City News is co-hosting a televised forum on mayoral control. The details are at the bottom of the following story.

School reform efforts are nothing new in Rochester. In fact, we've been reforming since 1841, when the city established free public education for Rochester children, and 1850, when segregation of girls from boys in classrooms was abolished. Over the past four decades, the city school district has created magnet schools, Major Achievement classes for high-achievers, and a racial integration plan. We have closed schools and brought in Jesse Jackson to inspire students and parents. We've experimented with unstructured open-classroom teaching, middle schools, small schools within schools.

In early 1987, a nationally publicized reform increased teachers' salaries, established mentoring for struggling teachers, and removed some seniority protection.

There have been blue-ribbon studies by business leaders and a promise of thousands of mentors for city students. A 1986 Call to Action was supposed to mobilize community efforts around education. More recently, we tried to create Rochester's own version of the Harlem Children's Zone. And in 2000, the district broke Franklin High School into several small specialty schools, including a Montessori program in an attempt to save that failing school.

The goal of almost all of those efforts was to give the city's poor, non-white students a better education: to reduce the achievement gap between whites and non-whites. But student achievement in Rochester is worse now - far worse - than before the reforms began. None of the reforms seem to have made a dent.

In fact, Franklin may epitomize Rochester's reform efforts. Franklin has been "re-formed" several times, always with the promise of great improvement. But next September, the district begins a several-year process of closing Franklin's high schools. In the eyes of the district's administration and nearly all of its board members, those programs are beyond hope.

Now Rochester is debating yet another reform, one that is as big as any it has undertaken: eliminating the elected school board and making the school district part of city government, with the superintendent reporting to the mayor. The proposal is also exceptionally controversial, more so than any previous reform efforts save school integration in the 1960's.

At the moment, the issue is in the hands of the State Legislature. Since school districts in New York State are creatures of the state, the legislature has to approve any changes in the laws governing them - including the elimination of the school board. When Mayor Bob Duffy announced his interest in mayoral control in January, he expected that Albany would have a bill by early February.

There's still no bill, however. Drafting a bill has proved more complicated than Duffy or members of the Assembly had anticipated. Adding to the complexity: Governor David Paterson's distractions and the state's budget problems.

When Bob Duffy ran for mayor, he was opposed to mayoral control. Now, he's pushing hard for it. He insists that it will lead to better student achievement and to better accountability. He, like other district critics, complains that the state requires the city to give more than a $100 million, but gives it no authority over how the money is spent. And, Duffy notes, the district is able to negotiate with its unions - and hire staff and provide raises - but doesn't have to go to taxpayers to raise money.

Duffy's push received some reinforcement in December when an audit by the state comptroller said that the school board hadn't provided enough oversight over the superintendent and his staff. And Duffy believes that by combining two government entities he can bring more focus and cohesiveness to meeting the needs of Rochester's children.

At a forum sponsored by the Rochester Business Journal last week, Duffy cited the district's low student achievement and its 46 percent graduation rate, and urged that he be given a five-year chance to change that.

"We are hemorrhaging children," he said.

But critics say that mayoral control hasn't improved achievement in cities that have it, that it reduces input and access by parents and the general public, that it puts too much power in the hands of one person, and that eliminating the school board takes away the public's right to vote - a concern that is especially important to the African-American community.

His critics also say that while Duffy links students' poor achievement and the dropout rate to the city's crime rate, he himself has responsibility for such things as job creation, economic development, neighborhood improvement, and crime prevention, all of which impact students' lives.

Does mayoral control work? The record is mixed, complex, and often contradictory.

At the RBJ forum, Dennis Walcott, deputy mayor for educational and community development in New York City, said New York has seen "measurable increases" in achievement and graduation rates since adopting mayoral control in 2002. But what's the cause? Mayoral control? Or a court-ordered increase in state funding?

Kenneth Wong - who chairs the education department at Brown University and who has studied the effects of mayoral control extensively - says his research shows that achievement is higher in cities with mayoral control than in those without. Wong's statements are so compelling that he's a popular, frequently cited source among mayoral-control supporters.

His comments at the RBJ forum, for instance, included this one: "After two years of mayoral control, you would expect a significant impact on achievement."

