Send Out The Mayors?

Over at This Week Russo uses the new urban NAEP data to take a pop at mayoral control of urban districts because Chicago did not do so well. Whether or not mayoral control is an effective strategy is an important debate because the results so far are mixed around the country. But isn’t this particular critique spurious? Districts with varying governance arrangements were all over the place in the NAEP results. Austin did well on NAEP, is hiring former federal officials the ticket? (In fact, Austin may have done deceptively well because of exclusions from the test).

Russo is right that mayoral control is “mayoral control is hardly a guarantee of success” but these NAEP results don’t tell us a lot about that.