For a few days, things were a little quiet after Mayor Bob Duffy said he wanted City Hall to take over the operations of the Rochester school district.

There's nothing quiet about the discussion now, though. By the end of last week, the Rochester Teachers Association and several activist groups had begun an intense campaign against the idea, and RTA was said to be ready to put tens of thousands of dollars into the effort. Business and city government leaders gathered to talk about the issue with a proponent of mayoral control, Brown University professor Kenneth Wong. Duffy and School Board member Van White were sparring over whether the state constitution permits control to move to the city at the pace Duffy has proposed. And Rochester's former interim superintendent, Bill Cala, came out against mayoral control in a 3800-word critique sent to this newspaper.

The debate is certain to heat up. There's talk that Governor Paterson may introduce a bill changing the governance of the school district by the end of this month. And on Friday, State Assembly member David Gantt said that if Paterson doesn't introduce a bill, he'll introduce his own.

Either way, the state legislature would have to approve the change, but two of the most powerful local Assembly members, Gantt and Joe Morelle, favor it. And the legislature has already given control of the New York City school district to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

(Duffy initially said he wants mayoral control in place by the beginning of the next school year, but in an interview on Saturday he qualified that: "I would say as soon as we possibly could do this but not sidestep due diligence.")

Duffy's critics - and even some people who say they haven't made up their minds about the issue - charge that he hasn't been specific about what he wants. That's not the case. While he hasn't drafted a detailed plan, he has outlined the basic structure. Here's what he envisions:

The school district would become part of city government, like the police department, the fire department, the environmental services department. The superintendent would be a top-level manager, reporting to the mayor. An advisory committee, appointed by the mayor, would replace the elected School Board. City Council would vote on the school budget, as it does now, but it would have more power. It would vote not only on the budget amount but also on what the money is for.

Duffy doesn't like the term "mayoral control." It "denotes some issue of power and control," he said when I interviewed him Saturday afternoon.

What to call it, then? Maybe "mayoral responsibility," he suggested. I get his point; "power" isn't the goal. But ultimately, somebody has to be accountable, he said. "You can't water down the responsibility."

Right now, responsibility lies with the School Board. Duffy thinks it's better to have it lie with one person. Picture what it would be like, he said, if in City Hall there were no strong mayor or no city manager - "if the city was run only by City Council. You'd be running this by committee."

Duffy's model is New York City, which has had mayoral control since 2002. People who have studied the New York system disagree about whether it has led to better student achievement; both sides pull out statistics they say prove them right. There seems to be less disagreement about another point, though: Parents in New York complain about lack of access to City Hall, about Bloomberg not being responsive.

Duffy said he's heard that. Parent access and parent participation would be a high priority under his system, he said, and he referred to his "City Hall on the Road" programs, in which he and other city officials have gone out into the neighborhoods to talk to residents.

It's worth noting that in Rochester, even with the School Board in charge, some parents complain about lack of access and input. Fairly or not, they say that they aren't welcome in the schools, that district officials aren't responsive.

Under Duffy's plan, the advisory committee would help provide that access. He pictures it being a group of 8 to 10 people with "a variety of experiences" - neighborhood leaders, parents, "leaders with experience in education in this community," Duffy said on Saturday.

"We would pick tremendous people," he said, and he said he's convinced that there are plenty of talented people who would be willing to serve on an advisory committee but aren't willing to run for elected office.

The committee would work with the superintendent, Duffy said, "to shape policy." It would advise the superintendent on the kinds of issues that the School Board has dealt with - creating an African-American studies program, for example, or deciding which children could get free transportation to school. But the advisory committee wouldn't have the final say on those issues. The superintendent would.

"The superintendent would have tremendous autonomy," he said.

And City Council, not the advisory committee, would have the final say on the school district's budget. (That, as WXXI's Bob Smith pointed out on one of his 1370 Connection programs last week, certainly would give Council a good bit of weight on policy and programs. If the superintendent wanted to add a new program or school and Council objected, there'd be no money for it.)

Some of Duffy's critics insist that his interest isn't really the district's students; it's money. He wants control of the district's budget, which he will then cut to provide more money for city services, they say. What's driving his push for mayoral control, those critics say, is "Maintenance of Effort," a state law that requires the city to give the district $119.1 million each year. If MOE went away, the critics say, Duffy would lose interest in mayoral control.

