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SETTING THE TABLE

Mayor Bloomberg lays out his vision for New York in 2007

By John DeSio

When he took office in 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised to bring a new culture of success to the city’s public school system. In his State of the City address last week, Bloomberg announced that his administration would roll many of those changes back.

During his first term, Bloomberg and Schools’ Chancellor Joel Klein worked together to bring the entire public school system under their collective thumbs. District offices, which had autonomy under the previous system, were eliminated for larger regional bureaucracies. Regional superintendents reported directly to Klein, who watched over them like a hawk. This was wrong, said critics, who argued that administrators needed independence from the head office to properly manage their schools.

From his comments last week, Bloomberg is prepared to undo much of that, at least symbolically. The mayor announced that he will empower principals to run their own schools, firmly placing many key responsibilities in the lap of each school’s particular leader.

“Today, important decisions about, for example, teacher professional development, get made for principals by regional offices—whether the principals like it or not,” said Bloomberg. “But beginning this year, principals will have the power to make such choices themselves. No one, not outside consultants or the [Department of Education], will be able to force such decisions on principals. The principal’s will be in charge of what’s best for their students, always.”

In exchange for all this new freedom, Bloomberg also announced a new initiative that would serve to publicly embarrass those same principals. By next year, the Department of Education will begin to send each public school parent a report card on city schools, grading each like a high school term paper by assigning a letter grade between “A” and “F.”

“Personally, I can’t think of a better way to hold a principal’s feet to the fire than arming mom and dad with the facts about how well or poorly, their children’s school is performing,” said Bloomberg. One can only imagine how thrilled many of those principals were to hear that come September they will be greeted by a rowdy mob of angry parents, demanding an explanation as to why their child’s school is in such awful shape.

Maybe they can take their minds off of the poor quality of their child’s education with a shopping spree. Bloomberg also announced a proposal to cut $1 billion in taxes this year, including the total elimination of the city’s sales tax on clothing and footwear. Bloomberg said he would also call on the City Council to work with him to lower the property tax rate, and would ask the State Legislature to keep the $400 rebate program, which awards property owners a small windfall once the budget outlooks are finalized.

For some months Bloomberg’s name has been mentioned as a serious contender for president in 2008, as a self-financed, third party candidate. And last week’s speech is filled with the type of financial populism the American public loves. At the same time Bloomberg is cutting taxes at home, he is announcing a new initiative in which the city will fill out the forms for you if you are owed money through the Earned Income Tax Credit. Anything he can do to put more money into your pocket Bloomberg will do, reversing his tax hike trend of his first term.

As for his most daunting challenge to any national ambition, Bloomberg is still sticking to his guns. The mayor furthered his battle against illegal guns, stating that he and his coalition of more than 50 mayors from across the nation would continue their work to “bring sanity to gun policy” in the United States. “It’s time to take ideology out of crime fighting and time to give mayors—the people who are responsible for policing our streets—the tools we need to protect our citizens,” said Bloomberg.

Though illegal guns are the public target, Bloomberg’s anti-gun agenda has drawn the ire of many gun rights organizations, who see Bloomberg as doing nothing more than opening the door to the elimination of legal gun rights altogether. Last week, Idaho Falls Mayor Jared Fuhriman, a member of Bloomberg’s coalition, backed out of the group after saying he saw the ideological writing on the wall. “I could see there was a conflict with the NRA and with some of the beliefs we have here in Idaho,” Fuhriman told an Idaho newspaper.

If Bloomberg is serious about a third-party run, his performance over the next year will go a long way towards forming the record he will be judged on. His anti-gun position might not play well in some (well, many) sections of the country. But maybe the mayor will be able to score points for his conviction. Come 2008, he will be the man who had an unpopular view and stuck with it, which is more than can be said of many other politicians. 
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