Plain Dealer education columnist Chris Sheridan had a sharp, scary piece yesterday in which she said some things out loud that insiders have been saying very quietly up to now:
Barbara Byrd-Bennett will soon be gone.Sheridan doesn't name the "city leaders" responsible, probably because the list is too long. Cleveland Tomorrow, the Growth Association, the County Commissioners, labor leaders, and her own newspaper would all be near the top. But the Mayor is on there, too... and so are Byrd-Bennett and the mayor-appointed School Board, if only through their complicit silence.
The levy defeat in November showed that Byrd-Bennett has already lost a lot of her political luster, leaving the school system without effective public leadership. (Sheridan doesn't mention that BBB's big slide has been with African-American voters, whose support in Wards 1 through 10 fell from over 80% in the 2001 bond levy vote to only 55% this time.)
"The downward spiral started more than a year ago, when city leaders squandered the prime electoral opportunity posed by the November 2003 ballot... Rather than capitalizing on the chance to secure the district's finances, leaders allowed dithering over a convention center to stall all other progress."
In not naming these names, Sheridan's otherwise dead-on analysis obscures a crucial point: The schools' political failure in 2003-04, and the "controversy, confrontation and, ultimately, chaos" they face in 2005 as their leadership and finances continue to shred, represent the failure of a system, not just a few individuals. We're now experiencing the first big test of the governance model known as "mayoral control" -- the "reform" system that was supposed to centralize accountability, eliminate petty politics, and empower professional management of the schools.
And mayoral control (which I personally voted to continue two years ago, along with 72% of my fellow voters) appears to be flunking that test.