Dear Commons Community,

“Oppenheimer” won big last night at the 2024 Oscars, coming in with 13 nominations and earning seven awards including best director, best actor, best picture, and best supporting actor.

“Barbie,” earned eight nominations, but only got one win last night for best song.

Other big winners at the 96th Academy Awards were “Poor Things” — which won awards for hair and makeup, production design and costume design — and Cillian Murphy, who won best actor, continuing his winning streak after taking home comparable awards at the 2024 Golden Globes, BAFTAs and Screen Actors Guild Awards for the title role in “Oppenheimer.”

Emma Stone, in what some consider an upset win, took home best actress for her role in “Poor Things,” beating out Lily Gladstone, who became the first Native American to be nominated for best actress for her role as Mollie Burkhart in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

This year’s ceremony took place at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. Comedian and late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel returned to host the Oscars for the second year in a row and his fourth time overall.

The full list of Oscar winners and nominees is below.

Hooray for “Oppenheimer” and all the winners!

Tony

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Dear Commons Community,

Pope Francis sparked anger after saying Ukraine should have the “courage of the white flag” and negotiate to end the war with Russia.

In an interview with Swiss broadcaster Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) published on Saturday, Francis was asked whether he thinks negotiations would “legitimize the stronger party.”  As reported by CNN.

“That is one interpretation,” he replied. “But I believe that the stronger one is the one who sees the situation, who thinks of the people, who has the courage of the white flag, to negotiate.” The pope added, “and today, negotiations are possible with the help of international powers.”

The comments brought a swift response from Kyiv, which has seen tens of thousands killed and is seeking to recapture all its territory seized by Russia.

“Our flag is a yellow and blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a post on social media Sunday.

“The strongest is the one who, in the battle between good and evil, stands on the side of good rather than attempting to put them on the same footing and call it ‘negotiations’,” he said.

Speaking to Ukrainians in New York on Saturday, the Father and Head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, His Beatitude Sviatoslav, said “Ukraine is wounded, but unconquered” and that no one is thinking about making concessions.

“I want to tell you one thing from the people of Ukraine,” Father Sviatoslav said, according to a statement from the Greek Catholic Church. “Ukraine is exhausted, but it is standing and will stand! Believe me, no one even thinks of surrender, even in the places where fighting is ongoing today,” he said.

Later on Saturday, the Director of the Holy See Press Office, Matteo Bruni, clarified to journalists the pope’s comments, saying “the Pope picked up the image of the white flag, proposed by the interviewer, to indicate a cessation of hostilities, a truce reached with the courage of negotiation,” and not surrender as some may have interpreted his remarks, Vatican News reported.

Other European leaders also condemned Francis’s comments.

“How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine,” Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said Sunday in a post on X. “Peace would immediately ensue without the need for negotiations.”

“My Sunday morning take: One must not capitulate in [the] face of evil, one must fight it and defeat it, so that the evil raises the white flag and capitulates,” Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkēvičs said in a post on X.

Alexandra Valkenburg, the head of the EU delegation to the Holy See, said on X on Sunday that “Russia started an illegal and unjustified war against Ukraine two years ago” and Russia “can end this war immediately” by respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Pope Francis misspoke here!

Tony

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Paul Krugman, The New York Times columnist and colleague at CUNY, reminds us this morning that 2020, Trump’s last year in office, was a disaster for the country.  Trump’s inability to deal with the coronavirus resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions seriously ill.  Here is an excerpt.

“2020 — the fourth quarter, if you will, of Trump’s presidency — was a nightmare. And part of what made it a nightmare was the fact that America was led by a man who responded to a deadly crisis with denial, magical thinking and, above all, total selfishness — focused at every stage not on the needs of the nation but on what he thought would make him look good.

….he denied, dithered and delayed at nearly every step of the way.”

Krugman’s conclusion:

“There’s no real question that thousands of Americans died unnecessarily because of Trump’s dereliction of duty in the face of Covid-19.

He responded to the only major crisis of his presidency with self-serving fantasies — with utter indifference to other Americans’ lives in an effort to boost his image.

Are we now really supposed to feel nostalgic about 2020?”

In sum, in a time of a national crisis, Trump was a “dithering” idiot who caused people to die.

The entire column is worth a read!