If there were widespread agreement on that, there'd probably be little to debate. But other research indicates exactly the opposite. The book "When Mayors Take Charge," edited by Hunter College public-policy professor Joseph Viteritti, contains case studies of several cities that have adopted mayoral control, including New York. In some cities, achievement has improved under mayoral control. In others, it has not.

Teachers union president Adam Urbanski offered his own data at the RBJ forum: "The two highest-achieving districts in the US are Charlotte and Austin. They do not have mayoral control. The two lowest are Chicago and Cleveland. They do have mayoral control."

Joseph Viteritti's conclusion: "Making a direct connection between structure and results is difficult, perhaps impossible."

What is not in dispute is that Rochester's test scores and graduation rate are abysmal. And even many of the students who graduate find it hard to do college-level work.

There seems to be growing agreement that the root of this is concentrated poverty. Many Rochester students enter school lagging in language skills and burdened with multiple problems: physical and emotional health problems, poor self discipline, poor parenting, neighborhoods and often families in which violence is a fact of life.

Teachers, Urbanski said at the RBJ forum, have children for 19 percent of their day. Parents, peers, and neighborhoods are the influence for the other 81 percent.

"Unless we believe children are schizophrenic," Urbanski said, "the 19 percent can't overcome the influence of the 81."

That raises two questions. One: if this system isn't working, is mayoral control the only or the best option? One of mayoral-control's opponents is Bill Cala, who led the Rochester district as interim superintendent before Jean-Claude Brizard was hired. In a lengthy opinion piece sent to this newspaper, Cala charged that mayoral-control supporters have exaggerated and distorted its success. And he wondered whether the real goal of mayoral control is "breaking unions and creating a lower paid work force with fewer benefits."

Cala cited research indicating that mayoral control limits minority participation and representation. And he offered several alternatives to mayoral control, including selecting "better school board candidates," eliminating political party affiliation for school board candidates, and instituting term limits.

But, he said, the ultimate answer is a metropolitan school district.

RTA's Urbanski agrees.

"If we really want a solution," Urbanski told the RBJ audience, "give all children access to middle-class schools."

Only the most naïve observer of Rochester-area politics believes that the public would agree to a metropolitan school district, however. There has been a push for that for decades, through citizen activism and court actions (and countless articles and opinion pieces in this newspaper). Resistance hasn't lessened.

The second question, then, is whether despite the concentrated poverty, Rochester's schools can do a better job. Current school board leaders insist that they can - and that under Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard, we're beginning to see progress. The graduation rate, for instance, climbed steadily between 2006 and 2008.

But the rate is still at only 46 percent. And test scores, traditionally, have bobbled, up one year, down the next; up for several years in a low-performing school, then back down.

At the RBJ forum, Margaret Raymond, director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, insisted that "thousands" of high-poverty schools in the US are successfully educating their students.

Even here, however, there are no clear-cut data. You can cite individual schools that are successful, Urbanski retorted, but they're exceptions.

"I'm not talking about the exception to the norm," he said. "I'm talking about making the exception the norm."

"Show me a district where there's concentration of poverty that has done well," he said.

Brizard who was a regional superintendent under mayoral control in New York City, hasn't taken a stand on the issue in Rochester. But he has been outspoken on the need for teachers and principals to do a better job, regardless of which system they operate under. 

Like many superintendents before him, Brizard insists that it's hard to get some poorly performing teachers and principals to improve - and hard to remove them because of tenure protection, union pressure, and teacher and principal resistance. Local union leaders disagree. Union contracts simply ensure that employees have the right to due process, protecting them from arbitrary punishment or dismissal, those leaders say.

Mayor Duffy doesn't specifically single out the district's unions when he talks about why he wants mayoral control. He insists that he respects the unions and recognizes the need for unions to represent employees. If Rochester gets mayoral control, the city will "still have to honor and negotiate labor contracts," he said on WXXI's 1370 Connection in January.

 "Those systems don't change," he said. "They're part of the law."

But Duffy also says frequently that the current system "is not focused on children and student achievement but on special interests and adult concerns."

