For more than a year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been talking about renewing the governance law first enacted in 2002. The law gave him and city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein control of city public schools. At midnight July 1, that law was allowed to lapse by a state Senate mired in a partisan battle.
The system was working. The mayor and Klein were accountable for school quality. Test scores and graduation rates were up. Schools made certain students had a basic grasp of material before passing on to the next grade.
Even as the deadline neared, the mayor held out hope senators would set aside their differences and vote on a matter important to the more than 1 million children in city schools. Despite a plea from the mayor and threats from the governor, the Senate was unable to get the quorum needed to vote on 125 bills.
The senators, especially Hiram Monserrate, who jumped ship and gave the Republicans a temporary majority, and Sen. Dean Skelos should be ashamed for betraying city children.
But the mayor and five borough presidents should be proud of how they responded to the crisis. By midday July 1, they stood with the mayor at City Hall to announce they would “do our best to keep [the children] from becoming victims of the Albany train wreck.”
The mayor had two appointments to the board and each borough president one. Borough President Helen Marshall appointed Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, a Queens resident with experience in the education system, giving the mayor virtual control of the city Board of Education. Remarkably, the board had already conducted an emergency meeting before the noon press conference.
The borough presidents put aside partisan concerns to do what was necessary for city children. The energy, unity and overall goodwill of that conference was impressive. The mayor was able to do what Paterson has failed to do. He got political leaders to set aside their differences and keep the schools running.
UFT President Randi Weingarten praised the mayor’s demonstration: “I think they made a lot of strides in terms of both maintaining the stability and cohesion of mayoral control as well as creating a lot of checks and balances.”
