There is a better way: More Honorable Politics All Around (...and City Council members who want to run schools are free to take the pay cut and run)

It is fashionable to deride school boards as "dysfunctional." But compared to whom? To Albany? That does not even require further comment.
To City Hall? The record on crime, jobs, and neighborhoods is plain enough. Rochester City Council members, in recent years, have had run-ins with the law, failed to use the authority they have on the budget, and practiced blatant nepotism. Even a serious criminal record (hard time) seems no bar to appointment to council staff, so long as you are related to a council member. A court had to prevent council insiders from removing an elected council member, whose only sin was independent thought and inquiry.

If a school board had this kind of a track record, you could only imagine the outrage! There is one notorious School Commissioner, Ms. Elliott, whose public and repeated bursts of profanity, directed at colleagues and media, prompted 61% of the voter last November to decline to vote for her, despite the lack of any major party opposition on the ballot. That is not only evidence of good judgment from voters, it is a sad commentary about that of Elliott's bitter end supporters -- City Hall, David Gantt, Joe Morelle -- the very people who want to substitute appointments for your vote.

The truth is we need better politics all around. Elected officials, mayors, school boards, councils, state legislatures -- wise and foolish -- come and go.
The people should decide! Elections are the remedy, not the problem! Rochester needs a new era of civic and political reform, and as I leave the board,
I am encouraged to see signs of it. These things take time. Success does not come with rushing speed. But we had a record number of primary challenges last year. People are developing new institutions to address new realities about media in the new century. After years of a rancid culture in Albany, not a single state assembly district in Rochester will have uncontested primaries this year. That is historic. I even see signs of hope in the desperate and lame arguments advanced by Mayoral Control advocates.

At this writing, the legislative fate of effort to roll back your voting rights (when people thought you were not looking) is unclear. The question of public support for this might easily be resolved by an advisory referendum. Mayoral Control would never have legitimacy here without it. To close, I go back to Bill Cala. One suggestion he had, a real reform, would be nonpartisan election of school boards. Bill was elected to such a board in the suburbs himself (an experience I share with him). Fewer people know that the city had such nonpartisan board elections in the 1970s. Not only did more people take part in them than in the primaries that decide things now, the elections were contested about education issues, not internal party power struggles.

You have to wonder about politicians who say they love the reforms of Superintendents Cala and Brizard, but want to abolish the elected boards that made those appointments. The public is smarter than this. After decades of decline, and starting with Dr. Cala, Rochester saw the sharpest increase in the graduation rate in the state. That is not good enough. But it is progress needs to be able to take root. Let’s settle adult political differences without hurting children.