Strong Mayors Now the Critical Component in Fixing Urban Schools

Who can break the gridlock over urban school reform? Strong mayors, say Rice researchers.

Despite the increased attention given to education reform over the past two decades, little agreement exists on ways to improve failing urban school systems. According to a new study at Rice, strong city mayors, not superintendents, might be the key to developing consensus and cooperation among schools’ principal stakeholders.

“Studies suggest that the role of superintendent has waned, and mayoral involvement in school policy has been on the rise,” says Melissa Marschall, an associate professor of political science at Rice. “Mayors may now be one of the critical components needed to move cities from conflict to consensus regarding education policy.”

Marschall believes superintendents are less likely to sustain support and cooperation around education policy reforms, in part because there’s too much turnover in their position. At the same time, a growing number of the country’s largest urban school districts have shifted from elected to mayoral-appointed school boards.

“Mayors are cited more often as more influential regarding their cities’ education policies because they tend to have more citywide leadership and better ties to the business community, unions, and other groups concerned with their public schools,” Marschall says. “They also may be better able to facilitate agreement among different stakeholders than someone like the superintendent, who is only in the education arena.”

In “Keeping Policy Churn Off the Agenda: Urban Education and Civic Capacity,” published in The Policy Studies Journal, Marschall and Rice doctoral student Paru Shah examine the conditions under which urban school systems are likely to have clear, sustained reforms. Given the seemingly insurmountable differences among stakeholders, the researchers were particularly interested in how governing coalitions around education reform develop—how much the education stakeholders agree as to who the key decision makers are and what problems and solutions are involved in reforming their school systems.

From data compiled in 11 U.S. cities by the Civic Capacity and Urban Education Project and from their content analysis of the media coverage of educational reform activities within those same cities at the time of the project’s study, the researchers found areas in which stakeholders agreed and disagreed. For example, they identified six cities where three-quarters of the stakeholders agreed about the key groups involved in education reform, but in the remaining cities, they found confusion over who should be responsible for improving their schools. In at least three cities—Baltimore, Boston, and Washington, D.C.—more than two-thirds of the stakeholders indicated they believed the mayor had critical responsibility for education reform. Less than half of the respondents in seven other cities identified the mayor as an important stakeholder.

The study also showed that none of the 11 cities had more than 70 percent agreement among their stakeholders as to what education solutions were most appropriate, leaving the researchers to conclude that cities were better at identifying the problems but less clear as to how to solve them.

“Our findings show that agreement was relatively high regarding who the key stakeholders are and why the educational system needs reforming,” Marshall says. “However, when it came to how reform should occur, we saw a considerable degree of conflict.”