It’s being described as a charm offensive, an olive branch and a peace offering. But nobody dare claim that Mayor de Blasio’s effort to quiet the war over charters marks a fundamental change of heart.
For that to happen, de Blasio would need to look in the mirror and say, “Stop it.” Or, better yet, “Grow up!”
That may be a bridge too far. To go beyond merely tolerating charters and actually recognizing their extraordinary accomplishments and potential, de Blasio would have to repudiate his faith in big government and his union allies.
Charters are creative and dynamic disrupters that threaten the old-school status quo de Blasio represents. He bought himself a mountain of trouble by trying to strangle the movement, and now he’s desperately seeking a public- relations fix.
He says, “I didn’t measure up when it came to explaining” his decisions, but that’s radar dust.
The decisions themselves are the issue.
They are not rookie mistakes. He campaigned on promises to his Occupy friends and union stooges that he’d crush charters, and he’s keeping those promises, or trying to, anyway. What he never expected was organized and determined opposition, including from Gov. Cuomo.
Although emotionally powerful TV ads from charter backers are hurting de Blasio’s popularity, strong public disapproval of his policies is at the heart of the resistance.
Poll after poll has shown for years that New Yorkers like the charter experiment as a new way to educate poor black and Latino children, and the mayor’s bizarre compulsion to deny the success damages his credibility. His policies don’t make a whit of sense if he really aims to help children.
A Quinnipiac poll showed that only 38 percent of voters approve of de Blasio’s handling of schools, against 49 percent disapproval. The public clearly thinks he’s wrong and isn’t likely to fall for his head fake.
The mayor’s problem is that charters are the antichrist of his world view. He’s a statist, a man who liked what Fidel Castro did in Cuba and praised the Sandinistas.
To him, government knows best and can never have too much power or money. He seems to believe that more bureaucrats and higher taxes can fix every failure.
And nothing in New York fails like public education. Crime has been tamed, public health improved and much of Gotham gleams like never before, yet too many schools remain a disaster.
The system is a sclerotic, union-political monopoly with no accountability and dismal results not tolerated anywhere else. Apart from gifted and talented programs and the test-in high schools that de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña want to dismantle, nothing really works. Except charters.
So, in the perverse world of “progressives,” they are the problem. Their excellence cannot be tolerated because the politics of envy can’t abide meritorious inequality.
“The answer is not to save a few of our children only,” de Blasio said Sunday. “The answer is not to find an escape route that some can follow and others can’t. The answer is to fix the entire system.”
He has it exactly backwards. The way to “fix the entire system” is to study success, and duplicate it. But his ideology won’t allow that because the success isn’t subject to his control.
Here’s the ultimate inconvenient fact: The biggest difference between charters and traditional public schools is that most charters are free of union control.
To believe otherwise is to believe charter success at closing the racial achievement gap is a coincidence.
Against that backdrop, it is nearly impossible to expect de Blasio to fix education. Still, if he is serious when he says he wants to “shake up the system,” there are ways to prove it.
He can start by restoring the capital funding for charters he cut so classroom space isn’t a problem. He can drop the punitive plan to charge them rent, and demand that Albany lift the cap on their numbers.
Then he can go to work on his teacher-union pals and demand real changes in the contract. The school day must be longer, bad schools must be closed, and bad teachers must be sent packing. Perverts, crooks and thugs have no business on the payroll, and the best teachers, based on student performance, deserve a raise.
Those things happen in the best charters, so the path to excellence has been established. The question is whether de Blasio has the courage and wisdom to follow it.
Towering lapses at world’s top terror target
It’s simultaneously unnerving and reassuring to learn that President Obama worries about “a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.” But it’s downright scary that security is tighter at ordinary office buildings than it is at the Freedom Tower.
Twice in recent months, people sneaked into the world’s greatest terror target without being stopped. A teenager climbed up to the 1,776-foot spire last week, and three men parachuted from the building last fall.
One of the jumpers worked on construction there and knew how to evade security. But that wasn’t hard, according to an alleged accomplice, who said they sneaked through a hole in the fence that was covered with a tarp. He said it took “no effort whatsoever,” adding, “God forbid it was somebody else getting in there with intentions to harm New Yorkers.”
Yes, God forbid. Because apparently, security doesn’t.
Mrs. Bam, aka Her Maje$ty
“With freedom comes responsibility,” Eleanor Roosevelt said.
It’s a lesson one of her successors has yet to learn.
First Lady Michelle Obama’s junket to China is a spring-break vacation masquerading as work.
As she has in the past, Obama spends taxpayer money in ways that reek of imperial arrogance.
Reports say she, her mother and daughters are occupying an $8,400-a-night presidential suite in a five-star hotel in Beijing. Government bean counters reportedly said the rooms were too expensive for Vice President Joe Biden, who found less pricey digs for his December visit.
But nothing is too lavish for the first lady, who is said to have an entourage of nearly 70 people, including security.
The cost is forcing the White House to spin the vacation as “person-to-person” soft-diplomacy, yet American media were pushed aside. A top aide to the president insisted the trip shows “the relationship between the United States and China is not just between leaders — it’s a relationship between peoples.”
Nonsense. Unfortunately, there is no law to stop the first family from milking the perks of the presidency. The only limit is a sense of responsibility, which Mrs. Obama lacks.
Plains nonsense
Jimmy Carter suspects the feds read his e-mails, telling NBC that “when I want to communicate with a foreign leader privately, I type or write the letter myself, put it in the post office and mail it.”
Methinks Carter is starved for attention. Nobody in their right mind could possibly care what he says about anything.