Tony

George Church – New York Post

Dear Commons Community,

A plan to genetically engineer a version of the woolly mammoth, the tusked ice age giant that disappeared 4,000 years ago, is making some progress, according to the scientists involved.

The long-term goal is to create a living, walking elephant-mammoth hybrid that would be visually indistinguishable from its extinct forerunner and — if released into its natural habitat in sufficient numbers — could potentially help restore the fragile Arctic tundra ecosystem.

Resurrecting the extinct species has been a pet project of Harvard University geneticist George Church for more than a decade. The plan gained traction in February 2021 when Church co-founded Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences with entrepreneur Ben Lamm and received an infusion of cash and an ensuing glare of publicity later that year. As reported by CNN.

Many challenging tasks, such as developing an artificial womb capable of gestating a baby elephant, remain. But Colossal Biosciences said on Wednesday that it had made a “momentous step” forward.

Church and Eriona Hysolli, Colossal’s head of biological sciences, revealed they had reprogrammed cells from an Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, into an embryonic state — the first time stem cells have been derived from elephant cells. The team plans to publish the work in a scientific journal, but the research hasn’t yet undergone peer review.

These modified cells, known as induced pluripotent stem cells or iPSCs, can be further teased in the lab to grow into any kind of elephant cell — an important tool as the researchers model, test and refine the scores of genetic changes they need to make to give an Asian elephant the genetic traits it needs to survive in the Arctic. These include a woolly coat, a layer of insulating fat and smaller ears.

“So what’s beautiful about the cells is they can potentially renew indefinitely and differentiate into any cell type of the body,” said Hysolli, who is the company’s lead scientist on the mammoth project.

The stem cells will also make it easier for conservation scientists to study the Asian elephant’s unique biology. For their size, the creatures are uniquely resistant to cancer — for reasons that are not well understood. A key obstacle for the team in making the elephant cell lines was to inhibit genes that are thought to confer that cancer resistance.

Cellular research techniques pioneered by Colossal have opened up a new avenue for saving the endangered elephant, said Oliver Ryder, director of conservation genetics at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

“The intention to produce iPSCs from elephants has been out there for years. It has been difficult to accomplish,” said Ryder, who was not involved in the research. “The impact on conservation is going to be in the realm of genetic rescue and assisted reproduction,” he added.

For obvious reasons, it’s hard to study naturally occurring elephant embryos. The stem cells would allow scientists to create model elephant embryos that will lift the curtain on how an elephant develops into a fetus — a “very valuable asset,” Ryder said.

The elephant stem cells also hold the key to the mammoth’s rebirth. Once edited to have mammoth-like genetic traits, the elephant’s cells could be used to make eggs and sperm and an embryo that could be implanted into some kind of artificial womb. However, that will take years of work.

Given an initial six-year deadline set by Colossal, the team plans to first employ existing cloning techniques similar to those used in 1996 to make Dolly the sheep, inserting genetically edited cells into a donor egg that would be gestated by a surrogate elephant mom. However, even though that technology has been around for a while, the results are hit and miss. And many question whether it is ethical to use endangered animals as surrogates given the likelihood of failed attempts.

“I think the first engineered elephant will be the major milestone and that may be consistent with Ben’s (Lamm) prediction of six years from 2021,” Church said. “The second thing that will make us happy is we have one that’s really cold resistant. Then the third one will be if we can do it in a way that’s scalable, that doesn’t involve surrogates. That’s an unknown distance out,” Church said.

The research team at Colossal has already analyzed the genomes of 53 woolly mammoths from ancient DNA recovered from fossils. The wide-ranging specimens from animals that lived in different places at different points in the past helped the scientists understand exactly which genes make a mammoth unique.

“We’ve come a long way. Mammoth DNA quality is almost as good as the elephant and both of them are almost as good as (DNA extracted from) humans,” Church said.

Good luck to Church and his colleagues!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

America’s employers delivered another healthy month of hiring in February, adding a surprising 275,000 jobs and again showcasing the U.S. economy’s resilience in the face of high interest rates.

Last month’s job growth marked an increase from a revised gain of 229,000 jobs in January. At the same time, the unemployment rate ticked up two-tenths of a point in February to 3.9%. Though that was the highest rate in two years, it is still low by historic standards. And it marked the 25th straight month in which joblessness has remained below 4% — the longest such streak since the 1960s.   As reported by The Associated Press.

