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The election of a progressive mayor who has said he wants to end mayoral control of New York City schools might seem like a bellwether.
The next largest school systems, Los Angeles and Miami-Dade County, have been run by elected boards for years. Chicago is transitioning to a fully elected board after decades under mayoral control.
But don’t bury mayoral control just yet.
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani hasn’t laid out clear plans, and his references to “co-governance” could mean a lot of things, including an ongoing role for the mayor.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, another progressive, supported a “majority-elected” school board when she ran in 2021, but vetoed legislation to create an elected board once she was in office.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teachers union organizer, has continued to exert his influence over the city’s schools in support of union priorities.
And in Indianapolis, some community groups are calling for the mayor, who already authorizes charter schools, to take on a larger role in an increasingly fractured school system.
Many large cities have repeatedly overhauled their school governance to try to address perceived shortcomings and real failures of the previous model. Now a new set of existential threats — declining enrollment, looming school closures and layoffs, persistent academic challenges, and threats from the Trump administration — are reviving conversations about who can claim to exercise legitimate power over schools.
Who gets to make decisions on behalf of students and families feels particularly high stakes in this moment.
Yet there is little evidence that voters consistently prioritize student outcomes at the ballot box, whether they’re voting for mayors or school board members. Nor is there strong evidence that any particular system consistently delivers better results for students, better financial management, or more responsive leadership.
“It’s like getting dirty and changing clothes and expecting to smell good without taking a bath,” said Jonathan Collins, a political science professor at Columbia University. “That’s what you’re doing when you change your governance structure.”
School closures put focus on who makes decisions
Education reform policies such as expanding school choice, closing low-performing schools, and welcoming charter schools have been supported by both mayors and elected school boards, sometimes under threat of state takeover. Those changes have reshaped communities in complicated ways.
New schools proliferated, and students got more opportunities. At the same time, the connections between neighborhoods and schools have frayed, competition for students and funding is fiercer, and multiple entities are now responsible for school oversight. These new realities are testing old ways of running schools.
In Indianapolis, the mayor already authorizes charter schools independently from Indianapolis Public Schools, which is run by an elected board. More students now attend charter schools than district-run schools. Legislation from earlier this year that would have dissolved the district failed, but a state-created advisory group, chaired by Mayor Joe Hogsett, is charged with figuring out how city schools should share buildings and transportation services.
The Indianapolis Local Education Alliance is also considering proposals that would give the mayor a much larger role in school governance, including appointing most or all of the board.
Historically, groups associated with education reform have supported mayoral control. Yet the Mind Trust, an influential pro-charter nonprofit that supported an appointed board in the past, hasn’t taken a position yet. Several potential Indianapolis mayoral candidates for 2027 are charter skeptics and supporters of an elected board.
Cleveland, where mayoral control has been firmly entrenched for nearly three decades, is grappling with similar challenges.
As in Indianapolis, a large share of the district’s school-age children attend charter or private schools after decades under the Cleveland Plan, and enrollment in district schools has plummeted. Supporters of mayoral control sometimes hold up Cleveland as an exemplar, but Mayor Justin Bibb’s aggressive school closure plan is causing some community members to demand a greater voice.
Ideastream Public Media reported an exchange at a recent community meeting between Bibb and teacher Sarah Hodge.
“Are you gonna go with us on the plan to make sure that the voters are re-enfranchised to vote for their school board?” Hodge said. Bibb responded that voters can seek a new system if they wish, but he has full confidence in his appointed board and in schools CEO Warren Morgan.
The ability to push ahead with a school closure plan is one of the benefits of mayoral control, said Aaron Churchill, Ohio research director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right think tank. He contrasted Cleveland with Columbus, where the elected school board has moved more slowly in response to many of the same pressures.
“They’re controversial, they’re hard to do, and it does take leadership,” Churchill said. And there is still a democratic check on the process. People vote for the mayor, he said, and most people know who their mayor is — unlike their school board members.
Hodge has a very different view. “It’s not bold to upset the entire city,” she said in an interview.
She believes an elected school board would listen to parents and ultimately come up with a better plan for what she agrees are necessary closures.
Hodge is working with a small group of other teachers and activists to explore options for restoring the elected board. But Ohio’s Republican trifecta state government is unlikely to go along willingly.
Hodge and other Cleveland activists have watched conservative groups like Moms for Liberty exert their influence on school boards. She wonders why people in Cleveland have fewer rights.
“If the people of Cleveland want to make an idiotic decision, that’s our right,” she said. “Since when do legislatures get to tell people, ‘You don’t get to vote. You’re too terrible to make decisions for yourself?’”
Voters often don’t care much about test scores
If mayoral control of schools is undemocratic, elected school boards raise their own questions about representation.
