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In Mayoral Governance and Student Achievement: How Mayor-Led Districts Are Improving School and Student Performance, published by the Center for American Progress, the authors seek to bring fiscal and student achievement data to the debate around mayoral control. The fiscal analyses of mayoral-led cities are problematic due to inappropriate comparisons and a lack of reliable and valid evidence supporting the assertion that mayoral control has an influence on the amount or the distribution of resources. Throughout the discussion of student achievement, the report highlights positive findings in a few districts, but offers limited discussion of mayor-led cities where such gains were not found and of other cities in the country that saw strong gains without mayoral control. These issues call into question whether "mayoral control" is appropriately credited with the improvements identified in the report. The paper does not provide or explain the statistical methods or provide the findings essential to supporting the authors' claims. Nevertheless, this report offers useful information about the context for shifts to mayoral control in different cities and the challenges that may arise in such governance changes. The limitations, however, preclude relying on either the report's findings or its recommendations in making policy decisions.

Charter schools are one form of decentralizing public education by shifting power into the hands of school stakeholders by providing them with more "voice" in day-to-day decisions. However, the increasing involvement of educational management organizations (EMOs) as managers of charter schools raises newquestions about the influence of school stakeholders. This exploratory study examines the experiences of three very different EMOs and two schools operated by each company. Specifically, the author describes the role of each company in the development of the educational programs in the schools it manages. The three companies varied in the extent to which they limited school stakeholder "voice." The analysis builds toward a greater understanding of the impact of EMOs on decentralization, including an exploration of the power of charter schools in the EMO-school relationship that examines how "exit" from the EMO-school relationship may provide power in a way that "voice" does not.

Charter schools involve a trading of autonomy for accountability. This accountability comes through two forces—markets through the choices of parents and students, and accountability to government through the writing of contracts that must be renewed for schools to continue to operate. Charter schools are supposed to be more accountable for educational performance than traditional public schools because authorizers have the ability to revoke charter contracts. Here, I focus on one central component of accountability to government: performance accountability or accountability for educational outcomes to charter school authorizers through the revocation or non-renewal of charter contracts. In this paper, I suggest that contract-based accountability for educational performance in charter schools may not be working as proponents argued it would. This article explores some explanations for why there are very few examples of charter schools that have been closed primarily because of failure to demonstrate educational performance or improvement. Future work will need to test if these challenges for authorizers hold in a variety of contexts. The conclusion examines the implications of these findings for the future of charter school accountability.

A comment on "Scale of Operations and Locus of Control in Market- Versus Mission-Oriented Charter Schools" by Heath Brown et al (2004) focuses on how the authors examine "decision making." Methodological issues are raised in relation to their claim that the locus of decision making is different for charter schools funded by for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) than for non-EMO charter schools, especially in terms of how the authors constructed the comparison group & why they focused on who founded the schools instead of what organizations manage them. Special attention is given to questions raised by their research on how best to disaggregate & categorize charter schools for both research & policy purposes. Other issues discussed include why some schools experience shared control while others maintain internal control; the implications of shared control; & why some charter school boards agree to be managed by EMOs. Emphasis is placed on the need for policymakers to decide upon the proper role for external organizations & to provide the resources to support their choices. 6 References. J. Lindroth