Someone For Mayor

Tomorrow is election day in New York City and about two weeks ago the idea occurred to me to run a mayoral endorsement on the blog today. The only problem is that now, two weeks later, I don't really know who I would like to be mayor. I honestly haven't made up my mind yet even though I will have voted 24 hours from now. This is a tough one.

My biggest issue, as you might be able to guess, is education. I think that's the biggest challenge facing the city and the one that the mayor has real authority to work on. So that's my litmus test. Even with a pretty narrow scope, I'm still terribly conflicted.

On the one hand, I disagree with a lot of the things that Mayor Bloomberg has done over the last eight years. I also object to his needlessly negative and often dishonest campaign approach. However, he has been focused on education, which is more than can be said about most leaders in this country. He's allocated tons of money to the schools and has tried a series of reforms to correct a system that clearly wasn't working. Whether these new reforms are the answer is, of course, a matter of heated debate, but at least he's trying something.

I often see Thompson as running against the Mayor's education policies. The bulk of Thompson's education platform is pretty much a direct response to things the Mayor has done poorly (not involving parents, too much test prep, etc). What's not clear is what Thompson's affirmative agenda is going to look like. It's one thing to say that you'll involve parents in meaningful ways and that you'll educate the "whole child", but what does that actually mean at the end of the day? And what's the guarantee that it will get done? After all, the Bloomberg/Klein system keeps saying that they're going to do a better job involving parents too.

I've also been remarkably unimpressed with the entire Thompson campaign. I mean, I get that the other guy has $15 billion to potentially spend, but that doesn't mean you should just roll over and die. Let's just say that I'm not impressed with his managerial skills on this front.

So the choice boils down to a guy I know I often disagree with, but that I know is taking big action on the issue I care about and a guy who says he'll do everything differently and better, but that I don't know will actually be able to accomplish anything. Like I said, this is a tough one and time is ticking.

Remember to vote tomorrow.

No Surprises

Last night was the first debate between Mike Bloomberg and Bill Thompson as the two campaign for mayor. I watched it (because that's the kind of guy I am) and wasn't terribly surprised by what I saw. Predictably, Thompson came out swinging in his first opportunity to confront the mayor face to face. Predictably, Bloomberg didn't really rise to the bait and tried to paint himself as the pragmatic problem-solver who's above the usual politics. So no surprises there at all.

Also, unsurprising was that education came up fairly often, even though nothing new was said. Bloomberg said that things are better now with him in charge of the schools than they were when Thompson was in charge. Thompson said that he actually did some good things, but that he wasn't ever in charge because, remember, no one was in charge under the old system.

That was one of two highlights of the debate for me because I think it means that Bill Thompson is reading my blog. I wrote a few weeks ago that he should say almost exactly that. I also wrote out an ad script that basically got turned into a question during the "cross examination" portion of the debate. And it actually hit home. When Thompson asked about all of Bloomberg's party switching and whether that represented just more politics, the mayor was noticeable uncomfortable. It was perhaps the only point of the debate in which he didn't seem to have a ready answer. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have thought of that, but I put it in print so I'm claiming full credit.

The bottom line (as both candidates seemed to enjoy saying) is that we didn't get anything last night we weren't expecting. Education is still an issue, but it's still a bludgeon. No new insights. No new programs. No new ideas. We'll see what happens on October 27th when they meet again.

If I Were Bill Thompson

Now that the Democratic primaries are really, truly, and officially over, I want to take a brief foray back to my blogging roots and post on a purely political issue (though I'll mention education a little later on if that's what you care about).

Michael Bloomberg has been running with the tagline that he represents progress, not politics. If I were William Thompson, I wouldn't let him get away with running that line unchallenged. Here's the script of the ad I would run. For visuals, think of less-than-flattering pictures of the mayor in black and white or something. The voiceover would be done kind of like someone reading a picture book to first graders. Here's how it would go:

This is Michael Bloomberg and he sure loves playing politics. He used to be a Democrat. But then he decided that he wanted to be Mayor of New York City. There were a lot of Democracts who wanted to be mayor, so he became a Republican because it would be easier. Then, after he'd been mayor for a while, he decided he wanted to be president. So he stopped being a Republican and became an independent. But people didn't want him to be president so he decided that he wanted to be mayor again. He thought he was doing such a good job that he changed term limits so he could run for a third term. And he's a Republican again. Michael Bloomberg. He sure loves playing politics.

