Out-of-towners continue to moon over Mayor Bloomberg's handling of the New York City school system, as in this dispatch from L.A., where the City Council has just appointed a new superintendent with no prior educational experience, just weeks before the mayor is supposed to gain the power to hire and fire the superintendent, and this one from D.C., where shoe-in candidate for mayor Adrian Fenty, who's vowed to push for expanded control of the city's schools, recently met with Bloomberg to seek his pedagogical counsel

Bloomberg brags that he's broken through the "politics of paralysis" and says of control that "The public wants a mayor who stands up and says, 'This is what I believe and this is why I believe it. I was elected the mayor, and this is what we're going to do. See me in four years, and if you don't like it, throw me out.' "

Oddly enough, he failed to mention that since he's term-limited out in 2009, voters have no such recourse.
MI senior fellow and education expert Sol Stern offers quite a different take:

It is becoming almost a regular ritual in New York City. A recently elected, or about to be elected, mayor of another large city visits New York and is taken by Mayor Bloomberg on a Potemkin Village tour of a few schools. In front of the news cameras  the schools are then hyped as making miraculous progress. Earlier in the year it was Los Angeles’ new Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who did the obligatory tour; last week it was the likely next mayor of Washington DC, Adrian M. Fenty. In both cases the visiting mayors dutifully announced that these “turnaround” schools were living proof that mayoral control of the education system is working in Gotham and ought to be the model for  their own cities. So far it’s been a win win political opportunity for all of the chief executives. Mayor Bloomberg burnished his national image and the visiting mayors got a pre packaged platform for education reform.

Certainly the dismal school systems in Los Angeles and the nation’s capital could benefit from a radical shake-up. Residents of both cities are understandably frustrated by the sorry state of their public schools. But before they turn over control of their schools lock, stock and barrel to their mayors they ought at least to demand a little more honesty about the academic improvement—or lack of it—registered by New York City’s 1.1 million students during the years of mayoral control.  Despite the hype coming from these mayoral tours, the fact is that student test scores have remained stubbornly flat in New York City. So far, the public has not seen the bigger bang for the buck that mayoral control promised.