MAYOR WILLIE BROWN has suddenly decided he wants to get rid of the elected S.F. Board of Education and replace it with a board appointed by the mayor. That puts Brown on the side of an alarming nationwide movement for corporate-style school administration – a movement that has proved unable to solve the problems in public education.

Elected school boards were a progressive-era reform aimed at giving voters more direct authority over the schools. When San Francisco made the switch to an elected board in 1972, it ended the sad tradition of having boards composed of businesspeople, socialites, and the token priest – not the parents and educators who should be running the schools.

School districts that have already been hit by this antidemocratic rollback have shown no improvement, according to academics. If you want a specific example of the problem, just look across the bay: Oakland mayor Jerry Brown spent hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting a ballot measure granting him the authority to appoint three people to serve on the city's school board, alongside its seven elected members. The elected board members and most community activists agree that this little experiment has been a disaster – leading to hours of fighting and, sometimes, a virtual stalemate on the board.

In San Francisco, Mayor Brown says that the school board is too often used as a stepping-stone to higher political office. He's right – but having a mayor-appointed board is unlikely to stop that. In fact, it would probably only intensify the phenomenon. After all, it's mainly the school board members Willie Brown has supported who have run for other city offices – people such as Juanita Owens, Leland Yee, Steve Phillips, and Bill Maher.

In fact, Brown has a long record of appointing utterly unqualified people to powerful city commissions just because they or their allies gave him campaign money or did him political favors.