If you picked “321” a few days ago, get to your local deli for your $500. You won.
But, unfortunately, someone else lost because that’s the number of days it took for Andrew Cuomo effectively to take “control” of the City’s schools out of the hands of our current mayor. Of course, Mayor de Blasio technically still “controls” the schools until June 30, 2015 but now he does so in name only.
Last spring, our new mayor ran into a buzz-saw
named Andrew Cuomo on a number of education policy issues. During his campaign for mayor, de
Blasio advocated a tax on high income earners to fund his plan for universal
pre-K in the City. Governor Cuomo
disagreed. The mayor put a large
pile of chips that he’d earned in his sweeping victory on his proposal. Andrew Cuomo picked up the chips and
announced that he would provide funding for pre-K programs around the state
through the State budget process.
Andrew Cuomo is a man who doesn’t step back from a
fight. A few weeks later, our mayor put a few more of his chips down on a plan
that gave the go ahead for the expansion of a raft of charter schools previously
approved by Mayor Bloomberg, but blocked the co-location in over-crowded public
schools of three Success Academy schools run by the formidable Eva
Moskowitz. Moskowitz closed her
schools for a day and bused thousands of her students and their parents to
Albany for a rally that was billed as a field trip to observe how State
government operates. Governor
Cuomo announced at the Moskowitz rally that he disagreed with the mayor,
pledged his firm support for charter schools and picked up the pile of chips
the mayor had put down.
Andrew Cuomo is a man who means what he says. Just
before the last election he announced that the public school system in New York
State “was one of the only remaining public monopolies” and that he would break
it. Andrew Cuomo is an impatient
man with both eyes firmly planted on his legacy. Just after the election, he announced “What I will have thus
far: marriage quality, gun safety, on a different level pension reform, fiscal
reform and education reform, teacher evaluation, performance,” Cuomo said.
“These things are profound changes that 50 years from now will have made a significant
difference in this state.”
Andrew Cuomo is a man who likes putting chips that
belong to other politicians into his own pocket. Last week, Cuomo’s Education
Commissioner, John King, demanded that the City provide a plan for remediating
94 low-performing city schools. A
few days later, the Mayor found a few more chips behind the sofa cushion in his
office and announced to much fanfare a “School Renewal Program” that was hailed
as a repudiation of the school-closing policies of the Bloomberg era and the
beginning of a new approach that would turn troubled schools into community
schools with “wraparound” social services provided by local organizations. Teachers at schools in the “Renewal”
program would be required to reapply for their jobs as part of an agreement
worked out with the United Federation of Teachers that puts teachers displaced
from any of those schools into a gray middle zone between assigned teacher and
ATR.
But that wasn’t enough for Andrew Cuomo because the
legacy he wants people to associate with him fifty years from now is breaking
the “public education monopoly” and the teachers union that has been desperately
placating him since 2010. On
Monday, Andrew Cuomo began to execute his plan. He had Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the New York State Board
of Regents, announce that the part of the mayor’s “Renewal” plan that involved
teachers didn’t go far enough. She
said, “From the state’s perspective, if we do not see movement with these
lowest-performing schools in terms of their ability to retool their workforces
by the spring, we will move to close them….It depends upon what they do with
the money... There needs to be the capacity to manage how and where we place
our teachers….You gotta give the new principals and assistant principals the
ability to hire the teachers that they want and fire the teachers that they
don’t want.”
But what Andrew Cuomo really cares about is
breaking the union that provides the monopolist teachers who staff the last
great monopoly. He wants to close those
94 schools in six months just as schools have been closed for the last twelve
years rather than support them with the extra resources and services that the
mayor wants to give them. The
problem with those schools is not principals who don’t want to run them or a
long-standing lack of support for some of the most disempowered communities in
the City. Once again, it is those
monopolist teachers who are to blame.
Andrew Cuomo wants to make sure that the
progressive mayor of New York City and its teachers union can’t “control” the
schools that rightfully belong to the investment bankers and charter companies
that funded Cuomo’s reelection campaign.
And the truly wonderful thing for Andrew Cuomo is that he doesn’t have
to do something messy like change the law that provides for mayoral control of
the City’s schools. He can just
take effective control out of the hands of this mayor by
fiat through his complacent Board of Regents while reserving the right to give
back control to some other mayor who looks more like the City’s last mayor.
Mr. de Blasio, we hope you enjoyed your time “controlling”
the City’s schools. But the next time you walk into Tweed to meet with “your”
Chancellor be sure to bring an ID card.
You’ll be asked for one. As
for those last few chips you still have, hold onto them tightly and use them
for something you really do control, like the Parks Department.
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