New York City parents on Thursday will send 50,000 toddlers off to pre-K, courtesy of Mayor de Blasio. Here’s hoping there are no pervs in the classroom — and hope matters, for the mayor’s minions seem not to have checked.
And when City Comptroller Scott Stringer impolitely pointed out this oversight last week, the entire municipal power structure united to attack . . . him.
Just for doing his job.
Just for insisting that de Blasio’s signature campaign program — universal, quality pre-kindergarten instruction — follow the same public-contracting rules as any other city undertaking.
It’s hard to dispute the need. News this week that not a single black or Hispanic child passed state-mandated reading or math tests at 90 New York City schools last year only underscores the point.
Of course, just about everybody loves pre-K.
Bill de Blasio sure loved it a year ago; there were many, many votes in it, and he rode that hobbyhorse right into City Hall.
Gov. Cuomo saw those same votes — and coughed up $300 million for the first year of the city program, with billions more to come.
Parents love it because at the very least it amounts to free day care — and it might even work.
Teachers-union boss Mike Mulgrew loves it, because it offers a distraction from alternative, nonunion programs that actually do work, like charter schools. Plus he gets 1,000 new members out of the deal, just this year alone.
And hundreds of new Department of Education vendors — mostly not-for-profit organizations and many of those incorporated solely to provide pre-K services — suddenly find themselves in the clover.
Or potentially so.
Which brings the discussion to the skunk at the garden party: Stringer — a spendthrift progressive who nevertheless has a strong work ethic. It’s his job to vet city contracts, and last week he expressed some healthy skepticism about more than 600 pre-K vendor agreements.
This sent de Blasio into low-earth orbit, and prompted a bitter anti-Stringer outburst from City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Council contracts-committee Chairwoman Helen Rosenthal and Public Advocate Letitia James.
Their beef? Stringer, by law the city’s principal bookkeeper, was insisting on keeping the city’s books.
To wit, he publicly pointed out that fully 70 percent of the private-vendor contracts necessary for de Blasio’s program to go forward hadn’t been submitted for timely review — and that he wasn’t going to approve them until they had been fully vetted.
Stringer’s job, while boring as bat guano, is of real consequence.
New York City will spend more than $74 billion this year, $24 billion on public education, and virtually every one of those dollars is attached to a municipal contract of one sort or another.
Somebody has to keep track of them — especially contracts with not-for-profit corporations hired to supply services the city is ill-equipped to provide. Like quality pre-K.
Not keeping track of them, on the other hand, leads to the sort of mischief US Attorney Preet Bharara has been so assiduously fighting for the past several years — corruption overwhelmingly associated with not-for-profit abuse.
Bharara hasn’t indicted anyone since July — and even though he has Cuomo’s Moreland Act Commission scandal squarely in his sights, he’d have no trouble dealing with corrupt pre-K dealings should it come to that.
That he has the inclination goes without saying.
Why de Blasio and his trained seals — Mark-Viverito, Rosenthal and James — don’t see the danger to themselves in this is a mystery. Mark-Viverito had scarcely looked at the contracts by last week, Rosenthal and James not at all.
And then there’s the potential pervert problem. You really never can tell about such things, but an ounce of scrutiny going in could save a ton of trouble down the road.
At its most basic level — politics — the Stringer-de Blasio squabble doesn’t count for much; they’re peas-from-the-same-pod politically; just think of it as trouble in progressive paradise.
But substance does matter.
While City Hall reportedly shut down nine pre-Ks Tuesday night and delayed the opening of 36 others – props to Stringer! – some 500 other contracts remained unapproved at nightfall.
Clearly there is no crisis. The mayor can and clearly will proceed without Stringer’s imprimatur — but his sloppy arrogance is both distressing and acutely reflective of his tenure to date.
This augurs poorly for pre-K, and for New York City in general.