Yet despite sharply lower inflation, a healthy job market and a record-high stock market, many Americans say they are unhappy with the state of the economy — a sentiment that is sure to weigh on President Joe Biden’s bid for re-election. Many voters blame Biden for the surge in consumer prices that began in 2021. Though inflationary pressures have significantly eased, average prices remain about 17% above where they stood three years ago.

Friday’s report gave the inflation fighters at the Federal Reserve some encouraging news: Average hourly wages rose just 0.1% from January, the smallest monthly gain in more than two years, and 4.3% from a year earlier, less than expected. Average pay growth has been exceeding inflation for more than year, but when it rises too fast it can feed inflation.

The latest figures reflected the job market’s sustained ability to withstand the 11 rate hikes the Fed imposed in its drive against inflation, which made borrowing much costlier for households and businesses. Employers have continued to hire briskly to meet steady demand from consumers across the economy.

The February figures will likely make Fed officials more comfortable about cutting rates sometime in the coming months. With December and January job gains revised sharply down, wage growth easing and the unemployment rate up, the Fed’s policymakers aren’t likely to worry about an overheating economy. Most economists and Wall Street traders expect the first rate cut to come in June. The Fed stopped raising rates in July and has signaled that it envisions three rate cuts this year.

The unemployment rate rose last month in part because more people began looking for a job and didn’t immediately find one. The Fed could be reassured by the influx of job seekers, which typically makes it easier for businesses to fill jobs without having to significantly raise pay.

Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial Services, said he was impressed by the breadth of hiring last month: Among industries, health care companies added 67,000 jobs, government at all levels 52,000, restaurants and bars 42,000, construction companies 23,000 and retailers 19,000.

When the Fed began aggressively raising rates in March 2022 to fight the worst bout of inflation in four decades, a painful recession was widely predicted, with waves of layoffs and high unemployment. The Fed boosted its benchmark rate to the highest level in more than two decades.

Inflation has eased, more or less steadily, in response: Consumer prices in January were up just 3.1% from a year earlier — way down from a year-over-year peak of 9.1% in 2022 and edging closer to the Fed’s 2% target. Unemployment is still low. And no recession is in sight.

The combination of easing inflation and sturdy hiring is raising hopes that the Fed can achieve a so-called “soft landing” by taming inflation without causing a recession — a scenario consistent with Friday’s numbers.

 Good economic news!

Tony

Joe Biden and Katie Britt

Dear Commons Community,

Alabama Senator Katie Britt is getting a lot of criticism for her bizarre delivery of the Republican rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State Of The Union address — but not from the president himself.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

Britt’s performance was brutally mocked by observers online, who said Britt seemed happy and cheerful one moment and almost tearful and angry the next. For example. 

Republican Charlie Kirk, founder of the far-right Turning Point USA youth group, was critical. “I’m sure Katie Britt is a sweet mom and person, but her speech is not what we need,” he said in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “Joe Biden just declared war on the American right and Katie Britt is talking like she’s hosting a cooking show, whispering about how Democrats’ don’t get it.'”

Biden’s reaction was more tactful. After a reporter asked Biden if he saw Senator Britt’s rebuttal, the president admitted seeing “a little bit on TV.”

When the reporter asked the president’s thoughts, he said, “I thought she was a very talented woman, [but] I didn’t understand the connection she was making.”

Biden is a class act. 

Trump can learn something from him.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last night and was pleasantly surprised.  He touched on all the major issues, was fiery and forceful at times, held Republican hecklers such Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene at bay, and even joked about his age. He never mentioned Trump by name but referred to the “former president’ at least a dozen times. I was also happy to see GOP Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, applaud and stand in support on occasion. Afterwards, I caught portions of reviews of Biden’s speech on the major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News).  All with the exception of Fox were fairly positive.  In sum, I believe Biden did well.

Below are some key takeaways courtesy of NBC News.

Tony

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NBC News

Biden turns on charm and confronts GOP hecklers

Sahil Kapur and Amanda Terkel

March 7, 2024 at 11:39 PM

President Joe Biden delivered the final State of the Union of his first term on Thursday, a speech packed with 2024 campaign themes and contrasts he plans to highlight in the eight months before Americans decide whether to give him — or Donald Trump — four more years in the White House.

