Curriculum warriors brace for round two - controversial New York, New York school board elections

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 17, 1993 | by Brian Robertson

Although the actual authority of the local boards extends only to elementary and junior high schools, the vexed issue of who controls the content of learning applies to the high schools as well, where some of the most controversial programs -- such as condom distribution -- have been or will be implemented.

New York has perhaps the largest school system in the world, and some say that its sheer size makes it unfeasible for either the chancellor or the central Board of Education to keep track of the diverse administrative needs and circumstances of schools across the five boroughs, much less the thousands of textbooks and curricula. The idea of breaking up the existing system into five autonomous borough systems with their own central boards has gained support from political figures as diverse as liberal Democratic Borough President Ruth Messinger in Manhattan and her conservative Republican counterpart on Staten Island, Guy Molinari. While increased power over patronage accounts for part of the attraction for politicians, many feel that increased local control also would prevent the ideological disputes that have marked Fernandez's tenure. Boroughs could, for instance, take different approaches to AIDS education. If parents in Queens preferred the teaching of abstinence rather than safe sex, a borough system would be more responsive to their wishes than a system dominated by the liberal education bureaucracy.

Dinkins, on the other hand, has proposed a plan that would go in precisely the opposite direction, giving the mayor a majority of appointments to the central board. Only by doing that, he argues, can there be accountability for education policy. Although the plan is supported by Gov. Mario Cuomo, it has little chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate in Albany, whose approval would be required.

The mayor's bid for control of the central board may be a last, desperate effort to avoid the decentralization that is inevitable if the city's schools are to reverse their painful decline. But if decentralization is to produce a renaissance in the quality of public education in New York, most agree that it will require a much higher level of parental involvement than currently exists. At the least, the turnout May 4 will be a measure of whether the controversy over Children of the Rainbow was just a temporary blip in public interest or whether it marked the beginning of a whole new level of parents' participation in their children's education.