When Thompson was president of the Board of Education he ran the old system.
Ooh. Old! That sounds scary!
Dropout rates increased.
Now we simply don't count dropouts. It's as though they never existed!
Kids promoted, even if they didn’t learn.
Now we just simplify the tests. Everybody gets promoted!
Woo hoo!
Billions in cost overruns.
Now we save money by packing 'em in like sardines! No one can squeeze 'em in like Mayor Mike!
And nothing was done about it.
We've done plenty! We've taken hundreds of millions to reduce class sizes, kept the cash, and raised 'em anyway! Then we cut budgets to boot.
Mike Bloomberg changed that system.
And with the money he saved, he built two sports stadiums!
Now, record graduation rates.
Not necessarily good graduation rates, but how many people watching this commercial will bother to check out that claim? And not counting dropouts as dropouts helps a lot!
Test scores up,
...now that we've dumbed down the tests. Pay no attention to those troublesome NAEP results! And for goodness sakes, don't listen to that awful Diane Ravitch!
violence down.
We insist every incident be reported. Then we close down any schools that actually report anything. What possible motivation would anyone have to withhold info?
So when you compare apples to apples, Thompson offers politics as usual.
There's no way Thompson could run a PR machine that manages to pull the wool over the public's eyes for eight years, and no way he could fit those tabloid editorial pages in his hip pocket. He simply hasn't got the cash.
Mike Bloomberg offers progress.
No one can pack kids in tighter than Mayor Mike. Despite years of promises to reduce class sizes and overcrowding, we've failed abysmally, and for the most part, no one even knows about it!
And just how many politicians could call overturning term limits disgusting, and then do it anyway? All hail Mayor-for-life Bloomberg!
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