The Russians are Coming,The Russians are Coming

That master of historical allusion is at it again-this time Mike Bloomberg is comparing any dilution of mayoral control of the schools to the return of the old Soviet Union (via Liz): "Using some of his toughest language yet, Mayor Bloomberg demanded that the gridlocked Senate pass the Assembly's mayoral control bill or risk throwing the entire system into "chaos", the DN's Frank Lombardi reports. “If the Senate passes something that differs by one word or more it is saying to the city: We want to resurrect the Soviet Union, we want to bring back chaos.” Bloomberg fumed."

That's what we like about Mike, he's always ready with an inapt analogy for our edification. In fact, there's so much wrong with this one, that we don't even know where to begin. Well, to start, the old Soviets were are corrupt bunch of thugs, but chaos hardly describes their dictatorial rein. Which underscores the thin ice that Bloomberg I is skating on-there's more to his particular governing style that resembles the autocratic than the hapless old BOE.

What's amusing, is that he has started to believe the editorial echo chamber: "You want to see a school system in disarray? A good example would be the Albany Senate - nobody in charge and they can’t function. And that’s exactly what happened before when nobody was in charge of (the) school system. And once you get somebody in charge, you might not agree with every decision, but it’s pretty hard to disagree with the results.”

Well, we were no fans of the old system-and our knowledge was gleaned first hand from five years of teaching elementary school-but to imply that the old system was totally dysfunctional is a bit too much for us. And, as far as the "results" are concerned, we believe that the entire examination process is watered down; providing misleading progress reports for an eager bunch of self servers.

So we hope that Senator Sampson calls the mayor's bluff; and a poison pill is just the kind of medicine that an unaccountable mayor needs to swallow in order to instill humility where only hubris has ever been evinced. Let's see if the senate Dems have the cojones for this.