JACKSON AND THE SCHOOL BOARD: As he promised during the campaign, Frank Jackson is expected to ask School Board members to resign and let him decide whether to re-appoint them. It looks like some are not in a mood to cooperate. John Ryan and Marybeth Matthews think they should.

Nothing would please me more than a new School Board, but I've got misgivings about Jackson's position on two levels.

First, there's the problem of respect for the law. Jackson, as Mary Ann Sharkey acknowledges in the PD article, has no legal basis for his demand. The Board members (including the "big Campbell supporter" who got his appointment the day after Jane Campbell lost the election) are duly constituted public officials who do not serve at the Mayor's pleasure. They aren't an advisory committee to the Mayor. They're the city's legal board of education, with all the powers and responsibilities that entails.

The Mayor has only two formal powers in this mislabeled "mayoral control" system: The power to veto the Board's choice of a CEO (which means he will control this key decision assuming it isn't made before January) and the power to appoint new Board members when seats open up. Five of the nine members' terms will end in 2007, so that's when Mayor Jackson gets to install his own majority. Until then, Campbell's appointees remain in charge. That's not an accident, it's exactly what the law -- which Clevelanders voted to keep on the books just three years ago -- intends.

Those looming 2007 appointments, plus the immediate CEO hiring process -- plus just being Mayor -- give Jackson lots of leverage over broad school policy for the next two years. He doesn't need to demand immediate, extralegal authority; he probably won't get it anyway; and by trying he'll guarantee a terrible relationship with the (totally legitimate) Board majority. What's the up side of having this fight now?

My second misgiving is about Jackson's stated political basis for the fight, the "standards" that Jackson says he wants to apply to his appointments: "active involvement in the schools, have attended public schools and have children who attend or attended Cleveland schools... people who have a stake in the system."

Really? Only former CMSD students with kids who've gone to CMSD schools should serve on the School Board? Does Jackson really mean to say these are the School Board's only true constituents, the only Clevelanders who really "... have a stake in the system"?

Wow. So much for all the other residents and taxpayers. So much for all those people who've ponied up private school tuition over the last twenty-five years so they could stay in the city without putting their kids at risk. So much for people who've directly experienced schools that really work -- schools, for example, that actually get lots of their graduates into colleges other than Tri-C. So much for learning the lessons of last August, when a strategy aimed at excluding "non-public-school voters" from the levy vote led to a disastrous backlash. So much for Candidate Jackson's house-meeting promise that his education strategy would unite the interests of both public and private school families.

Apparently we're about to revert to the self-destructive notion, practiced by Byrd-Bennett and her compliant Board, that the only community that matters is the "school community" of CMSD parents, staff, volunteers, and supporters. Only we're taking it a step further, and insisting on a Board composed entirely of the parents.

For Mayor-elect Jackson, this is exactly the wrong message, and he needs to stop sending it right now. The CMSD is not a club, to be run by and for its user-members. It's a public institution, a tax-supported government agency, owned by the whole public of the city. The School Board must start representing that whole public... and so must Jackson, in appointing them. Trying to throw serving members off the Board early because they aren't part of the schools' current customer base... well, I don't think that's ground that the new Mayor really wants to be standing on.

Update: You know what? Seven of the current nine Board members are either Cleveland public school graduates, and/or parents of Cleveland public school students or grads. It's right there in their bios on the CMSD website. The exceptions are Vice Chair Grady Burrows and new member John Moss (not yet profiled on the site). So... what's the issue again?