A Regular Ritual

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.

Quick Hits-Coast to Coast Crooks

—We'll have more on recidivism posted later this week. In the meantime, here's would-be A.G. Moonbeam on Oakland's returning prisoners [subscriber only link] in the weekend Wall Street Journal:

As attorney general, Mr. Brown wants to target prisoner recidivism in California, where roughly 120,000 convicts are released annually, and 80,000 returned to prison annually. "They have 8th-grade reading levels, no skills, their attitudes are bad, many are addicted to drugs and they are coming back to disrupt the community," he says. "That's why I'm putting GPS bracelets on them in Oakland. Whether they are active enough that we can root them out of certain neighborhoods at curfew and enforce it -- well, I am at least attempting to compensate for the failed parole system."

—Is there a Villaraigosa-Schwarzenegger alliance in the making? The governor's appointment of the mayor's sister "to a $149,160-a-year judgeship on the Los Angeles County Superior Court" has some Democratic Party loyalists fuming. The Phil Angelides gubernatorial campaign has accused the mayor of placing his family’s finances above his duties to the Democratic party. More likely Villaraigosa would like to see Angelides lose so that he can run for governor in four years when the term-limited Schwarzenegger has to step down."

—And a slap at Villaraigosa, as the Board of Education unanimously selected a new superintendent, retired Navy Vice Admiral David L. Brewer III, an education neophyte, just weeks before new legislation is scheduled to take effect giving the mayor substantial authority over local schools, including the functional ability to veto the hiring and firing of superintendents.

Villaraigosa, who won office in part because of black voters disenchanted with then-mayor James Hahn for his decision to fire black Police Chief Bernard Parks, will have to be cautious in criticizing the board's choice of Brewer, who is black.

—Miami may be known for its pay-to-play culture, but Orlando is making strides. It turns out the Magic, who are in the midst of a deal to build a new arena with about $280 million in taxpayer subsidies, have been caught paying $200,000 in "shut-up money" to well-known radio host, political consultant and so-called "Voice of the People" Doug Guetzloe. The arrangement came just after a report that Guetzloe had been paid $107,500 by the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority, an agency he's often criticized, for a two page report.

The Magic's pay-offs were made through the team's law firm, which it turns out has paid another half a million dollars to Guetzloe over the past 10 years, with payments frequently coinciding with the radio host playing a politically active role in cities where the firm faced opposition to development projects they represented.

—In St. Louis, still more allegations of voter fraud directed at the left wing and supposedly grassroots group ACORN.

—In D.C., thugs are going where the money is.

Jersey Guts

While there are few things New Yorkers enjoy more than making fun of New Jersey, EJ McMahon pointed out to me yesterday that nothing like the idea of selling or leasing the Jersey Turnpike, which could be worth upwards of $20 billion for the state, has come up in New York, even in the midst of a gubernatorial election. The Turnpike Authority is the third largest toll-collecting authority in the nation with more than $700 million in annual revenue, more than $500 million of which comes from the Turnpike, which spans from the Delaware to New York crossings into the Garden State.

Part of the appeal of such a move would be to free up money that’s presently locked into debt and school construction payments for new investments .

And Jersey’s schools have problems of their own:

In Newark, sky-high spending and a state takeover of a public school system that had previously functioned as more hiring service than educational provider has led to nothing in the way of academic results. New mayor Corey Booker is looking to reassert control over the system, beginning with creating a safe and orderly environment within the classroom, prior to the return of the school system to the city next year, at which point he’ll be pushing for direct mayoral control, new charter schools and possibly vouchers, which he’s flirted with supporting in the past.

The control battle is headed in the opposite direction in Camden, which presently faces a grade and test falsifying scandal, a grand jury investigation, a state AG’s investigation of a former superintendent for paying herself unauthorized performance bonuses, and an ongoing probe by acting State Education Commissioner Lucille Davy.

In response, the district kicked off its year with a pep rally, where School Board President Philip Freeman bragged that "This board has not hesitated to take on issues time and time again, and not only take on issues, but effectively move forward from one crisis to the next." I can believe it.

Villaraigosa's "Revolution?"

In a typical year the promise by the Mayor of America’s most under-policed city, Los Angeles, to expand the LAPD by 1,000 officers over the next four years, to be paid for by an increased trash fee, would be the lead story.
But in yesterday’s state of the city speech Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced at a charter school that he was staking his mayoral reputation and political future on remaking the Los Angles Unified (County) School District. His proposal, based in large part on Mike Bloomberg’s takeover of the New York City Schools, would bypass local voters by seeking the approval of Sacramento to replace the current school district with a council of mayors, which would then pick a CEO who would be given broad powers to streamline the bureaucracy. With Los Angeles representing eighty percent of the counties' students, the mayor of LA would dominate the council.
Villaraigosa, a former teacher, whose wife still teaches in the public schools, has taken pains to reach out to his former allies in organized labor who are the chief opponents of the reforms. But this is a fight he can win.
The limited success of New York's experiment with mayoral control should serve as a caution. There is probably no alternative to a far more decentralized alternative that replaces the dead hand of the teacher’s contracts with a heavy emphasis on charter schools and vouchers. But the LA Daily News probably got it right when it argued in an editorial that the “breakup of the district will never go anywhere until this mayoral-control debate is played out.”