Schooling the Mayor

In today's NY Sun the paper's Andrew Wolf continues to highlight the deficiencies of the mayor's control of the school system. In fact, so egregious are the mayor's errors, and those of "Top-Down" Klein the chancellor, that Wolf believes that they may prove to be the death knell for continued mayoral control of the schools.

Which would be a shame, because we believe that it is important to have political control and accountability in education-and a return to the past would conceivably be worse even than the mess that Bloomberg has made in running the system. We're not terribly surprised by all of this because we have commented in the past on the complete lack of policy expertise that Bloomberg brought to the mandate for mayoral control.

What this means is that the next mayor needs to lay out a clear picture of how he/she would attack the educational malaise that Bloombergistas have wrought; and how one can creatively meld mayoral control with parental input to make the system function more effectively. Clearly, however, simply being a "good manager" without any concomitant educational vision is a recipe for disaster. Mike Bloomberg has proven this.