Rushern L Baker III
News out of Prince George’s County, Md., suggests County Executive Rushern L Baker III may actually have a shot at taking over the school board’s money-making decisions and at making any newly appointed superintendent a member of his cabinet, the Washington Post reports.
Members of the Prince George’s County Board of Education are now elected, as are most boards of education in the country. New legislation, if passed, however, could significantly reduce their authority over the district’s $1.7 billion budget.
Mr Baker and a few state lawmakers are considering the restructuring of school governance in Prince George’s County because recent events in one of the nation’s largest and most affluent African-American districts have led people to doubt the board’s ability to run the schools and be accountable to the public. For example, the superintendent’s office has a revolving door: five superintendents have come and left in the last 10 years, including William R Hite Jr, who now runs Philadelphia’s school system. Other top administrators have also left.
Mr Baker, for his part, has expressed concerns about the school system since he was elected in November 2010, but he told the Post he was hoping to bring about a new, positive direction through the bully pulpit of the county executive. “You can do it,” he was quoted as saying, “but you can only take it so far. I think in order to have real sustained change that will outlast this administration, you’ve got to restructure it.”
And that takes legislation. Ideas put forth include adding six appointed members to the nine-member board. Three new members would have voting rights—an educator, a business leader, and the president of the PTA—and the others would be ex officio members, such as the president of the University of Maryland, College Park. The new legislation would apparently also restrict the board’s authority to academic and parental engagement matters but allow them to move any item on the school system’s budget by only 1 percent.
Some top education officials, including US Education Secretary Arne Duncan, say mayoral control of struggling, large urban school systems should be considered. Prince George’s school system fits that description. However, takeovers like this, in practice, have produced mixed results. Prince George’s County, actually, was replaced with an appointed school board in 2002, a move spearheaded by Mr Baker as a state delegate. Within four years, that change was reversed due to public outcry.
The most famous case of mayoral takeover is probably what happened in Washington, D.C., where the mayor took over control and appointed Michelle Rhee as superintendent. She immediately took over the failing public schools, closing many of them and firing ineffective teachers and central office staff. As an administrator, Ms Rhee delivered, and it’s hard to argue with the success of schools getting textbooks on time and buses picking up kids reliably. (Transportation problems have plagued Prince George’s County for some time.) But as an educator, Ms Rhee’s reliance on standardized tests to back up her opinions about teacher effectiveness reduced support for her changes. On balance, Ms Rhee succeeded by taking administrative worries off teachers’ plates but failed by steering non-educators toward a religious belief in standardized tests.
The dilemma over Ms Rhee’s work in Washington and her continued work with the StudentsFirst organization is giving many people pause when it comes to removing any authority from an elected board of education. In most places, elected school boards appoint district superintendents, who then often hire assistant superintendents. The need for assistants is highlighted in what happened with Ms Rhee: districts need administrators for business affairs of the schools and educators for curricular affairs. The right mix of those qualities, along with support for student programs, makes a good school superintendent, CEO, etc., or a good team of top administrators.
In the case of Prince George’s County, the Post ran two stories about this, and neither story provided any details about the plan Mr Baker might have for the schools. In other words, despite the fact that many schools in Prince George’s County could be considered struggling—low graduation rates, poor performance on standardized tests—it’s not clear from the information provided in the media that changing the organizational structure will have any impact on the district’s classrooms or other school operations, because we haven’t seen any plans of what might be done.
Second, although it would not be difficult to revert, putting authority over the schools in a county executive would change the qualities people look for when electing that county executive: people will have to think about authority over the schools and any possible board and superintendent appointments.
This may sound simple enough, but in practice, changing what people think about when they vote can become corrupt or messy. Schools are important, but many voters don’t put K-12 education on the top of their lists of issues when electing a county executive in Maryland. They do consider management of the schools as the most important factor when they elect the school board. So the person with authority over the schools in Prince George’s future may not have been elected based on how well he or she will tend to the schools. In turn, the schools could be poorly managed—maybe more poorly than they are now with an elected school board. At least with a school board, change would only have to wait until the next election.