Do You Know About Mike Bloomberg’s Record on Public Education?
Much of what follows is from a November post on this blog about the education policies of New York City’s former three-term mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who was granted the right, by the state legislature, to run New York City’s public schools. In November when this was originally posted, Bloomberg was exploring whether to join other Democrats running for President in 2020. Bloomberg has now declared his candidacy. He has spent millions of dollars already on widespread television advertising. But his ads don’t tell us much about his extensive record as a mayor who, for more than a decade, controlled the nation’s largest school district.
Bloomberg is a plutocrat and he ran the schools as a technocratic businessman, with disruption conceptualized as the key to making everybody work harder to raise student achievement as measured by test scores. Turnarounds, more charters, more school co-locations: all of these so called “reforms” were introduced by Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Joel Klein in New York City before Arne Duncan brought the same turnaround strategy to the whole country through Race to the Top.
On December 14, at a Public Education Forum 2020, we had an opportunity to hear from other leading candidates for the Democratic nomination about their plans for the nation’s public schools. Additionally, we were able to listen as each one responded to questions from parents and public school students and schoolteachers. All of the leading candidates pledged at least to triple Title I spending for public schools serving children in poverty as a top priority. Neither Bernie Sanders nor Joe Biden nor Elizabeth Warren nor Pete Buttigieg nor Amy Klobuchar promoted the sort of policies that Mike Bloomberg launched as the mayor CONTINUE READING: Do You Know About Mike Bloomberg’s Record on Public Education? | janresseger
