You heard it here first, folks. Council President Garabedian is shopping his newest proposal around town, and even talking about getting something on the ballot for the General Assembly. It will involve making the Cranston City Council into a 15-person board with a subcommittee on education, and other changes. But it faces several uphill battle against the many, many bureaucracies out there that serve and defend educational professionals.
I will give Aram Garabedian credit — the idea starts to make more sense when you take into consideration that the two major bodies of financial control in the city, the school committee and the city council, fight frequently, and even resort to suing one another in really desperate times. To have one organization with a clearer hierarchy might make more sense. But will there still be adequate advocacy for good education?
[…] [Garabedian] noted that talk of merging city and school departments has surfaced many times in recent decades and never turned into anything concrete.
Only a structural change, such as eliminating the School Committee and concentrating power in the council, would do the trick, he suggested.
Garabedian is proposing a 15-member City Council, with two members elected from each of the city’s six wards and three elected citywide.
The reconstituted council would have a subcommittee dedicated to education matters, he said, with one member from each ward serving on the panel.
The new council would not only be better positioned to consolidate city and school services, he said, it would also be able to negotiate better contracts with teachers and other school employees.
I think Garabedian also offers excellent business acumen when he talks of the need for structural changes in order to resolve the issue of consolidating duplicative departments. He is probably right — this issue will not get solved until the city council and the school committee are one. I remember in my interview with Mike Traficante, how he said that mayors going all the way back to DiPrete have been trying to merge school and city-side departments, and it just never happens. He did not know why. Garabedian may be correct that the reason is because both sides have their own funding stream.
More discussion of the idea of eliminating the school committee is on this thread.
Kmareka.com 
This from Tim Duffy, as quoted in the same ProJo article:
City Council members, he said, are “not elected, necessarily, to keep student performance and student welfare in mind.�
I’m sorry to inform Mr. Duffy, but the same can also be said of school committees — who’s got major union support, who’s being elected as a backlash toward an unpopular mayor, etc. And, sorry to be flippant, but kids don’t vote — adults do, and adults can be persuaded by emotional appeals to elect people who care more about closing schools, fighting needless legal battles, and protecting those “entrenched bureaucracies” Ms. Iannazzi identifies than actually delivering education to the kids.
One aspect of thus issue that’s been all but missed is the perspective of the teachers. I’ve argued previously that council oversight will allow for more effective contract negotiations — but, as I consider it more, I also think that the demonization of teacher unions would subside to a degree.
Look at it this way: When people see a school board negotiate a contract, they generally blame the teachers’ union for the situation. But, let’s say the City Council gets to negotiate — without all the (apparent) backroom dealing that goes on now. A City Council would be very sure of the money it has to spend, and would be very careful to keep future increases affordable. Result? No animosity toward the teachers.
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Oh, and Kiersten:
Thanks for the attribution. And, you’re welcome for the scoop.