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On Wednesday evening, Mayor Bloomberg huddled closely with Joel Klein, his former schools chancellor and trusted confidant, at an event honoring the educator at The Pierre hotel in Midtown.
A dejected Bloomberg confided in him that the candidate he chose to succeed Klein, Cathie Black — an unqualified magazine exec he repeatedly defended despite her bungling of the position for 96 days — had screwed up for the last time and needed to be fired.
Bloomberg admitted the breaking point came earlier that day when Black’s most competent deputy chancellor, John White, quit — the fourth top DOE official to defect since Black took over the nation’s largest school system.
“White was running the system,” a source said. “The mayor felt he needed to make a move.”
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Bloomberg called Black into his office at City Hall yesterday morning and forced her to resign. A relieved Black — whose absence from the Klein event at The Pierre suggested she knew her days were numbered — was happy to oblige.
“I take full responsibility for the fact that this did not work out,” Bloomberg said at a press conference. “The story had really become about her and away from the kids, and that’s not right.”
He replaced Black with his loyal and respected deputy mayor Dennis Walcott, who has served as a cross between a chaperone and mentor to Black since the announcement of her appointment on Nov. 11.
Black began serving on Jan. 1.
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Sources said the decision to whack Black didn’t come easy to the mayor — who, despite months of bad press, his own plummeting public approval ratings, and Black’s series of embarrassing public gaffes, was planning to stand behind his embattled appointee.
In an interview on the Syracuse public radio station, WCNY, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said Bloomberg was “somber” when he called her with the news.
“Ms. Black is a personal friend of the mayor, so I’m sure that any type of disruption here has a huge uncomfortable implication for everyone,” Tisch said. “I know how loyal he is to the people he asks to join him in city government, and none of these are easy choices.”
A source close to the administration said Black felt she was doomed from the start because she never got Klein’s support.
Klein was hoping one of his former deputies, Eric Nadelstern, would get the chancellorship.
But while she thought she was at a disadvantage, it was really her own actions that led to her undoing, observers say.
At a meeting with parents, Black made a crack about “birth control” being a solution to school overcrowding. At that same meeting, she bizarrely likened her decisions on overcrowding to making a “Sophie’s Choice” — selecting which of her children would be killed by the Nazis.
A month later, she contorted her face and mocked parents at a school closure hearing.
“The bottom line is that this was a bigger mess than she thought, and basically everybody started leaving,” the source said.
Two recent polls concluded her approval rating was just 17 percent — the lowest of any public official in the city.
Sources within the administration said that over the past two weeks, they repeatedly discussed with the mayor Black’s shortcomings because “she couldn’t get the job done.”
“There was a growing sense this was not a correctable situation,” one source said.
When the dam finally burst Wednesday, a City Council hearing on the education budget planned for the following morning was hastily pushed back a day.
When Black arrived at her Park Avenue home yesterday afternoon, she told reporters she was happy to have served.
“It’s been a great privilege to serve the City of New York and the mayor for three months,” she said.
“I went out, I bought a new pair of running shoes today, so I’m off,” she added.
“Dennis is fantastic,” Black said Friday morning.
Additional reporting by Amber Sutherland, Jennifer Bain, Brendan Scott and Yoav Gonen