A dose of exaggeration is inevitable and occasionally welcome in politics. But in making his case for keeping control of New York schools, Mayor Bill de Blasio is crossing the line into pulp fiction.
Standing in City Hall’s glorious rotunda, the mayor warned that any change would invite the return of “chaos” and “corruption.” The implied subtext, that he is running a smooth, honest operation, is so obviously untrue that he might well have winked and nodded.
To add irony to insult, he was surrounded by children holding “Pass mayoral control” signs as he insisted, “We don’t want our children treated as political pawns.”
Hey, pawn, smile for the camera. No, wait, don’t smile. Look sad and angry.
So it goes in the cynical swamp known as New York. The mayor who presides over one of the most corrupt and incompetent administrations in memory holds a rally for children that is dominated by union members where he warns that a nonexistent utopia is at risk.
The gathering was such a soulless gesture that even the teachers union, which has benefited the most from de Blasio’s tenure, skipped it as unnecessary.
Unhelpful would have been more accurate, for the greatest threat to mayoral control is this mayor’s false claim to have been a wise steward of the power Albany granted. His many failures, and especially his ruthless bid to strangle the charter movement, explain why the state Senate is threatening to let the power expire at the end of the month.
In theory, mayoral control is a no-brainer. In fact, under this mayor, the schools are slipping backward, even as the cost skyrockets.
Failure doesn’t come cheap in de Blasio’s New York. The schools’ operating budget is $24.3 billion, and another $6.5 billion covers pensions and debt service, according to the Department of Education. In addition, there is a $15.5 billion capital plan through fiscal year 2019.
This gusher of city, state and federal money defeats any claim that New York doesn’t “invest” in its children. In fact, it invests like a drunken sailor, with similar results.
Credibility is also a casualty. The mayor’s team uses every loophole to lower standards, including on discipline, so they can pepper the debate with happy talk about statistical improvement.
And no teacher need fear the ax, even when students graduate without being able to read their diplomas.
The lack of consequences is exactly why then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg succeeded in gaining mayoral control in 2002. If it is now failing, why should it be continued?
After all, the current mayor’s brand of mayoral control amounts to union control, which takes the city back to the pre-Bloomberg era. Since de Blasio isn’t using the power for actual progress, why not take it away?
The answer is the real tragedy: There is no reliable place to put the power. The history of New York’s school wars illustrates the point.
The turbulence over decentralization, which involved racial politics and rank anti-Semitism, reached its peak under Mayor John V. Lindsay, who was so embattled that he was given no seats on the ruling Board of Education. Eventually, the mayor got two of the seven seats, with the five borough presidents each getting one.
The goal was to keep local control by forcing the mayor to win over at least two borough presidents to get a majority. In reality, the unions controlled most of the borough leaders, so no chancellor could get the job or take action without union approval, which immediately doomed reform.
Mayors Ed Koch, David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani chafed under the structure because it made them responsible for the budget without the authority to make real change. Going back to a system of fractured power, then, isn’t a step forward.
The awful truth is that mayoral control is the best solution, but it won’t work as long as the mayor’s name is de Blasio. The only hope is partial — that Albany exercises greater oversight to prevent disaster, which is what Senate leader John Flanagan is offering City Hall.
Flanagan, a Long Island Republican, wants better answers on how the city spends billions of state taxpayer dollars. And he wants de Blasio to get out of the way of adding more charters. Those are reasonable demands, and the mayor is foolish to reject them.
That he does so shows his arrogance, and his hypocrisy in pretending to care about at-risk children. The best charter schools have broken through the barriers of race, class and ZIP code to show that most children can meet high standards.
Yet the mayor resists for one simple reason: As the chief errand boy of the unions, he is sworn to protect them from charter competition. Unions give him money and votes and he lets them run the schools, the results be damned.
That’s the truth, the whole truth, and everything else is fiction.
Still lax on terror
Another day, another attempted terror attack in Europe. Yesterday, it was Belgium, the day before, it was Paris.
Most intelligence analysts say that the Islamic State is stepping up individual attacks in response to the fact that American and coalition forces are shrinking the territory it controls in Iraq and Syria. The theory is that the barbarians want to inflict civilian casualties in the West to distract attention from their battlefield defeats.
Whatever the truth, the facts compel tighter restrictions on potential jihadists who are already on law enforcement’s radar.
Unfortunately, a lax approach still dominates. For example, officials admitted that the man who rammed a car filled with guns and gas canisters into a police van on the Champs-Elysées had a gun permit despite being on France’s terror watch list.
Why does that keep happening? Nearly every major attack, including many in the US, involve men suspected of being radicalized, yet they were free to carry out their mayhem.
Numbers are part of the problem, with Great Britain watching some 23,000 people. That takes enormous police power, with much of it certain to be wasted.
But what is the alternative? Public safety must come first or Western cities will become full-time war zones.
Odd day without POT shots
Stop the presses! Tuesday’s New York Times did not have a single front-page story accusing President Trump of doing anything dastardly, despicable or just different.
Even more stunning, there was a David Brooks column inside saying “it is striking how little evidence there is that any underlying crime occurred — that there was any actual collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians.”
Hmmm. Inquiring minds want to know, what’s up, Gray Lady?
Yikes, ski-sy does it!
That’s going to leave a mark.
A story headlined “Skiers Hit the Slopes in Bikini Tops as California’s Endless Winter Endures a Heat Wave” contained the not-so-sexy facts: “Patrol workers describe dealing with brutal skin abrasions on bare-skinned skiers who fall.”
Ouch!