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The Education Mayor: Improving America’s Schools reviewed by Joseph P. Viteritti — March 11, 2008 Title: The Education Mayor: Improving America’s Schools Author(s): Kenneth K. Wong, Francis X. Shen, Dorothea Anagnostopoulos and Stacey Rutledge Publisher: Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC ISBN: 1589011791, Pages: 254, Year: 2007 Search for book at Amazon.com Sometimes we expect too much from governance, sometimes not enough; and sometimes we don’t know what to expect at all. The book under consideration here is probably the most detailed assessment of “mayoral control” of city schools we have to date. For that reason it is important. The phenomenon being studied is now operative in many large American cities, including Boston, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Providence, Harrisburg, Hartford, Trenton, New Haven, and, most recently, Washington, D.C. Detroit had also experimented with mayoral control for a while, but it was tossed out in a popular referendum.
What is generally referred to as mayoral control appears in many different institutional forms. In some jurisdictions the mayor picks all or a majority of school board members; in others he also picks the schools chief (variously referred to as the superintendent, chancellor or CEO). In Philadelphia and Baltimore, the mayor shares appointment power with... (preview truncated at 150 words.)To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropropriate membership. Please review your options below:
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- Joseph Viteritti
Hunter College, CUNY JOSEPH P. VITERITTI is the Blanche D. Blank Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Affairs at Hunter College, CUNY. He has written widely on education policy, politics and governance as well as municipal government and law. Among nine books and more than one hundred articles and essays, he is the author of Across the River: Politics and Education in the City (1983), one of the first scholarly works to propose mayoral control of schools, which he wrote after serving as special assistant to the Chancellor of Schools in New York. Viteritti has also been a senior advisor to school superintendents in Boston and San Francisco and now serves as Executive Director of the Commission on School Governance (CSG) in New York, which is studying the existing governance structure that is under consideration for renewal by the State Legislature. The views expressed here are his and are not meant to represent those of the CSG or its members.
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