Why I Have Decided To Support Cathie Black For Chancellor

[Hannah Bell]

Everywhere I look - from the education blogs to the newspapers (except for the Murdoch Post, of course) to the City Council to the State Senate - I hear calls for Mayor Bloomberg to pull back the appointment of Hearst publisher Cathie Black to replace Joel Klein as New York City schools chancellor. The rationale is that Ms. Black has no prior education experience...

On the face of it, I agree with that rationale, and ordinarily I would be signing those CAN CATHIE BLACK petitions like everybody else.

Here is why I have decided not to:

No matter who the autocratic Bloomberg picks to be the new schools chancellor, the policies are going to be the same....

Bloomberg has three more years to completely destroy the school system as it was constituted before he took over in 2002.

These days, even the BOE headquarters building on Livingston Street has become emblematic of Bloomberg's New York - it was sold off to become condos...

So in replacing Klein, Bloomberg has ALWAYS intended to continue with this agenda. And the agenda has been to remake the school system to look like a corporation - top-down management, "accountability" principles...employees who constantly fear downsizings and layoffs, and the breaking of the teachers union...and now he is using the economic crisis that the state and city are facing as another opportunity to argue that "bad teachers" (i.e., expensive vets) have to go...

It is true that the current UFT contract protects teachers from layoffs, but the zeitgeist these days makes me think that job protections like tenure and seniority will either be soon gone completely or rendered meaningless by the new teacher evaluation law.

Layoffs are coming. Firings are coming. More school closings are coming. More charter schools are coming. More turf battles between charters and traditional public schools are coming. More chaos and destabilization of the system is coming. Thanks to Obama and RttT, more standardized tests in every subject at every level are coming. More top-down management and standardized curricula are coming.

It doesn't matter who Bloomberg chooses to replace Klein. This will be the policy....And after state lawmakers in Albany reauthorized mayoral control of the system without putting any real checks on the mayor's power, there is little that can be done to mitigate the damage Bloomberg wants to do to the system.

He has total control. The problem, then, is not Cathie Black or whoever inhabits the chancellor's chair. The problem is mayoral control.

So I say, let him have Cathie Black. She is the devil we know. Layoffs and downsizings are her specialty, so we know why Bloomberg brought her in. Klein was sour, but Black can do the downsizing with a smile.

BUT EVERY MOVE SHE MAKES AS CHANCELLOR, THOSE OPPOSED TO BLOOMBERG'S AGENDA CAN USE HER LACK OF EDUCATION EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE TO OUR ADVANTAGE.

Both the public and the usually compliant corporate media have been skeptical of her. We can use that skepticism against her when she makes her first moves to close schools and fire teachers, as will undoubtedly be done later in the school year. That may be the best way to push back against the union-busting Bloombergian agenda as well as put a check on some of the more chaotic destabilizing efforts of Bloomberg and the school privatizers.

It's not much, I know. And that's because the problem is not Cathie Black or indeed, Joel Klein. The problem is Michael Bloomberg...

With Cathie Black as head of the system, Bloomberg has very nakedly signaled his intentions to teachers, city residents, and state lawmakers. THE FINAL CORPORATIZATION OF THE SYSTEM IS COMING.
That was going to happen anyway, no matter who he chose. But now that it is out in the open, we can call his CHILDREN FIRST reforms exactly what they are - PRIVATIZATION FIRST.

And we can work to undermine mayoral control by pointing out how absurd it is that one man, one little autocratic egomaniac, gets to make all these decisions that affect a million children, their parents and the educators in the system, in secret, without any outside input

That ought to be the battle we fight next - to wrest total control of the school system from the mayor, any mayor, and return some semblance of democratic control and public accountability to the people who run the school system.

It's a long ways away to the next mayoral control reauthorization, but it is important to start that fight now.

The battle against Cathie Black, while well-meant and one that I am sympathetic to, even if it is victorious, will be a hollow one, just as the UFT court victory on schools closures was.

Bloomberg is STILL closing those schools.

http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-i-have-decided-to-support-cathie.html