Bruised and battered from his first collision with Albany, Mayor Bill de Blasio is trying to put a smiley face on the outcome. But beyond the dollars he got and the tax hike he didn’t, the key test is whether he actually learned anything.
To judge from his early reaction, he learned something, but not nearly enough.
He learned that fighting with Gov. Andrew Cuomo guarantees him a bloody nose, and that Eva Moskowitz and the charter movement are more powerful than the teachers unions. Indeed, de Blasio has, temporarily at least, stopped picking fights with the wrong people.
That explains his profuse praise Monday for the governor he only recently accused of not caring about city kids. And he wisely did not challenge the historic provisions that protect and expand charters beyond anything that existed before he tried to kill them.
Talk about a backfire. The mayor didn’t just fail to strangle the movement. He lost much of the control over charters he had, making this the first significant setback for mayoral control of schools.
That experience, and the media pummeling, probably also explain why City Hall is pivoting back to an old foil — the Bloomberg administration — to give it a few new slaps.
Top cop Bill Bratton went on television to rehash tired attacks on stop-and-frisk, and to claim the NYPD he inherited suffered from low morale. And de Blasio’s new Superstorm Sandy recovery czar, Amy Peterson, complained to the City Council about the slow pace of reconstruction under the former mayor.
The timing made it easy to imagine de Blasio’s political team cooking up the attacks to remind voters why they elected him. With his most recent approval rating at a measly 45 percent, the mayor effectively picked a fight with a predecessor who took a vow of silence. That might be the only fight he can win.
As for the rest of de Blasio’s learning curve, he has a steep hill to climb. Consider his description of the impact of state funds for pre-kindergarten and after-school programs, which scaled the heights of rhetorical ridiculousness.
“The whole school system will be different after we put these investments in place,” he said Monday. “And we’ll look back and realize this was one of the moments where things change.”
Wife Chirlane McCray chimed in with an e-mail that insisted pre-K means “a new kind of city will begin to emerge.”
Their hyperventilating recalls President Obama’s hubris in 2008, when he said his nomination marked “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
We know how that worked out, and de Blasio is likewise doomed to be accused of over-promising and under-delivering.
For one thing, the city will get about $300 million more a year dedicated to the programs, which, in an education budget of nearly $21 billion, means less than an extra 2 percent. If that’s going to create a “new city,” where is the first $21 billion going?
And that gets to de Blasio’s claims that his programs are the Holy Grail and the silver bullet all in one. Inequality, poverty, crime, joblessness — he suggests the programs will fix everything.
Even allowing for rookie hyperbole, this is nonsense. Pre-K aimed at vulnerable kids has been around since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, mostly under Head Start programs, and the record is mixed at best.
The most important finding is that even quality early education doesn’t stick for most children unless they have parents involved and quality teachers throughout elementary and middle school.
If they don’t, they quickly begin to backslide. Studies show that many students fall behind by six months per year, meaning they are barely literate when they get to high school. If they graduate, some can’t read their diplomas, and only a sliver are ready for college or work.
Ending that pattern is the heart of the modern reform movement and the genesis of charter schools. The best ones, such as those run by Moskowitz, prove their value by showing that the same kinds of kids who fail in traditional public schools can succeed, and even excel, in the right environment.
Yet de Blasio has not said anything — anything! — about how he will improve student performance for the 1.1 million kids already in school.
He says the system is “in a crisis,” but his silence about substantive changes suggests he sees only new students, starting with September’s class of 4-year-olds, as his responsibility.
That’s not just a mistake, it’s a cruel and reckless abdication of his duty. It’s also proof that he’s still got a lot to learn about being mayor of New York.
There is no DiNapoli ever after
Rest assured that, starting now, Tom DiNapoli will be a lot more careful about what he wishes for. The state comptroller long demanded public financing of campaigns, but now that he’s got it, he’s having second thoughts.
Showing they have a sense of humor about how to kneecap competing power centers, Cuomo and legislative leaders agreed on what they called an experiment involving public matching funds and donation limits. The law would apply to the controller’s race only — and only for this year. They defend the odd arrangement by saying DiNapoli proposed a similar scheme himself, so he should take yes for an answer.
While there are questions about whether the state Board of Elections could get its act together in time, the biggest impact would be on DiNapoli’s fund-raising. He’s got a reported $2.1 million in the bank and would have to return about 75 percent of the money, or at least not use it this year under the new rules.
Suddenly, the Democrat doesn’t like the program. “The process was flawed: I was excluded from the negotiations, and it appears a historic opportunity was missed for comprehensive campaign-finance reform,” he said in a statement. He also said he wondered whether it was “set up for failure.”
There’s just no pleasing some people.
Israelity check
It is understandable that Palestinians and other Muslims refuse to acknowledge that Israel is a Jewish state. After all, it means nothing that Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan all are formally known as Islamic republics. And just because there is an Arab League of 22 countries, there’s no way Jews should have a whole country. Who do they think they are?
What a chucklehead
With Russian President Vladimir Putin massing his troops at the doors of Europe and Obama planning to cut America’s military, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has come up with a brainstorm: He’s “looking at” banning tobacco sales on military bases.
And the band played on.
Reader Joyce Miller asks a question for the ages: “History will record the corruption, mendacity, lawlessness, and mediocrity of this president, but will it also record the blindfolded surrender of the mainstream media to the forces of the left?”