whose fortunes would rise or fall based on what happened in classrooms all over the city.