Never one for false modesty, I have to say that I think this is brilliant. The whole Bloomberg-is-totally-above-politics idea is so obviously false that it's child's play to point it out. If that's going to be the basis of his campaign, I would hit that point hard and repeatedly. It's only fair.

And now for my point about education (I told you I'd get there). Over the last few months, Thompson has criticized Bloomberg's handling of the schools under mayoral control. Regardless of the criticism or how valid it may or may not be, the Bloomberg response is inevitably, "Unh uh. And he wasn't a good president of the board of education when everything was terrible." (I'm paraphrasing here, of course.) Here's my response if I were Thompson the next time a reporter asked me about that:

"You know, it's funny. During the fight to renew mayoral control, Michael Bloomberg kept saying that under the old system no one knew who was in charge and there was no accountability. Now that I'm running for mayor, it turns out that I was in charge all along and that I should be accountable. I guess it took me running for mayor to help him figure that out."

In the interests of disclosure, I should say that I'm actually undecided in the mayor's race and that so far I don't think Thompson has actually done anything to influence me one way or another. In my mind, for now at least, this is entirely a referendum on Bloomberg. That said, the dishonesty and disingenuousness of the Bloomberg campaign offends me and it needs to be called out.

P.S. He may have lost yesterday, but this tongue-in-cheek ad for Mark Green is hysterical.

Mayoral Unspeak

City Hall News starts a recent profile on Bill Thompson's mayoral campaign as follows:

"Bill Thompson cannot win the competence argument against Michael Bloomberg. He would like to, he is trying to, but the idea that Bloomberg is good at the job of being mayor is so deeply entrenched in the minds of New Yorkers that any time spent trying to convince people that he would actually be better would probably be in vain."

Almost the exact same thing could be said of the mayor's education record. It's taken as self-evident that mayoral control has been a good thing for city schools. That's why when Thompson makes charges about the books being cooked, the Bloomberg campaign's response is, essentially, that Thompson is just jealous of the record. Never mind that the record itself is being called into question. That doesn't matter because everyone knows that mayoral control has been a good thing.

More than the billions of dollars that Bloomberg possesses and more than the tens of millions of dollars he's willing to spend on the campaign, Bloomberg's biggest asset in this campaign may be that his record - on schools and other things - has become a form of unspeak unto itself. Accurate or not, it wins the argument before one even starts.

No Surprises Here

Surprising absolutely no one, NYC Mayor and mayoral candidate Mike Bloomberg sent out a mailing (approximately the ten thousandth I've received) hitting newly nominated mayoral candidate Bill Thompson over their compared education records. I got the flyer in my mail on Wednesday, which is pretty impressive when you consider that Thompson didn't win the primary until late Tuesday night. Maybe the mail will run better if Bloomberg is re-re-elected.

The flyer doesn't go in much for subtlety. On the top in huge red letters it says "On Education: The Choice Is Clear." Then there's a T-chart showing Mike Bloomberg's record as mayor compared to Bill Thompson's record as president of the board of education. Unsurprisingly (this is campaign lit after all), Bloomberg looks very good in the comparison. I wish I could show it to you, but I don't have a scanner. I'm sure if you check your mail boxes, you'll be seeing it soon. Even if you don't live in New York.

Not much to say here, but I do have three quick observations.

1. It's nice to see education featured so prominently in a political campaign.
2. It's a shame that the issue is being used as a bludgeon instead of a launch point for real discussion.
3. When one side has billions of dollars to spend on advertising it's not really a surprise that we aren't going to have a nuanced conversation.