Biden comes into the speech with an exceptionally low approval rating of 37%, according to recent NBC News polling. That’s lower than the approval rating of his predecessors Trump in 2020 (46%), Barack Obama in 2012 (48%), George W. Bush in 2004 (54%) and Bill Clinton in 1996 (46%) in January of their re-election bid years.

“The state of our union is strong and getting stronger,” Biden said.

Here are six key takeaways from his speech.

Confronting Trump and the GOP about Jan. 6

Biden didn’t take long to zero in on one of his central campaign themes: protecting American democracy. And he looked at Republicans in the crowd and confronted them.

“The insurrectionists were not patriots. My predecessor — and some of you here — seek to bury the truth about Jan. 6. I will not do that,” he said. “This is the moment to speak the truth… Here’s the simple truth. You can’t love your country only when you win.”

“As president, my predecessor failed the most basic presidential duty that he owes to American people: The duty to care,” he said. “I think that’s unforgivable.”

Seeking to claim the mantle of foreign policy hawkishness, Biden also pitted President Ronald Reagan’s famous “tear down this wall” line against Trump’s recent promise to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to European countries that don’t pay their dues to NATO.

“My message to President Putin, who I’ve known for a long time, is simple. We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down,” Biden said. “In a literal sense, history is watching.”

Later, he touted his legislative achievements to make the U.S. less reliant on China. “Frankly for all his tough talk on China, it never occurred to my predecessor to do any of that.”

A sharper message on legalizing abortion

“In its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court majority wrote, ‘Women are not without electoral or political power.’ Clearly those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women in America,” Biden said as several justices who wrote the Dobbs decision watched. “If you the American people send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”

He took on Republicans and Trump directly, saying that “many of you in this chamber — and my predecessor — are promising to pass a national ban on abortion” that could amount to “forcing survivors of rape and incest” to carry the pregnancy to term.

What Biden didn’t specify was that if Republicans hold control if either chamber, it’s a lost cause. At a minimum, codifying abortion rights nationwide would require a Democratic trifecta and 50 votes to pierce the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule. Biden is betting heavily that a backlash to the GOP’s success at overturning Roe v. Wade and attempts to restrict abortion will yield Democratic votes.

A confrontation with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

The most regular shouter was the far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who yelled “Laken Riley!” as Biden discussed immigration.

Riley’s murder has been taken up by conservatives pushing for stricter immigration policies. The 22-year-old woman was killed while jogging at the University of Georgia last month; an undocumented immigrant has been charged with her murder.

Biden called her “an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal” — a term generally avoided by Democrats — and told Republicans to pass the bipartisan border security bill to resolve the situation at the border. He said they’re blocking it on orders from Trump to deny him a political win.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “politics have derailed this bill so far.”

At another point, Greene yelled “liar” as Biden spoke.

Lawmakers had plenty to say, but no microphone to say it. At some points in Biden’s speech, a few of them shouted their disapproval through boos. At other times, they used symbolism, and their ability to invite guests, to highlight their causes.

Democratic women wore white outfits and pins reading “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom.” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and other Republicans wore white ribbons that included Riley’s name. The Dad Caucus wore pins with Lego blocks to symbolize “building blocks of a better future” on matters like affordable child care and paid leave.

And Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, wore a T-shirt with Trump’s mug shot from last summer in Atlanta — when he was booked for alleged election subversion — as a rallying cry for the ex-president.

Republicans invited families of Israeli hostages, while Democrats invited women affected by the recent Alabama IVF ruling.

Biden shows a populist side and jokes about age

The president sought to burnish his populist credentials before the audience, painting Democrats as a party on the side of the working class and Republicans as pawns of the super-rich.

“No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher or a sanitation worker,” Biden said, as Democrats broke out into applause and Republicans barely reacted, many of them looking bored and or staring at their phones.

He also accused Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security, which prompted a few shouts and boos.

“My friends on the other side of the aisle want to put Social Security on the chopping block,” he said. “If anyone here tries to cut Social Security, Medicare or raise the retirement age, I will stop you.”

He also mocked Republicans in the audience, saying he notices some of them voted against his infrastructure package but are “cheering on” the money that it brings to their districts.

“You don’t want that money in your district, just let me know,” Biden said, to laughs from his allies.

Toward the end of his speech, Biden alluded to his age: “I know it may not look like it but I’ve been around a while. When you get to be my age certain things become clearer than ever. I know the American story. Again and again, I’ve seen the contest between competing forces in the battle for the soul of our nation.”

