Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor, said he hadn't seen it but he said if voters think city schools are better today than they were under Thompson's leadership at the Board of Education, they should vote for Bloomberg.
http://www.newsday.com/...
Under Thompson?
The record will show that the control of New York City Public Schools was firmly gripped by the New York City's Mayor's office.
Rudolph W. Giuliani made New Yorkers three promises when he campaigned for mayor in the early 1990s: He would fix troubled schools, cut crime and boost the economy.
New York City schools went through eight years of political chaos during Giuliani's terms, which ended in 2002. His bare-knuckle tactics contributed to the departure of three chancellors, according to interviews with former school administrators, Board of Education members, teachers, parents, union officials and outside experts.
This was the Rudy Giuliani Show. Chancellors made guest appearances and the Board of Education, students and parents were a captive audience.
NY Times reports that Mike Bloomberg faults Bill Thompson in a TV ad for the failed state of New York City Schools under his leadership -
It [the ad] highlights a familiar theme in Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election bid, portraying Mr. Thompson as a vestige of an old, broken system and suggesting that the mayor has capitalized on his political independence to institute positive reforms. (Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign slogan: "Progress, not politics.")
"When you compare apples to apples," the ad’s narrator says, "Thompson offers politics as usual. Mike Bloomberg offers progress."
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The comparison is less a comparison between apples, and more a comparison between dictators. There are some things that are beyond the powers of the Board of Education.
Jack Newfield wrote in an article for The Nation in May 2002
Even Michael Bloomberg, Giuliani's Republican successor, who was elected with the help of a powerful Giuliani TV commercial, told me: "Giuliani never got his hands around the school system. There is no question that it's gotten worse the last eight years, not better."
What is revealing is that every time Giuliani did try to get his hands around the school system, it was never about actual classroom learning issues like class size, teacher training or salvaging the middle schools before middle-class parents fled the public system. Giuliani's interventions were over side issues like vouchers, condoms, privatization and using the NYPD for school security. He supported a for-profit privatization plan by the Edison company that parents voted down overwhelmingly.
Giuliani kept bashing teachers, scapegoating their union, subverting their morale and forcing them to work without a raise or union contract during the last fifteen months of his administration.
http://www.thenation.com/...
From the Fall of 2009 it seems the Board of Education during the Giuliani days had been muffled and dismissed.
Giuliani fought with administrators, board members and state legislators over budgets, union contracts, vouchers, gay tolerance education, lunchroom supervision, curriculum, testing, social promotion and summer school, among much else.
"He could not have accomplished more with a different approach," said Anthony P. Coles, Giuliani's deputy mayor, who handled education. "The school system was far superior when he left than it was when he was elected mayor."
http://articles.latimes.com/...
Even among Republicans we see different perceptions about who was in charge of New York City Public Schools during the 1990s. Today, Mike Bloomberg says Thompson was in charge. Then, Deputy Mayor Coles, says he and Giuliani were in charge.
While Giuliani Was Mayor
The influx of immigrants to New York City was overwhelming. Between 1980 and 1990 about one million people from over 160 countries moved to New York City. Then, over one-third of the City's population was comprised of immigrants (New York City Department of Planning, 1992).
To qualify for federal aid, the City Board of Education performed an annual Federal Emergency Immigrant Education Census, counting children attending a school for three years or less whose total immigrant enrollment was at least three percent of its total enrollment. In the 1995-96 school year, the Census identified nearly 135,000 students-almost four times the number counted only five years before (Board of Education of the City of New York, 1996). These students represented only a portion of the total number of immigrants in New York City schools. In fact, using statistics from the 1990 U.S. Census of the Population, it is estimated that about 320,000 immigrant children attended City schools in 1995-96.
Conclusions from studies in the mid-90s –
Newer immigrant children are highly motivated to attend and succeed at school, while more acculturated immigrants and the offspring of immigrants have higher dropout rates (see, for example, Suarez-Orozco, 1995, for a study of Mexican American adolescents in the U.S.). There are two major hypotheses for the discrepancy. The first is that immigrants in general are a highly motivated population that uses education for upward mobility (McDonnell & Hill, 1993). The second hypothesis considers the comparison between immigrants and U.S. born minorities who share the same low economic status and English proficiency (Ogbu, 1991; Solomon, 1992). According to this view, immigrant children perform above "involuntary minority" children, because the latter experience a historically-rooted discriminatory treatment in both society and educational institutions.
http://www.ericdigests.org/...
Thompson was a school board member from 1994 to 1996 and then president for five years. The board was dissolved when Bloomberg persuaded the state Legislature to put the city's school system — the nation's largest — under mayoral control during his first term.
Before Bloomberg
Bloomberg takes unprecedented control of the New York City Public Schools.
The Board of Education was first created in New York City in 1842. When the city consolidated into five boroughs, there was a central board plus borough boards for the years 1898 to 1901. Mostly, it was the Board of Education that was in charge of New York City public schools until it was replaced by a mayoral agency, the Department of Education in 2002.
The average length of tenure for a chancellor is about a year and eight months.
Ramon C. Cortines 1993-1995
Cortines, a former superintendent of San Francisco schools for six years prior to coming to New York, became chancellor at the beginning of the 1993- 1994 school year in September. His tenure was marked by repeated clashes with Mayor Giuliani.
Rudolph F. Crew 1995-1999
Crew came to New York City schools from Tacoma, Washington. In a New York Times article on October 8, 1995, announcing Crew's appointment as chancellor, it was said that "a cease-fire [was] reached with Mayor Giuliani after months of recrimination and political tumult."
Harold O. Levy 2000-2002
Levy, an executive at Citigroup and a member of the state Board of Regents at the time, was strongly supported by the Queens representative to the Board of Education, Terri Thomson. On January 9, 2000, he was appointed interim chancellor.
http://www.qgazette.com/...
Jack Newfield sheds light on the political reality at the time -
Giuliani was skilled at solving problems that lent themselves to the application of relentless will or military-style strategy. Therefore, he was effective at cutting crime, reducing violence in the city's jails and driving the mob out of the Fulton Fish Market, where it had ruled for fifty years.
The record shows that Giuliani was less effective at solving problems in which such efforts require cooperation with other levels of government, labor unions or communities of color. As a result, public schools got worse during the Giuliani years. Police-community relations got much worse. Much less affordable housing was built, and budgeted for, than under Ed Koch. The poor became a much lower priority than under Mayors Dinkins, Lindsay and Wagner. In Giuliani's second term, the poor became scapegoats and lab rats for experiments in conservative social policy.
Giuliani also governed in a fashion that created problems beneath the surface, for which the bill of reckoning is only now coming due. His borrowing left his successor with a $4.5 billion budget deficit only eighteen months after Rudy sat on a $3 billion surplus. And in a political deal, he closed the city's largest landfill, creating a crisis in garbage disposal and a tremendous budget burden for the sanitation department.
There was no room for the Board of Education in the Giuliani administration. The record shows that Thompson's role at the Board of Education would be overshadowed by a New York City's mayor that had higher priorities for the school system than education.
Thompson pledges to overhaul curriculum to reduce the focus on standardized testing and create a school-by-school plan to cut class size. He also promises to better involve parents by creating a Parent University to educate families on ensuring children's academic success, similar to what Philadelphia has done.
http://www.thompson2009.com/...
THOMPSON: City Fails To Monitor Early Grade Class Size Reduction Funding
http://www.youtube.com/...
http://www.youtube.com/...
New York City Educators Speak Out in Support of Bill Thompson's Education Policy
http://www.youtube.com/...
Real Democrats
http://www.dailykos.com/...