Since coming into office nearly 12 years ago as a successful, billionaire businessman, Michael Bloomberg has come across as confident, impervious to criticism and often arrogant in his assurance that he is always right.
Lately, though, our mayor has been a little thin-skinned.
Take the UFT’s forum for mayoral candidates on May 11. The event drew extensive media coverage as all six candidates proclaimed that they would reverse course on some of the mayor’s signature education policies.
The closing of more than 100 schools, the obsessive overemphasis on standardized test scores, the unfettered proliferation of charter schools, the forced co-location of charter schools in public school buildings regardless of community opposition, the Department of Education’s failure to listen to parents — all of these practices and more came under fire by mayoral hopefuls at the forum. The candidates didn’t agree on every education issue, but they were unanimous in their calls for change.
And that got the mayor’s goat.
A top aide to Bloomberg took to Twitter shortly after the forum to counter the criticism.
Two days later, Bloomberg himself fumed at a news conference that if the next mayor really agrees with the UFT on education policy, “the city has no future.”
Chancellor Walcott joined in later that week, using his annual address to principals to bash the mayoral candidates’ statements at the UFT forum.
Tweed must have really wanted principals to hear Walcott blast the mayor’s critics because for the first time in memory the DOE promised an extra vacation day to any principal who attended the event. The principals who attended were not obligated, however, to applaud Walcott’s diatribe. And most didn’t.
Why, suddenly, do Bloomberg and the chancellor care about the opinion of the public when for so long they have not seemed to give a hoot?
The mayor is scrambling to salvage his legacy. For years, Bloomberg boasted about being the “education mayor.” If many of his destructive policies toward schools are reversed when he leaves, what will he have to show for his time at the helm?
Bloomberg has refused to listen to parents, educators and the public about the schools.
Now many of the mayoral candidates are listening as they travel to schools and forums and community meetings. When the candidates criticize the mayor’s record on education, they are responding to what they hear.
If Bloomberg had started listening to the public earlier, the criticism that seems to bother him so much now would have come as no surprise.