Biden walks the line on Israel and Gaza

The president, who is facing a heavy backlash from the left for supporting Israel as the death toll in Gaza rises, acknowledged their concerns.

“Israel has an added burden because Hamas hides and operates among the civilian population like cowards — under hospitals, day care centers and all the like. There’s also a fundamental responsibility, though, to protect innocent civilians in Gaza,” he said. “Thirty-thousand Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas,” he said, adding that they’re “ministers, women and children, girls and boys,” while many more are without food or medicine. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age by Alec Wilkinson.  It is his story of trying to learn mathematics at the age of sixty-nine, having avoided it in high school and his adult life.  Wilkinson is a fine writer but as the book reveals, he is not much of a mathematician.  His struggles learning high school algebra, geometry and calculus are painful for him to say the least.  He asks his mathematician niece to help him but she becomes frustrated and even stops returning his phone calls.  Wilkinson delves into the metaphysical aspects of mathematics, hence the title A Divine Language…  I am not sure that he had the breadth of knowledge to go here.  The most enjoyable parts of the book for me were his mini-biographies of two people:  Yitang Zhang, a mathematician who came up with a pioneering proof at the age of 55; and Chris Ferguson, a game-theory expert who was the first person to win more than a million dollars at a poker tournament.

In sum, consider reading A Divine Language…carefully and be sure to read its reviews first. Below is  a review that was published in The New York Times.

Tony

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The New York Times

In “A Divine Language,” Alec Wilkinson writes about the year he spent trying to learn the algebra, geometry and calculus that had confounded him decades before.

By Jennifer Szalai

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, David Bloomfield, had an article earlier this week in Vital City entitled, “Five Myths About Mayoral Control.” It reviews a most important issue presently being discussed in the New York State Legislature about the New York City public schools.  His analysis is excellent and well worth a read. 

With David’s permission, I have included the entire article below.

Tony

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Vital City

Five Myths About Mayoral Control

David Bloomfield

March 06, 2024

Answering common critiques of New York’s school governance system

In 2002, the governance of New York City’s public schools had its biggest overhaul in generations. After the state passed a law giving the mayor authority to choose the chancellor, out went a seven-member central Board of Education (appointed by borough presidents and the mayor), the chancellor those board members chose, and assorted local decision-making by 32 elected community school boards (each chosen by a tiny fraction of the electorate). In came mayoral control — the appointment of the schools chancellor by the mayor, with a central board dominated by the mayor. Community school boards were eliminated, converted to largely advisory parent-elected community councils.

I’m no apologist for mayoral control — there have certainly been associated problems and inequality remains persistent — but under the system, graduation rates and test scores have inched forward and school funding generally increased with the mayor now directly responsible for school quality. It also squares with delivery of other public services. After all, we have mayoral control of just about every other major city responsibility, based on the reasonable theory that the city’s chief executive, chosen in the highest-turnout election, should ultimately be held politically accountable for the consequences of leadership.

Yet for all 22 years of its existence, mayoral control of the schools has been under siege by its opponents, including the strange political bedfellows of the teachers union and local activists who battled over community control in the 1960s. The fever pitch of today’s debate is not only an ideological proxy war between those who believe in centralized citywide authority and those who value more local autonomy, a principle that has special resonance when schools and children are at issue. It’s about access to decision-makers, jobs and the largest slice of the city budget — and, of course, who has the biggest stick, whether that’s Mayor Eric Adams; John Liu, chair of the State Senate’s New York City Education Committee; UFT President Michael Mulgrew; or other contenders.

I know a great deal about the old way things worked. I was general counsel to the old Board of Education, the seven-appointed-member body that made most big policy decisions until it was disbanded in favor of rule by the chancellor and a pliant, mayor-dominated Panel for Education Policy. In the early 1990s, I served as the education advisor to the Manhattan borough president — one of the officials who appointed a member to the BOE.

I also understand the way things have worked since the governance change. I was a parent member and president of a local community education council — one of the largely advisory bodies that replaced the 32 elected community school boards — at the start of mayoral control, when Joel Klein was Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s first chancellor. I saw and sometimes expressed resistance to the way Klein led as he closed many large high schools, downsized community district offices and demanded the co-location of charter schools in traditional school buildings.

