Mayor Bloomberg got it right yester day when he called the disgraceful verbal savaging of Schools Chan cellor Cathie Black Thursday night an assault on the entire school system.
So much for post-Tucson civility.
The chancellor, in fact, showed great patience as she tried to deliver her remarks through an unending cascade of jeering, booing and catcalls — before nearly 2,000 people in the audience at a schools-closing hearing got up and stomped out.
This just 24 hours after Black received an equally harsh greeting — by many of the same culprits — during a meeting at which the Panel for Educational Policy voted to shut 10 failing high schools and open a new Upper West Side charter school run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz.
Both moves were important steps in the continuing process of addressing non-performing schools — as was Thursday’s vote to shut 12 more sub-standard schools.
That the assault was led by local elected officials — Brooklyn Council Members Jumaane Williams and the professionally obnoxious Charles Barron — and teachers union president Michael Mulgrew is particularly reprehensible.
As Black tried to explain why the Department of Education wants to close schools — a decade or more of “persistently poor performance” — she was drowned out by a torrent of rowdy heckling and personal abuse.
Yet Barron accused the chancellor of showing “the height of disrespect” to those present.
Incredible.
“This is embarrassing for New York City, New York state [and] for America,” the mayor said yesterday on his weekly radio broadcast.
“This is not democracy — letting people yell and scream. That’s not freedom of expression. That’s just trying to take away somebody else’s rights.”
Frankly, the protesters’ behavior wasn’t all that surprising, given the presence of some people who’ve made a specialty of such incendiary behavior.
But it’s Mulgrew who should be most ashamed of himself.
Indeed, he shamed New York.
He and his union reflexively oppose all efforts to deal with failed schools — because constructive change threatens their narrow, selfish interests.
All in all, a disgraceful performance.