‘I take full responsibility,” Mayor Bloomberg said Thursday morning after announcing that Schools Chancellor Cathie Black was stepping down.
The mayor fought for mayoral control of city schools and championed its renewal, so his political stock had been riding on Black — and mostly falling — in the three months since he chose her for the job.
In choosing Dennis Walcott to take over, however, Bloomberg has a great opportunity to restore his political luster.
As the deputy mayor for education for a decade, Walcott is well-prepared to lead the nation’s largest school district. He holds two master’s degrees, taught school for two years and at one time presided over the politically riven Board of Education. Walcott has been the low-key architect behind the mayor’s education-reform agenda. He’ll also be a harder target than Black — who’d quickly become one of the two most-vilified women in public education. (The other — charter-school leader Eva Moskowitz, CEO of the Success Charter School Network — is a longtime player who no one will be pushing out anytime soon.)
Bloomberg has made a virtue of taking responsibility for his decisions and actions — a quality typically lacking among politicians today. Indeed, he personifies the principle behind mayoral control of city schools. No longer is it a faceless, bloodless bureaucracy protecting the education status quo. New Yorkers hold Bloomberg as responsible for educating their children as for clearing snow from their block.
Mayor Rudy Giuliani once quipped about blowing up 110 Livingston St., the headquarters of the old Board of Education — which he not unfairly painted as a bureaucratic swamp. Bloomberg actually got that edifice sold off after he’d won mayoral control — and its replacement, the Tweed Building, which sits behind City Hall, is an active education-reform laboratory.
Now that Chancellor-designate Walcott is at the helm of the schools, the reform agenda will proceed at flank speed. Some early targets are obvious: Despite all of former Chancellor Joel Klein’s best efforts, city middle schools remain an academic black hole; our high schools have a higher graduation rate, but too few graduates are ready for the academic rigors of college. Walcott has the ability to put the final pieces into place.
He has the charm, political savvy and “community roots” that neither Klein nor Black possessed. In him, the political class finds someone who is equal parts cool, pragmatic and open. His policy chops make him the equal of education reformers and union leaders. And he won’t be mau-maued by the education activists.
Dennis Walcott, who was educated in the city public schools, is a Queens kid who has done well. He embodies the striver’s mentality that many New Yorkers try to inculcate in their children. Like many parents, Walcott knows the heartache that a wayward child can cause. In him, parents have a role model and an empathetic education leader.
In short, Walcott is more than an education reformer with soul; he is also a policy wonk who can translate his aims so that parents can embrace them as their own — so that the self-appointed advocates will have to get on board or be left on the sidelines.
Together, they can restore New York City public education as the path into the American middle class.
Michael Benjamin retired from the As sembly last year after eight years repre senting a Bronx district.