A senate bill aimed at shifting leadership within Chicago’s public schools could be a step back for the district, according to some education policy advocates.

Introduced earlier this month by State Sen. James Meeks (D-15), the bill calls for local school councils to become “advisory in nature,” transferring their powers — which include the hiring and review of principals, program oversight and spending approval — to the district’s mayorally appointed school board.

The district’s 570 councils are made up of peer-elected parents, community members, faculty and principals.

Sen. Meeks, who heads the Senate Education Committee, has maintained that the councils are proving unfit to select principals and assist the district’s struggling schools, in news reports.

The senator has promised that his bill would hold Mayor Richard M. Daley accountable for the victories and failures within the city’s public school system. Meeks is concurrently sponsoring a bill which would mandate that CPS board members be elected rather than appointed by the mayor.

Meeks and officials at CPS did not return calls for this story.

School councils can be powerfully democratic governing bodies, which have led Chicago to have more women and people of color in elected office than any other city in the country, said David Mayrowetz, a professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

But, he added, “they can also be rubber stamps for principals, and ways for parents to ensure preferential treatment for their children if they get elected.”

The school councils were created following a 1988 reform act that sought to decentralize management and strengthen local control of neighborhood schools. In 1995, Mayor Daley appointed a chief executive officer to CPS and established a five-member board of trustees to focus on reforming the district, a move that critics said limited the councils’ powers.

Thomas Driscoll chairs the council at Agassiz Elementary, a pre-kindergarten through eighth grade magnet school in Lake View that serves roughly 350 students. He felt that Meeks’ bill was ill-advised.

“I believe the general overall consensus is that parental involvement in all areas of child education is the critical ingredient for success,” said Driscoll.

Agassiz, at 2851 N. Seminary, has consistently exceeded state standards in reading and mathematics since 2002.

According to research from the education policy group Designs for Change, a majority of the 144 public schools in Chicago that saw significant improvement between 1990 and 2005 were lead by parent-majority councils.

Another one of the group’s studies states that high schools under CPS board control between 2001 and 2007 saw only marginal gains in students exceeding state test scores in math and reading.

Valencia Rias, a senior organizer with Designs for Change, said that leadership reform within the district should reinforce the councils’ abilities, not take away their seat at the table.

“A democratic process is always better than a dictatorship,” she said. “Although it’s not perfect, we don’t want to go back to the way it was.”

Rias, who is also an LSC member at Entrepreneurship High School on the South Side, said that the councils provide a unique opportunity to address issues surrounding the schools — from neighborhood violence to performance oversight for principals.

She said that if some councils had served inadequately, it was because the district limits the council members’ input on policy decisions and their exposure to administrative data such as audits and staffing lists at the schools.

UIC’s Mayrowetz said that, if passed, the bill might bring about significant differences in faculty and principals being hired within the CPS pool.

“I think it’s likely that we’ll see some school communities underwhelmed by the choice of principals,” he said. “I also think that there will be an opening for CPS to remove principals who really shouldn’t be running schools.”

He added said the legislation could pave a hiring inroad for graduates of educator training initiatives like New Leaders for New Schools and UIC’s Urban Education Leadership program, which target low-performing urban schools for improvement.

The Meeks bill was not yet scheduled to go before committee as of press time on Wednesday.