Also, in mayor-related news, check out this video. Happy Friday!

More Politics

A few weeks back, I wrote a post on who was playing politics with education in New York. My conclusion was that it was everybody and so it was kind of useless to try blaming one person more than another. Since that time, Mayoral-candidate Thompson wrote a column on Huffington Post provacatively entitled, "Why Joel Klein Should Be Fired." The bottom line, in Thompson's analysis, is that Klein "has consistently embraced measures designed more to sell the idea of a system helping our students to attain critical achievement goals than to target those goals directly."

Pretty serious charges, though hardly unique to the Comptroller. Still, it gets to the heart of what is wrong with a lot of educational policy in the city and in the country.

I've been reading Fist Stick Knife Gun by Geoffrey Canada lately and it's pretty good. In one of the chapters he laments that we have "an American tendency toward quick-fix solutions to complicated problems." In other words, we throw a new system into place and expect it to work miracles on a problem that far exceeds the scope of our problems. Consider the New York school system. The impediments facing kids in trying to seek a good education are huge and far-ranging. They can include poverty, lack of health care, lack of basic social services, a values system that does not always include education, poor school facilities, poor school faculty, and more. It's going to take something more than empowering principals and instituting all sorts of measures of accountability to turn problems like that around.

Even so, the expectation is that we get solutions. So we need to see progress. So, lo and behold, the test scores start showing progress. Maybe the tests are easier. Maybe test prep factories are making the difference. Maybe kids actually are improving.

The problem is that we're more focus on making it look like kids are improving because that's what people are demanding. The kind of systemic reform that will actually bring about lasting and positive change would take years to implement. We'd be turning around decades of a growing problem. That's not going to happen overnight.

Playing Politics

Yesterday, Comptroller Bill Thompson (who is running for mayor) released a report essentially saying that the graduation rate in New York isn't as great as the Bloomberg administration is saying. The "blistering audit" (seriously) looked at a sampling of student transcripts and found that 10% of their sample didn't indicate that students had met the graduation requirements. For instance, there was no record of passing the required regeant's exams or students were given multiple credits for passing the same course two or more times.

In other words, the numbers on the graduation rate may be a little bit doctored. That the Bloomberg administration may be cooking the books a little bit on this stuff is not exactly a novel concept. In fact, that's been one of the more frequent complaints about Bloomberg and one of the reasons that the Mayoral control bill that passed the Assembly (but famously not the Senate) gave oversight over educational data to the Independent Budget Office.

In responding to the Comptroller's audit, the Mayor's campaign spokesman said:

“Instead of politicizing the comptroller's office with phony attacks, Mr. Thompson should be explaining his own failed record on education. The facts are clear: When Bill Thompson ran the old dysfunctional Board of Education graduation rates were flat and dropout rates increased. Under Mike Bloomberg's leadership, graduation rates have skyrocketed and dropout rates have fallen. Bill Thompson had a chance to help oversee our schools and he failed. Why would we ever want to go back again?”

What struck me about the response is that there is no attempt to rebut Thompson's findings. The attack here presupposes that he's wrong and that the graduation rate really is better under the current administration. Otherwise, the comparison to Thompson's tenure as BOE chair is meaningless. (Note: Later in the day, there was a rebuttal to the methodology of the audit.)

At this point, the discussion (if it can be called that) has devolved into a round of throwing accusations about who's "playing politics" with education. The answer is obvious - they both are. And that's really part of the problem here.

The good thing about mayoral control is that it is designed to give accountability to the mayor for the school system. Whether this happens in practice or not is less clear, but that's the idea. However, when a politician (or anyone) is going to be judged on something, they're going to want to make sure that they make that look as good as they can. Given the deep problems of education that likely will require long term solutions, a politician caught in a four year election cycle is going to be reduced to spin and cosmetics. Maybe the long term solutions will be put in place too, but the focus is going to have to be on what's going to look good immediately.

As long as we're looking for quick fixes for deep, entrenched problems we aren't going to get where we need to be.