Mayor de Blasio traveled to La Guardia Community College in Queens Monday to paint once more his vision for New York City.
He put a check in each of his major campaign-trail boxes — “income inequality,” “affordable housing,” “save the hospitals” and so forth. And both Superstorm Sandy and stop-and-frisk victims got their due — as did, of course, “the children.” (Don’t they always?)
And it wouldn’t have been a de Blasio speech without evildoers — in this case, unnamed real-estate developers, anonymous fat cats and selfish half-millionaires reluctant to diminish their own circumstances to finance the various social schemes being touted by the new regime and its enablers.
The performance added up to same old, same old — if it’s fair to say that about an administration that is a mere 40 days old.
Still, Monday’s speech contained at least one benchmark goal that the administration is working overtime against.
“Our aim is that within eight years, the majority of skilled technology-related jobs in New York City are being filled by those educated in New York City schools,” said the mayor. “We will look to the innovation economy not just to grow companies, but also to put New Yorkers to work.”
He was talking about so-called STEM jobs — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and he laid down an astonishingly ambitious objective for a city where barely half of all high-school graduates are capable of college-level work in any discipline, let alone hard science.
And as scandalous as that stat may seem, it represents hard-won Bloomberg-era public-school progress — advances already placed at risk by the new team in City Hall.
For one, de Blasio & Co. have launched a vicious assault on one of the few unambiguous success stories in the Department of Education — charter schools. Meanwhile, the new team’s laser focus on raising city taxes on the “rich” to pay for amorphous pre-kindergarten programs suggests that politics, not policy, is what’s driving the debate.
Indeed, the labor union that has become functionally indistinguishable from the de Blasio administration — SEIU 1199 — Monday opened a broad-front assault on Republicans in the state Senate over de Blasio’s proposed millionaires’ tax.
“This is one of the most important policies for addressing inequality,” said Kevin Finnegan, the union’s political hammer, as he promised to bring “hundreds of our members to Albany to express directly to our state legislators that this is one of our highest priorities, and we will remember in the Fall elections who took a stand for working families.”
History suggests that 1199 will prevail, but in the meanwhile Gov. Cuomo is essentially on the correct side on both disputes — sending Lt. Gov. Bob Duffy out last week to deliver a broadside in favor of charter schools, and continuing to offer state money to pay for pre-K in New York City.
Charters are a matter between Cuomo and the teachers unions, which wants them dead. Period. It’s purely economic — the unions see charters as a threat to pay and perks — and resolution of the issue will doubtless involve contract guarantees.
De Blasio, Local 1199 and pre-K are an entirely different matter, involving raw ideology in addition to power politics, and it remains to be seen if the governor has the staying power to work his will. But he certainly needs to give it his all.
For both the mayor and the union, which has nurtured him throughout his career, clearly have their eye on more than the half-billion-dollars or so in additional taxing power that’s at the center of the current dispute.
For pre-K services — whatever they turn out to be — will be provided only in part by the DOE itself. The bulk of the money is to be distributed to hundreds of so-called community-based organizations, a k a CBOs, now in line to join the program.
Now in line, that is, to be groomed by Local 1199 and like organizations into reliable suppliers of campaign foot-soldiers and other political considerations as they grow into maturity.
Corruption is often part of the arrangement — both the imprisoned Pedro Espada of The Bronx and the disgraced Vito Lopez of Brooklyn made their political bones running CBOs. And federal prosecutors lately must be working overtime packing away other pols who first established their own CBOs — and then looted them.
But building such a network requires uninterrupted streams of cash, which explains why both de Blasio and the union disdain Cuomo’s offer of state pre-K assistance. What Albany gives, Albany can take away — and where would that leave Bill de Blasio and Local 1199?
But if they get their way, where will that leave Andrew Cuomo?
Where, indeed, will that leave de Blasio’s STEM initiative?
It’s not going to be an easy fight for Cuomo — but it’s a necessary one. Here’s hoping that he makes it. And wins.