While it’s reasonable to debate the merits of mayoral control and refinements to the model — I’ve proposed giving the City Council more oversight power — both proponents and opponents of the current system should agree on one thing: The way schools were governed before mayoral control was a disaster. Authority and accountability were fragmented; waste, fraud and abuse were chronic problems; and inertia far too often carried the day. A dysfunctional Board, with five members appointed by the borough presidents and two by the mayor, ultimately represented and answered to no one. Nor were they helpfully insulated from politics. In my time there, during the Dinkins administration, four borough president representatives peeled away from their Democratic patrons to oppose mayoral appointees, leading to petty in-fighting and the eventual ouster of Chancellor Joseph Fernandez over his “Children of the Rainbow” curriculum proposal. Similar fates awaited ex-chancellors Ray Cortines and Rudy Crew.

Since Bloomberg’s mayoralty, Albany has offered grudging renewal after grudging renewal of the authority, and this time around, there’s talk that the state Legislature might press for more serious changes still. In the latest wave of scrutiny, public hearings have centered on the supposedly inevitable flaws in the current governance structure and the supposedly intrinsic benefits of alternate models.

Oft-repeated talking points, however, don’t hold up to scrutiny.

1. A Non-Educator Shouldn’t Run Schools

The very term “mayoral control” raises hackles. Why should one person, a politician no less, dictate educational policies, contracts, building uses like charter school co-locations and all other aspects of a system responsible for educating almost 1 million children and a budget of almost $40 billion?

But the fact is that non-educators are at the core of American public education. School board members across the country are generally non-educators who are elected (thus, politicians). They serve part-time, usually without salaries or staff, hiring educators as district superintendents, like our chancellor, who are required to be educators with specialized licenses. Ever since the debacle of Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s appointment of a magazine editor to head the schools, all chancellors have been educators like Adams’ choice, David Banks. But like all superintendents, Banks reports to a lay board and, in New York’s scheme, ultimately the mayor.

Even if mayors were eliminated from the equation, they would maintain vast powers over the schools by setting the Department of Education budget and union contracts, powers derived from the City Charter, not mayoral control legislation. New York City has no dedicated school tax, as in most other school districts run by elected boards, so it’s the mayor, with input of the City Council, who determines the budget and negotiates collective bargaining agreements. Without far greater changes than are currently debated, these vast powers would continue.

2. Almost Everything Bad is the Mayor’s Fault

Decisions by education leaders are frequently controversial and often wrong. But arguments over policies and shortcomings are not generally the fault of the governance system. If revenues fall without new income streams, budgets need to be tightened, whether by a local school board or the City. Curricula need to be chosen and attendance zones determined, a fact of life for all school districts often accompanied by strong feelings among differing proponents. Who declares a snow day or flood day or figures out bus routes or special education placements or building enrollments? Someone needs to decide, with attendant opposition and second-guessing by those in disagreement. There’s no way around that, no matter who’s in charge.

It’s fair to state that in some cases, mayoral control has been the determining factor in school policies. Bloomberg’s creation of small high schools and broad school choice options comes to mind, along with charter co-locations. But popular opinion on those issues is divided, and even without mayoral control, it’s possible that larger political forces (i.e., from the governor in the case of co-locations) would have mandated similar policies. It’s also fair to say that one overwhelmingly popular policy, Mayor de Blasio’s public pre-K initiative, would not have taken place without mayoral control.

3. We Just Need More Democracy

Still, say mayoral control opponents, better decisions would come from more democratic decision-making. What that would look like, however, is unclear. Many propose that the mayor should no longer be able to appoint a majority of the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP), our version of a Board of Education, and that the PEP, rather than the mayor, appoint the chancellor. But how would that group be assembled? Now, 23 appointed members sit with a thin but decisive mayoral majority, with the rest named by the borough presidents and parent councils. Re-weighting the group away from a citywide elected official toward borough president appointees and parents would likely run afoul of one-person, one-vote requirements and equal protection claims against favoring parents over other constituencies. Chicago’s attempt at parent-centered governance was overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court on that basis.