Most school board members are elected by small numbers of voters who don’t have children themselves and who aren’t representative of the families served in the schools. Once in office, they spend very little time talking about how to improve schools, surveys show.
Vladimir Kogan, a political science professor at Ohio State University, said that’s because voters don’t give them any incentive to do so.
Voters in school board elections might care about home values, taxes, jobs, or “symbolic virtue signaling that they are [on] team red and team blue,” Kogan said, before they care about how well schools are serving students.
School board elections are one of the few places parents can pull on the levers of power, said Keri Rodrigues, a Boston parent and president of the National Parents Union, an advocacy group. But they can turn out to be “democracy in name only.”
Scott Levy, author of “Why School Boards Matter,” said many members would benefit from more training, including on how to understand academic data and budgets.
“If you look at education reform efforts, you can find every permutation except investing in school boards,” he said.
But if school boards don’t spend enough time on schooling, it’s not clear that mayors who do reap big benefits.
Kogan points to former District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty. Public opinion polls at the time showed voters believed the D.C. schools had improved under his controversial appointed chancellor, Michelle Rhee. But he lost the next election anyway: Voters didn’t like the disruptions and job losses that accompanied the overhaul of D.C. schools.
“Reformers have a wrong theory of change about mayoral control,” Kogan said. “The idea is that mayors are more visible, and it’s easier to hold them accountable. That assumes that voters care about academics.”
Progressive mayors want a role in schools
Fights over who gets to control schools often reflect racial and political divisions. Predominantly white business interests, Black- and Latino-led community groups, and teachers unions wrestle for influence. Republican legislatures try to control Democrat-led cities.
Mayoral control spread in the 1990s and 2000s as white flight and shrinking tax bases undermined school systems. Mayors, the thinking went, could elevate the importance of education, marshal resources, and insulate governance from the influence of teachers unions.
Some of these political assumptions have eroded as voters choose more left-leaning mayors.
In last year’s Chicago school board elections — held amid a leadership and budget crisis that pitted Johnson against the superintendent — the mayor’s union-backed allies picked up only four of the 10 elected seats. But with 11 appointees on the 21-member board until 2027, Johnson still controls the school board.
During recent union contract negotiations, Johnson pressed the district to hire more staff and cover a larger share of pension costs, which district leaders feared would be financially unsustainable. The teachers union also wants Johnson, not the board, to pick the next superintendent.
Wu, Boston’s progressive mayor, became a firm believer in mayoral control once she was in office. During a 2023 WGBH call-in show, a caller reminded Wu that the idea of an elected school board “got more votes than you.”
Wu pointed to frequent superintendent turnover and the recent threat of state takeover to argue against the idea.
“We need to have a focus on stabilizing and getting our school facilities up to date and mental health supports and some of the academic changes that we’re making,” Wu said.
Voters haven’t penalized Wu — she ran unopposed this year and handily won re-election.
New York parents, community groups want more say
Mayoral control in New York City is up for renewal in 2026. If Mamdani goes to Albany and advocates for less authority, he’ll be the first New York mayor to do so.
When Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman, successfully lobbied for mayoral control in 2002, people were concerned not just about student achievement but basic safety. Some of the city’s local community boards, which ran 32 regional school districts, were corrupt or dysfunctional.
Bloomberg gained the sole ability to appoint the chancellor and the majority of the city’s school board. He adopted a suite of reforms that included charter school expansion and greater school accountability. Test scores and other metrics improved. New York City represented a “victory lap for mayoral control,” said Collins, the Columbia professor.
But Bloomberg also introduced Lucy Calkins’ now-discredited “Units of Study” reading curriculum into city schools. Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, who was elected on a public safety platform, overhauled the reading curriculum — initial results are promising but the rollout frustrated teachers. Now Mamdani, who ran on affordability, may give schools and teachers more autonomy.
“That whiplash is a real problem,” said Jonathan Greenberg, a Queens parent and member of the Education Council Consortium, a coalition of parent leaders. “So much of the really deep-seated changes we think need to happen take more than two years or more than four years.”
Mayoral control already has weakened under Adams, with the school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy, expanding and exerting more independence.
Finding the right balance for an exceptionally large and complex school system may not be easy. The coalition is proposing a short extension of mayoral control — but with the mayor no longer appointing the majority of school panel members.
Greenberg hopes that policy experts can help the city design a system that allows for community control and a healthy central system that can do things at scale.
Low voter turnout in both mayoral and school board elections should be treated like a crisis, Collins said. A better system would allow for more meaningful participation, and not just at the ballot box.
Unless more people are engaged, Collins said, “there’s going to be a small fraction of people who decide who serves, and the people who are serving are going to be disconnected from the true needs of the folks who are sending their kids to school.”
Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
