All of that changed this year with the onset of the perennial school-funding crisis. When the funding gap widened to $629 million, it was tough-love time. The city had to stage a family intervention.
Which is why, when Council voted yesterday to spend an additional $53 million on schools, it ushered in a new era in city-district relations.
Call it education a la carte. For our $53 million, Council got to choose from a prix-fixe menu of budget line items. It opted for the yellow school buses, reduced class sizes, early-childhood education and a few accelerated schools.
In exchange for his full-throated advocacy for additional funding, the mayor got something called the Educational Accountability Agreement, which gives him open-ended access to the district's ledgers.
This is a be-careful-what-you-ask-for moment because when money comes with strings attached, they're attached on both ends. Council can no longer say it just signs the checks, and the mayor can no longer claim that he doesn't know what's going on over there.
Which is how it should be. I'm not a fan of elected school boards, but I think that voters should expect more accountability than they are getting from the people who opt to spend their money on schools.
That avenue is the mayor and Council. If schools aren't performing, somebody needs to answer to the public for that, and it needs to be somebody that the public can hire or fire.
Nutter, bless his heart, seems eager to forge this new partnership. Even some of the most reluctant Council members are on board.
And Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman has been around long enough to know how to work within the structures of this new level of scrutiny.
"I'm not threatened by this in any way," she told me yesterday. "I'm all for transparency and the engagement of the city in the process.