A more radical change — but similar to most American school districts — would be to create an elected citywide board of education that appoints the chancellor. This might be accompanied by a return to elected community boards with similar powers of personnel appointments and more localized education policies. But it hardly follows that better decision-making would go hand in hand with an elected citywide board, especially if low-turnout elections could be easily turned by high-dollar special interests. And localized decision-making over personnel, school enrollments and curriculum would find many opponents seeking city-wide solutions and protections for our highly mobile, often educationally-vulnerable students, not to mention the teachers union, which sank community control in the 1960s.

Progressive proponents of elected boards might find broader popular voting unlikely to bring the kind of policies they favor. In pre-mayoral control days with elected community school boards, for example, District 14 in Williamsburg had a Hasidic-majority board. With so many non-parent voters and the recent conservative cast even to local community education council elections, an electoral system brings with it the contentious politics we’ve seen nationally and the potential for board in-fighting and paralysis, a feature of high consequence in a system so large and important.

Turning to the democratization of funding, the norm in most New York State school districts is to vest taxing authority in its elected boards with separate referenda on the district budget. But as a result, school funding is often kept low by voters opposed to higher taxes. In New York City, with large numbers of people without school-age children, high rates of poverty and other factors, votes over school spending would be as likely to result in less, rather than more money for schools. Moreover, with the mayor no longer accountable for the schools, it’s likely that the education budget would take a hit in favor of those services and agencies for which the mayor remains directly accountable.

4. We Need Checks and Balances

Just as the phrase “mayoral control” automatically raises hackles, the notion of adding “checks and balances” rings favorably, contrasting autocracy with ordered government. Surely advocates have a point — but the concept is slippery. In traditional district governance, lay school board members appoint professional superintendents to run the school system as CEO. Thus, day-to-day operations and decision-making is left to the superintendent without checks on executive authority.

The board does not declare snow days or appoint, supervise and fire school personnel. In addition, since the board appoints the superintendent, they are generally allied with the superintendent’s recommendations when board action is required. In most cases, as in the system of mayoral control and similar public and even private executive/board relations, the board rubber stamps recommendations of senior staff; its check on executive function is mostly benign and, when active, as likely to do with personal ax-grinding as the common interest.

This arrangement is far different from the one often imagined by opponents of mayoral control; assuming board consensus, it puts board members in a position to micromanage schools’ policies and thwart, rather than support, the chancellor. Such a system is unworkable in practice and far from the classic checks and balances we see in the federal system. There, the president, Congress and the courts each have wide latitude within their clearly delineated powers, while day-to-day executive decision-making proceeds relatively unconstrained by the other branches or even public input. I have proposed that more traditional form of checks and balances as a form of “city control,” where the City Council would provide the kind of check on the mayor’s education powers that it now has over police and fire departments, and would be more effective in representing community interests than the traditional model of a part-time, voluntary, unstaffed Board of Education

5. Mayoral Control Breeds Too Much Turnover

A final myth about the mayoral control era is that it is intrinsically unstable since, at most, mayors serve eight years and, as they turn over, so does the chancellor and the educational policies and program of the previous administration. Of course, that’s often a good thing. But the volatility of schools’ leadership is hardly ascribable to mayoral control. In the 20 years before 2002 when mayoral control became law, New York City had 12 chancellors. Since then we’ve had seven. The longest-serving chancellor during that 40-year span was Joel Klein, who served for eight years thanks to the support he had from Mayor Bloomberg. More generally, superintendency is a notoriously hard and relatively short-term job, last estimated, pre-pandemic, at approximately six years for urban superintendents, and likely shorter now. Superintendent turnover is a fact of life, whatever the governance system, and mayoral control, even when Chancellors leave mid-term, guarantees a degree of continuity often lacking when elected board majorities change accompanied by ensuing superintendent terminations.

There’s No “One Best System”

When it comes to district governance, it may be that we are asking the wrong questions. Does it matter whether the mayor controls the system, an elected board or another set of power players? How can we deliver a system that promotes learning through effective instruction inclusive of all students? That is the fundamental question and, in the words of education historian David Tyack, an answer that continues to elude us as we seek “the one best system.”

Humility is thus a critical quality as we engage in this important debate. Especially in an era of exploding technological innovation, we need a governance system agile enough to accommodate our diverse post-pandemic student population for an unknown future faced with challenges of climate change, economic and social inequality, and extreme political polarization. In determining a governance system for this era, myths only get in the way.

David Bloomfield is professor of education leadership, law and policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. He was general counsel to the New York City Board of Education prior to mayoral control.