Edition: U.S. / Global

Scandals at the School Boards Led to Loss of Their Powers

Published: December 18, 1996

For much of its history, the New York City school system has struggled with the question of where decision-making should lie: at the center, with the Chancellor and the elephantine bureaucracy at 110 Livingston Street, or out on the periphery, with locally elected school boards that would be more responsive to their communities.

For the last 26 years, much of the power has lodged in the city's neighborhoods. Community school boards made up largely of people without professional training in education have been choosing superintendents and principals of elementary and junior high schools.

Last night, lawmakers in Albany voted to return the balance of power to the center, giving the Schools Chancellor the power to hire the superintendents of the city's 32 local school districts and giving those superintendents the power to hire principals of the elementary and junior high schools (high school principals have always been chosen centrally). With that, the role of the neighborhood school board members has been rendered more advisory.

''It's the effective end of the New York City decentralization experiment,'' said Robert Berne, vice president for academic development at New York University and an expert in school governance. While local boards existed before decentralization, they were essentially toothless until 1970, when they gained hiring powers.

If the community school boards have indeed been eviscerated -- and all the details were not yet absorbed by educational experts last night -- critics contended that the change was overdue, given the long record of scandal and incompetence on many boards. Under the local boards, a school system that was once a national urban model was plagued with schools that year after year could not teach students to read or calculate effectively. Moreover, many board members engaged in petty thievery and flagrant patronage.

Some school board members stole pianos, protected cocaine-sniffing principals, hired relatives as school aides and appointed administrators because the candidates paid bribes. Some boards become key dispensers of legislative patronage.

As the embarrassments and scandals mounted, impartial panels repeatedly studied ways of overhauling decentralization. But the Legislature could never agree on any significant changes.

Many legislators, including the Assembly Speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, and State Senator Guy J. Velella, the Bronx Republican who is a sponsor of a Senate version of a school reform bill, had political roots in the community school boards that date back to a period of upheaval in the late 1960's.

Decentralization came after a tumultuous conflict that polarized the city and sent political leaders searching for a compromise that could please both neighborhood groups and the powerful teachers union. Through much of the 1960's, minority groups had been chafing at the sputtering drive for integration and the poor record of the schools in educating black and Hispanic students. Demands for community control of schools grew and three experiments were set up, including one in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn.

While the teachers union initally lent its support, it turned against the experiments in April 1968 in a dispute in Ocean Hill over the transfer of 13 teachers and 6 administrators. The battle led to teacher strikes that closed 85 percent of the city's schools for a total of 55 days.

In the aftermath, the State Legislature passed a law that gave 32 elected boards the power to run elementary and junior high schools. But the teachers union made sure the law provided strong protections for teachers' jobs.

The decentralized system has been troubled from the start, but a confluence of circumstances made change possible this year, experts say. Through a flurry of suspensions, the school boards have repeatedly been put on notice that their days as powerhouses were numbered, but many refused to change their traditional ways of operating.

Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew, in office just over a year, proved a popular leader whose rapid suspensions of board members he accused of corruption carried weight with a wide spectrum of legislators.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani established a genial relationship with Dr. Crew and eventually abandoned City Hall's call for a Board of Education controlled by mayoral appointments. That contentious issue, as Mr. Berne points out, had made it difficult for the Legislature to compromise.

The legislators avoided a welter of issues that had paralyzed them in years past. They did not tamper with the size of the central Board of Education or how it was selected. They did not eliminate the community school boards themselves or change the method of election.

Legislators focused largely on how the professionals who run the system were selected. By letting the Chancellor rather than the school boards pick the superintendents, the Legislature reversed the thinking of 25 years ago that lay people could make these decisions more responsively than trained educators.