The mayor, the story goes, won back control of the city’s public school system from the unelected, unaccountable, and apathetic Board of Education, meaning parents at last have someone to hold politically responsible for their children’s education. And now Albany is mandated by Justice DeGrasse of New York’s top tribunal, the Court of Appeals, to change its funding formula to send more money to the city’s schools. The story is not so simple, given that it is mandates such as the one imposed by Mr. DeGrasse that have kept much of the schools system in the clutches of a most undemocratic and unresponsive entity — the courts.

In the latest judicial development, our Kathleen Lucadamo reported yesterday, the parents of pupils in the city’s special education system are threatening to sue the city for what they claim is the schools’ failure to abide by the terms of Jose P. v. Ambach. Commonly referred to as Jose P., the court order mandates the administrative and financial particulars of the city’s special ed system, requiring among other things a team of three administrators to evaluate each pupil in the system and a host of special services at every school with special education students. While Jose P. began in 1980 as a slim 47-page document, it expanded to 515 pages of regulations by 1982 and has continued its gross growth since. The mayor can close firehouses if he sees fit, but special ed bureaucrats have become, with the court’s protection, the ultimate civil servants. As anyone with first-hand experience of the city’s special ed program will tell you, the results have not been commensurate with the ink spilled and the money spent.

But the court orders hardly stop there. Consider bilingual education, which is controlled by the court order stemming from 1974’s Aspira of New York v. the Board of Education of the City of New York. The decision, which originally mandated that the city maintain bilingual education for Spanish-speaking students, now applies to languages including Chinese, Russian, and Haitian Creole. Because of it, the city is forced to maintain expensive programs with a long history of failure and is unable to experiment with alternative programs, such as English as a second language, that might mainstream more of these students. Or the 1982 consent order stemming from the Boe case, which in essence ensures that disruptive high school students cannot be suspended without a lengthy and expensive trial, a process administrators naturally try to avoid. And these are just the most costly and disruptive of the numerous judicial fiats that control much of the public school system regardless of whether the mayor or the Board of Education is “really in charge.”

Between the more than 135,000 students covered by Jose P. and the 125,000 whose academic experience is governed by Aspira, the city lacks educational and financial discretion over more than 25% of the children placed in its schools. And those more than a quarter of a million students consume a disproportionately large percentage of the system’s spending. We’ve long called for charter schools and vouchers to introduce choice, competition, and accountability into education. But in the meantime, allowing the mayor to control the schools whose gains and losses are marked on his political ledger sheet might be a good first step toward at least establishing accountability.