The kind of mayoral control Rochester gets is as important as whether we gets it at all.

In the plan under discussion in Albany, the elected school board would be replaced by a nine-member citizens' board who would advise the superintendent on school policy. Whether the mayor would appoint all nine or City Council would appoint some of them hasn't been decided.

Duffy wants to appoint all nine; Assembly member Joe Morelle has favored having City Council appoint at least some of them. Presumably that would provide more citizen input and would provider a stronger check on the mayor's power.

Experts such as Wong argue that the mayor must appoint at least the majority of the board. Otherwise, they say, the mayor has little more control than he has now.

But critics say that puts too much power in the hands of one person. And, they say, it dramatically reduces public input and access.

That has been one of the biggest complaints in New York City, where mayoral control first went into effect in 2002. Parents and teachers charged that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein ran roughshod over their requests and concerns, almost completely shut them out of participation in district affairs, and fired two advisory board members who objected to a Bloomberg proposal. When the State Legislature reauthorized mayoral control last August, in fact, many of the revisions to the original legislation were aimed at providing more input and access for the public, particularly for parents.

Viteritti says that any form of mayoral control should ensure plenty of checks and balances - providing at least some City Council oversight, for instance.

Viteritti also notes another potential source of imbalance: the business community. Business leaders here, as in other cities, have been pushing for mayoral control. And they often accuse district officials of not using sound business methods. But relying too heavily on "the business model for public schools can undermine democratic norms and leave ordinary people on the sidelines of school politics," Viteritti writes in "When Mayors Take Charge."

"The centralization of power and authority at city hall can remove decision making from community-based institutions, including schools themselves, where parents tend to have better access," Viteritti writes. "Unlike business leaders, parents do not have the political clout that is needed to get a call through to the mayor's office."

Another key issue: whether the community supports the change to mayoral control.

Research suggests that "even the best-designed and most effectively managed policy initiatives may founder if they fail to engage the participation and political support of recipients and other stakeholders," Viteritti writes.

On this issue, as on the issue of other cities' experience, Rochester has dueling data. A January poll of parents of district students indicated strong opposition to mayoral control. That poll was sponsored by the Rochester Teachers Association and 14 other unions and organizations opposed to mayoral control, but it was conducted by an independent, non-partisan research firm, BRX Global Research Services.

A poll released this week, however - sponsored by the non-partisan Center for Governmental Research and opinion-research firm Metrix Matrix and conducted by Metrix Matrix - indicated quite the opposite. In a broader survey of city residents - parents and non-parents - 62 percent of respondents said they support mayoral control. Only 23 percent said they oppose it. Thirty-three percent hadn't made up their mind.

In the CGR survey, the support for mayoral control held up through all demographic groups: white and black, parents and non-parents.

The majority of respondents also said they have more faith in the mayor's ability to increase the district's graduation rate than they do in the school board's.

That support doesn't negate Viteritti's concern about the need for "political support of recipients and other stakeholders," however. Unions representing the district's principals, administrators, and non-teaching employees are adamantly opposed to mayoral control and have been marching and picketing against it. Their opposition isn't likely to evaporate if the State Legislature passes mayoral control legislation.

The risks of change: Many supporters of mayoral control base their opinion more on their unhappiness with the current system's record - on the sense that mayoral control couldn't make things worse - than on hard evidence that mayoral control will improve things.

But the change creates tension and intense division in the community. And if mayoral control doesn't produce strong improvement in student achievement, things certainly could get worse.

Among the Rochesterians worried about a change to mayoral control is former Mayor Bill Johnson, who has made education improvement a cornerstone of his public service, both as mayor and, before that, as head of Rochester's Urban League.

Johnson has been an outspoken critic of the school district. Despite his concerns about the district and its performance, however, Johnson, like Urbanski, Cala, and many others, believes that concentrated poverty is at the heart of the district's challenges. And he says he isn't convinced that mayoral control is what the city and the district need.

Johnson worries about the concentration of power in the hands of one person, and he notes the problems that power has created in New York. He also draws distinctions between Rochester's mayor and two mayors who are moving forcefully to change their school districts: Michael Bloomberg in New York and Richard Daley in Chicago. Duffy, he says, doesn't have the power that Bloomberg and Daley have built for themselves. And it takes power, he says, to resist criticism and pressure and bring about change.

