How de Blasio’s Narrative Got Hijacked
Last week on the 64th day of his mayoralty, Bill de Blasio, criticized for his too hardy approach to snow days, for the slow pace of his appointments, for displays of petulance, achieved a predicted but still significant victory. The City Planning Commission unanimously approved a reimagining of the Domino Sugar refinery on the Brooklyn waterfront, which the de Blasio administration had worked to ensure would have a greater number of apartments priced below market rate than had originally been proposed. Proving that he could compromise with developers, that he could alienate factions of a left that find excessive height distasteful as they clamor for more affordable housing, the mayor permitted the project’s buildings to go to 55 stories, rather than 30 or 40.
The success, though, was eclipsed by a drama that had been unfolding since the previous day, when Mr. de Blasio went to Albany to make a plea for the tax increase that would fund his prekindergarten program. As if arriving to a book group scheduled to discuss “Huckleberry Finn” only to find that everyone else was talking about “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” the mayor was effectively silenced by the thousands of voices who had come to protest his recent actions on charter schools.
The previous week, Mr. de Blasio had approved 14 of 17 charter schools for co-location in traditional school buildings, which does not easily suggest that he is conducting a war on charter schools. And yet this has become the conventional wisdom. Five of the approved schools belong to the high-performing Success Academy network, run by Eva S. Moskowitz, who having led the protesters upstate chose to focus not on her win, but rather on the fact that three of her schools were rejected.
In two of those instances, elementary schools would have been set up on
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