City’s say in schools is a study in contention

There is talk in Los Angeles of following New York City’s lead and giving the mayor control over the school district. Should the city councils of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa have more say over the schools than they do now?

Letting the city councils of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa have any official power over schools would be an incredibly bad idea. I don’t believe that it’s ever been seriously proposed and I hope that it stays that way.

I’m not sure that mayoral control over schools is ever optimal, but in cities like New York and Chicago it came to pass mostly as a response to widespread failure in massive school systems. Mayors in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are also highly experienced in management and government, so there’s a reasonable expectation that the additional expertise that the mayor’s office brings will help stabilize crumbling school systems. Mayors in these cities are also directly elected, so at least they can claim some mandate.

In Newport-Mesa we have a relatively small school district that’s nowhere near crumbling. It has some obvious problems, but I doubt that anyone would say that we’re in crisis mode. We also have the opposite of highly experienced management and government experts on our city councils. We have part-time, rank amateurs who sit on what are still small-town councils.

I’d rather that the city councils stay focused on the truly small-town issues that make the differences in livability: Fix a road, upgrade a library, keep streets clean and provide services for seniors. In Costa Mesa, actually build a new park. In Newport, don’t build a hotel on an existing park. In both cities, it might even be nice to see an actual consensus once in a while.

In Newport Beach, most of the council didn’t even get elected. It’s pretty hard to claim a mandate without an election. Most Newport residents I know can’t even name two council members. New appointees get selected with an eye to expertise on how to end-run what the majority of the electorate wants, via tricky tools like certificates of participation, proving that expertise in government affairs may not always be a good thing for a small-town council.

In Costa Mesa, we have our dysfunctional family of a council, led by a mayor who has little need for process or debate as he bulls his way through his divisive agenda. The city of Costa Mesa also had stewardship of a significant school-district asset over the last several years ? the district’s fields via the old joint-use agreement ? and they failed badly enough that the district took back control in the new agreement. The city couldn’t even grow grass at the schools, so it seems a real stretch that they could help grow our kids.