"Duffy doesn't have the killer instinct," he says. When a city gets mayoral control, "it isn't just that you get the right to do it, it's do you have the will to do it," he says. "Sometimes it's not pretty."

He also charges that there's been too little transparency in Duffy's push for mayoral control - too little public discussion of the specifics of a plan for Rochester.

Duffy has asked for a five-year trial period. If achievement doesn't improve under his control, he says, he'll agree that we should go back to the old system. But Johnson questions how that can happen. For mayoral control to have any chance of success, the district's administrative operations will have to be incorporated into the city's. If the new system doesn't work, asks Johnson, "how do you rebuild the system that has been completely deconstructed?"

Johnson and others note that the Duffy administration faces major financial problems. Is he confident that he can get more money from the state to expand the increased services he has promised for children and their families? Or does he plan to use some of the school district's money to pay for them?

And Johnson says he worries about what might happen after Duffy leaves office.

"Nobody is bound to maintain the programs of his predecessor," he says. "There's no clearer example of that than the fast ferry," referring to Duffy's rapid move to shut down the initiative that was a hallmark of Johnson's administration.

Viteritti's book includes examples of mayors who weren't nearly as passionate as the predecessor who brought about mayoral control. Some of them ignored the schools, when mayoral strength and focus was a principal reason for the reform.

"How do you bind Duffy's successor?" Johnson asks.

"This is the Achilles' heel of the contemporary movement for mayoral control," writes Columbia University's Jeffrey Henig in "When Mayors Take Charge," "and at this point, not enough is known to confidently judge whether this vulnerability will prove to be a tragic one."

"Mayoral control has been launched largely in response to short-term alignments and particular personalities," writes Henig. "This runs counter to an important tradition in American political thought, which conceives of governance institutions at least in part as a tool for reducing dependence on individuals."

"The citizens of the District of Columbia and a majority of members within Congress currently are encouraged by the style and energy of Adrian Fenty," writes Henig. "But it takes no stretch of the imagination to predict how Congress would have reacted to a proposal to give control of the District of Columbia's schools to Marion Barry."

"For struggling and complex urban school systems, what matters are vision, capacity, and sustained political support," writes Henig.

Johnson seems to leave some room to be persuaded. But his skepticism is clear.

So is his concern.

"I can't think of a more critical decision this community has," he says.

So if there are risks, and there's no conclusive proof that mayoral control consistently leads to improvement, is there any reason to embrace it?

In some cities, there seems to have been real improvement.

"Mayoral control in Boston," Viteritti writes, "has engendered continuity in leadership and a new focus on learning."

And Viteritti points to a possibility that Duffy has mentioned: integrating school and municipal services. Particularly in large cities, "where disadvantaged students are especially dependent on support services to be ready for school," he writes, that kind of service integration is more essential than in more affluent suburbs.

But perhaps most important: "Structure is not a solution; it is an enabler," writes Viteritti. "It creates possibilities for the kind of bold leadership needed to turn around failing school districts."

Viteritti cautions that any mayoral-control system should contain plenty of checks and balances and should "create opportunities for democratic engagement and participation."

That said, New York's school system, he writes, "has undergone more change in the past seven years under the Bloomberg-Klein administration than over any similar time frame in its entire history."

"Most informed observers," he writes, "whether or not they agree with the administration's changes, believe that this would not have been possible under the previous governance arrangement in New York."

TV forum will discuss mayoral control

WXXI, City Newspaper, and WDKX radio are sponsoring a televised forum on mayoral control from 8 to 10 p.m. on Thursday, April 1.

The panelists: Mayor Bob Duffy, school board President Malik Evans, and Joseph Viteritti, public-policy professor at Hunter College and editor of "When Mayors Take Charge," a study of the experience of mayoral control in several US cities.

Journalists participating in the program: WXXI's Bob Smith, City's education writer Tim Louis Macaluso, and WDKX morning-show host Liz Medhin.

Video of the forum will be posted on City Newspaper's website within a few days.