Mayoral Leadership in Education: Current Trends and Future Directions: Mayors and Public Education: The Case for Greater Involvement

Abstract

Over the last generation, a new politics of education has evolved throughout the United States. Since the 1983 watershed report A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), the country’s most influential business and political leaders — and, more recently, mayors — have spearheaded efforts to improve student achievement in America’s schools in unprecedented ways. Their concerns about the quality of education have been predicated on widespread apprehension that if its schools remained mediocre, the nation will be unable to compete in an increasingly competitive global economy (Friedman, 2005). The demands of political and business leaders for greater accountability in public education have been sustained for more than two decades and show little sign of abatement. Indeed, the standards-based reform movement has spread on a bipartisan basis to virtually every state in the country. Nowadays, every governor seeks to be an “education governor,” and our most recent presidents have sought to expand the influence of the federal government in the traditionally local sphere of public education. Ironically, through the No Child Left Behind Act, President George W. Bush — an avowed “compassionate conservative” — has expanded the influence of the federal government in a manner inconsistent with traditional Republican ideological opposition to centralized big government. This has been the case in particular in the field of education, which historically has been under the purview of state and local authorities (Usdan, 2005). Throughout the twentieth century, presidents, governors, and mayors have played subordinate and relatively passive roles in shaping educational policy. Professional educators in state education departments, local school boards