Decentralized Corruption

Whenever I hear anybody talk about "reforming" the educational system, I think of the ways in which New York--the city in which I live--has tried to do it.  And it failed every time.

Perhaps the most egregious failure started in 1968 with the so-called "decentralization" movement. 

That year, in response to neighborhood residents' demands for more local control over their schools, the by-then-predominantly African-American neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn was one of the communities given, in essence, its own school district.  The teachers--all of whom were white, and most of whom were Jewish (The neighborhood had been mostly Jewish until the 1960's.), saw it as an attempt to break their union. 

The teachers' fears had, as it turned out, a rational basis:  Soon after the local board started operating, it dismissed seventeen teachers without citing any reasons why.  In response, the teachers staged a bitter strike that kept the schools closed until November and which taints Black-Jewish relations in New York until this day. 

Those teachers were reinstated, which intensified the demands for local control of schools.  In response, the New York City Board of Education (now the NYC Department of Education) divided the city's five boroughs into 32 Community School Districts in 1969.  Each had a board that, in essence, had the power to decide who would and wouldn't work in their district, and how money would be spent.

Decentralization might have been a good idea, save for something that its architects neglected or ignored:  Many other communities in New York's five boroughs were changing in ways that paralleled those of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Jewish neighborhoods turned into enclaves of African-Americans; Italians were moving out of communities in which they'd been living for two or more generations and Latinos were moving in. And much of the rest of the City's white working-class population--whose kids comprised the majority of the City's public school enrollments until the mid-1960's--was fleeing or had already fled.  Still, most of the city's teachers--and just about all of its education administrators--were white, and most of them were Jewish.

That pattern continued under decentralization, and the local boards themselves followed the trend:  Most board members were not only of different racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds from most of the people in their communities; they didn't even live or send their kids to schools in those communities.

So, in essence, decentralization turned out to be a form of colonialism:  Local board members who had no other ties to the communities they were supposed to serve did not act in the interests of those communities.  They did everything they could to discourage parent participation, except in those communities where they didn't need to:  In some districts--most notoriously, #6, which included the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan--the vast majority of the parents were immigrants (some illegal) who didn't speak English and didn't understand how the system operated.

So, with essentially no checks on them, members of those boards could write themselves blank checks.  They hired their relatives and friends; sometimes "positions" were made for them.  Money was spent to attend conventions and such; there were even board members who, for example, used school district funds to purchase computers, pianos and other items that were delivered to their homes.  

In the late 1980's, District 6's board members were dismissed.  Officials in other districts were also pressured to resign and those local districts started to lose their power.  Finally, in 2002, Mayor Bloomberg dissolved all of the local school districts and the Board of Education, which he re-formed into the Department of Education, operating under his control.   That, of course, has had its own problems (see Cathie Black, among others).

What the Mayor did was, in essence, to take over a corrupt system and substitute his own corruption for that of the local districts.  Already, some are calling for decentralization, though in what form, they don't or can't say. 

The lesson here is that it doesn't really matter whether local communities or centralized bureaucracies run the schools:  The result is always waste, fraud, cronyism, nepotism and other kinds of corruption.  The only people who can truly have a child's education at heart are his or her parents, whether they're biological or adopted, or simply people who have decided to mentor that child and want nothing in return.  After that, it really doesn't matter much whether or how much schools are centralized or decentralized.