On Tuesday, voters will choose whether to give the next mayor and his successors more power to appoint the nine-member Philadelphia school board - and therefore more accountability if things go wrong.

A ballot initiative approved by City Council this year proposes amending the Educational Supplement to the Home Rule Charter to change school board members' terms so they are the same as the mayor's four-year term. That way, the mayor could appoint all board members at once upon taking office.

Currently, the mayor appoints board members to serve staggered six-year terms. That means the mayor ends up serving with some board members who were appointed by a previous mayor.

The proposed amendment also would allow the mayor to remove board members for any reason with 10 days' written notice to City Council. Now, board members can be removed only for wrongdoing.

Proponents of the measure say the change is one step toward making it clear who is in charge of the schools and making it easier for the mayor to develop and execute a school policy. Among those favoring the measure are Mayor Rendell and government-watchdog groups such as the Committee of Seventy, which have been pressing for similar changes for almost 20 years. Republican mayoral candidate Sam Katz has said he favors it. Democratic mayoral contender John F. Street has said he does not oppose the idea.

"This is about who will be held responsible for public education in Philadelphia," said City Councilman Michael Nutter, the author of the measure. "If public education isn't going in the direction you want, then hold the mayor accountable for it. . . . Ultimately, no one is held accountable the way the system is established today."

Opponents of the measure, including the League of Women Voters and Councilman David Cohen, say they see a more independent school board as a good thing and worry that the change would disempower community members. They also worry that there will be a lack of institutional knowledge on the school board if the mayor is able to appoint an entirely new board at will.

"The school board needs to be independent of politics to make decisions that are appropriate for school children, that are not just political," said Barbara Dietrich, president of the League of Women Voters of Philadelphia.

The proposal for changing school-board appointments comes out of an education-reform debate that has gone on for years. Good-government groups and education advocates have been promoting a larger package of proposals that would give the mayor more control over the school district. Most of these reforms would have to be approved by the legislature, which defeated them by one vote when they were proposed in 1982.

But now, reforming big-city school districts by giving mayors more say in how they are run has caught on. Within the last decade, cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland and New Orleans have tried it. Proponents of the ballot measure say an example of success is Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley has been in charge of the troubled district since 1995, when the school board was disbanded entirely.

"The mayor of Chicago identified schools as the most important priority for his administration," said Frederick L. Voigt, executive director of the Committee of Seventy. "We have urged that that happen here. For all too long, mayors have been able to duck and hide behind the superintendent and the board."

Voigt and others would like to see additional changes that would give the mayor even more control, such as authorizing the mayor and City Council to make changes to and approve the school district budget, which is now presented to the mayor and Council but approved by the school board. (City Council, however, must sign off on the tax appropriation for the school budget.) Other suggested changes include allowing the mayor to negotiate contracts with school employee unions and to appoint the superintendent, who is now chosen by the school board. All of those proposals would have to be enacted by the legislature.

Cohen, though, says he advocates the current system, set up when the school district was established in 1965. That system was designed to be free of the political corruption of earlier eras.

The framers of the Home Rule charter "wanted to separate the school district from the political process as much as possible," Cohen said. "You can't do it entirely, but they tried to do it as much as possible."

Cohen said he is unimpressed with similar changes enacted by other cities.

"Just because another city does it doesn't mean it's a good thing," Cohen said. "Philadelphia's thing is to get the full participation of people in the neighborhood" rather than "surrogates for the mayor."

Nutter and others are hoping that if voters pass the initiative, the legislature will enact the additional proposed changes giving the mayor power over the schools. At a hearing on the issue in April, State House Majority Leader John Perzel (R., Phila.) and State Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Phila.) were among a group of politicans speaking in favor of the measure.

"This is the opportunity for the people of Philadelphia to speak out, and then we can take that to the state legislature and say, 'Look, the people of Philadelphia have spoken,' " Nutter said.

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