Mayors and Schools: Minority Voices and Democratic Tensions in Urban Education

This book examines the national trend toward mayoral control of big-city school districts through comparative case studies of Chicago and Cleveland - two school districts that adopted mayoral control during the 1990s. Chambers takes up the question of whether granting control to mayors in major cities will indeed fix public school systems. She finds that although both cities have experienced noteworthy improvements in student performance since mayoral control, the increased centralization of decision-making has reduced minority participation in democratic politics. Chambers argues that this conundrum of improved performance at the cost of decreased minority participation could undermine the very democratic and civic values that schools try to teach. In a concluding chapter, she offers several suggestions for better incorporating minority participation educational decisions, even while centralizing more power in mayors' offices.