That's not true, Duffy said on Saturday. "I've already been approached about that," he said, by people who asked whether he'd drop his push for mayoral control if they backed off on MOE. (He declined to say who had approached him.)

"I don't think people truly understand what we are trying to accomplish," he said. His goal, he said, is "to improve the success rate" of city students, including, importantly, "the success rate of young African-American males," many of whom are trapped in poverty and crime.

"I believe this is the way we change the city," he said.

WXXI's Bob Smith added a lot of value to the discussion last week with his five-day series of interviews on 1370 Connection. The programs included hour-long interviews with Duffy, School Board President Malik Evans, City Council member Adam McFadden and State Assembly member Susan John, a group of parents, and two educators who have studied the experience of mayoral control in other cities. (You can access all five interviews on the WXXI website, wxxi.org. Search for: mayoral control. The individual interviews are listed on the menu on the right-hand side of the page.)

I found Smith's interview with the two educators - Joseph Viteritti of Hunter College and Kenneth Wong of Brown University - particularly informative. Viteritti is the author of a book on the subject, "When Mayors Take Charge," to which Wong contributed.

While both agreed that mayoral control is positive, they disagreed strongly on one key point: whether it boosts student achievement. Wong insisted that the experience of New York City and others proves that it does. But Viteritti cited non-mayoral-control cities where test scores have jumped higher than in mayoral-control cities.

"It's very hard for me, looking at it as an academic, to say that there's clear evidence that if you change the governance, you're going to get an increase in test scores," Viteritti said, "because the evidence, based on the national data, is just not there to support that."

He noted that New York City's improvement may just as well have been due to a substantial, court-ordered increase in funding. "It's very hard, even when you see test-score improvements, to say that it's the result of mayoral control," he said.

"The most important thing that you get from mayoral control," Viteritti said, "is that you create an institutional capacity for change." And, Viteritti and Wong said, mayoral control provides better accountability.

Both cautioned that a mayoral-control system must include strong checks and balances. The mayor should appoint the superintendent or chancellor, Viteritti said. "You have to have somebody who's ultimately accountable." And, he said, when the person responsible for raising much of the money doesn't have responsibility for what happens, "it almost creates a disincentive to spend more money on the schools."

But, Viteritti said, the mayor's power should be checked by City Council, which should have "strong power" over the budget. "The schools have to be accountable to the mayor, but the mayor also has to be accountable to the people," Viteritti said, "and a once-every-four-year election is not enough."

"There have to be ways for the public to have a say in the way the schools are run," Viteritti said.

Wong cited the system in Providence, Rhode Island, where, he said, a nominating commission appointed by the mayor recruits and "certifies" candidates for School Board, and the mayor is required to select board members from those candidates.

And Wong and Viteritti suggested that an independent body be in charge of assessing student performance. "When the mayor is in charge," Viteritti said, "he has lots of incentive to present the best picture possible, so you need independent data."

Like Mayor Duffy, I've changed my mind about mayoral control. I support it. But that's not because I think it's a quick fix or a guaranteed path to better student achievement. I think Viteritti's right: this could create "institutional capacity" for change, and I'm not talking about change only in the school district. I think with mayoral control, we could at last end the conflict between City Hall and the school district. I think if the mayor were accountable for the school district's success, it could spur him to pull the entire community together to attack the problems that concentrated poverty breeds and that have such an enormous impact on Rochester's children and on the city.

In his opinion piece on our website, former Interim Superintendent Bill Cala says that the real answer is to break up the concentration of poverty by combining suburban school districts with the Rochester district. He's absolutely right. But that's not going to happen in any of our lifetimes. There've been calls for an integrated school district since my family moved to Rochester in 1965. Former Mayor Bill Johnson lost his bid for county executive in large part because suburban residents suspected that was what he was up to.

Those of us who support some form of metro school district will keep pushing for it. Meantime, though, thousands of children are growing up with little hope of landing a good job and living a stable life.

The school district has been trying to overcome the effects of concentrated poverty by itself for far too long. There are important decisions to make about the details of mayoral control. People like Viteritti and Wong can help us ask questions and shape the system. But I don't see how in good conscience we can stand in the way of this change.