[3] As of October 2011, evidence of existing or attempted mayoral control was found in about 20 major districts around the United States.
[4] Perhaps the most high-profile case of mayoral control is New York City where Michael Bloomberg won the right to appoint the head of schools in June 2002.
[7] According to scholar Deborah Land of Johns Hopkins University, the origins of a system in which lay individuals were given the authority to govern their local schools dates back more than 200 years.
[8] From the inception of school boards, there was skepticism about the ability of distant politicians to see and meet the needs of local neighborhoods when it came to education.
While mayoral control in some cities such as Jackson, Mississippi, has existed since the mid-20th century,[10] most shifts from elected to appointed school boards took place after 1990.
[2] Starting in the 1990s, mayoral control was viewed by its supporters as a way to address the chronic underperformance and jumpstart reforms in medium to large urban districts.
[20] His support is also rooted in a belief that one point of accountability—the mayor—is far more effective than accountability spread across an elected board of education model.
The average tenure of urban superintendents is less than four years—an unfortunate consequence of the frequent turnover in board membership and the shifting winds of local interests.
"[8] Similarly, while unwilling to dismiss the connection between strong mayoral involvement and student achievement outright, researchers at the Institute on Education Law and Policy at Rutgers University— Newark "were unable to establish conclusively that the change in governance had any causal relationship to improved performance, or that, using nationally normed test data, our [mayoral controlled] cities had greater improvements than anywhere else".
[24] Additionally, an analysis of top-down market-based reform efforts in three mayoral controlled cities, Chicago, New York City and Washington DC, indicate the efforts "deliver few benefits, often harm the students they purport to help, and divert attention from a set of other, less visible policies with more promise to weaken the link between poverty and low educational attainment.
That same study found that mayoral control in New York City had improved the performance of African American and Latino students in fourth and eighth grade by between 1 and 3 percent annually.