A majority of Clevelanders want control of the city schools returned to a popularly elected board of education, according to a Plain Dealer poll.

That apparent uneasiness with Mayor Michael R. White’s 20-month reign over the district is tempered by the belief of many residents that the schools have improved under the stewardship of an appointed board and Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the mayor’s hand-picked schools chief, the poll shows.

“It’s interesting that people see the district getting better, but they don’t make the connection between that and the governance change,” said David Bergholz, co-chairman of the 1996 citizens panel that recommended the mayor be given control of the district.

The poll, conducted May 18-23 for the newspaper by the Washington-D.C.-based Mason-Dixon Polling and research Inc., interviewed 624 likely Cleveland voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The poll found that if an election were held today, only 20 percent of the respondents would vote to keep White in charge of the 77,000-pupil district, and 68 percent would favor returning control of the system to an elected school board.

But 35 percent of those responding said the district was somewhat or greatly improved under Byrd-Bennett, whom White hired 18 months ago. Only 9 percent of those surveyed said the district had become worse during that period.

The poll also found:

Clevelanders with school-age children were more positive about the district’s progress than other voters. More than 40 percent of the former said the system was getting better.

Blacks also were much more positive about the system’s direction than whites. Nearly half black respondents said the schools were somewhat or greatly improved under Byrd-Bennett, while only about a quarter of whites saw such progress.

Regardless of their race, income or gender, a significant majority of Clevelanders agreed the city should return to an elected school board.

“I’m not surprised,” said former board member Stanley Tolliver, who has challenged the dis-solution of the elected board in court. “They took away people’s right to vote without any input from them at all.”

Asked for her input, Patricia Harvey said she would like to see the district return to an elected board.

“Things just don't seem to be working out too well,” said Harvey, 49, who has three grandchildren in the system. “I think it was better run by the former administration.”

But Rob Kezdi, 19, said he supports the mayor and his appointed board. He cited the end of cross-town busing as evidence that the district has minimized politics and focused on education.

“They seem to be making wise decisions,” he said.

Most of the elected board’s duties were suspended in 1995 when a federal judge, citing management chaos and fiscal irresponsibility, placed the district under the control of the Ohio Department of Education.

The board was abolished in 1998 after the state legislature gave control of the district to White and allowed him to choose his own nine-member board and a CEO to manage the system’s 10,000 employees and $600 million budget. The same law also gave voters an opportunity to keep or reject the system, but not until 2002.

Tolliver and a coalition of parents and activists went to court to try to force a vote this year or next. A state appeals court ruled in their favor, and the matter now rests with the Ohio Supreme Court

What rests with White is a school system beset by ills common to big-city districts: a large number of children living in poverty, a low level of student achievement and a bureaucracy so big that change is slow and progress incremental.

“Education is a tough issue to take on because there are no short-term solutions,“ said Ronald Lester, a Washington-D.C.-based pollster who works extensively in mayoral campaigns. “Yet mayors have pressures on them to produce results quickly.”

Cleveland State University political scientist B. James Kweder said the city schools could emerge as the single most important issue in the mayor’s race next year. But he cautioned against reading too much into early poll numbers, and said Byrd-Bennett’s performance could be key to changing voters’ perceptions of the troubled system.

“She comes across as being more forceful than any of her immediate predecessors,” he said.

White declined to be interviewed for this story. But in his State of the City Address in February, the mayor vigorously praised his schools chief and appointed board and lauded their accomplishments: the largest summer school program in the city’s history, gains on proficiency test scores, a new discipline policy and the creation of alternative schools.

“This is the best board of education we’ve had in more than 30 years,” White said. Byrd-Bennett  “is everything I had hoped that she would be, and she is more. She is an educator, a visionary and an administrator.”

Byrd-Bennett deferred comment to William Wendling, the district’s chief communications officer. Wendling said Clevelanders eventually would tie the district’s progress to the work of the appointed board.

“We’re pleased that a substantial number of those surveyed see that we are indeed making progress,” Wendling said. “The appointed board of education has been a key partner in the success the district has had recently. As our success multiplies, I expect we will see a corollary increase in the number of residents who favor the appointed board form of governance.”

That’s also the way veteran political consultant Arnold Pinkney sees it. Pinkney, a former school board member who ran the district’s successful 1996 levy campaign, and ran White’s 1997 re-election campaign, said it should be relatively easy to demonstrate that the district has stronger leadership, is less politicized and is more fiscally sound than at any time in recent years.

“Nobody that goes into the Cleveland public schools today can say that the conditions are not better,” Pinkney said.

Despite those assurances, Clevelanders from the beginning have had mixed feelings about the mayor taking over the schools. A 1997 poll commissioned by The Plain Dealer, but conducted by a different pollster showed that Clevelanders were split on whether it was a good idea for the mayor to assume control of the schools.

In that poll, taken after the mayoral control bill was signed into law by then - Gov. George V. Voinovich, 51 percent of those responding said they were “not too confident” or “not at all confident” the mayor could improve the district, while 46 percent said they were confident he could.

“The major issue is being dis-enfranchised,” said former Rep. Mary Rose Oakar, who has been mentioned as a potential challenger to White. “But the schools are doing reasonably well these days, and it appears that the superintendent is doing a good job.”

Cleveland Public School Facts