De Blasio: The Left’s Id

NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio launched his first salvo in his war on charter schools – which is, essentially, an extended payoff to the unions and the condo pinks that put him in office in the first place (occasional emphasis added by me):

While running for New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio could count on applause for attacking unpopular charter school co-locations, where charters that need space are squeezed into public school buildings alongside other schools.

Instead of extolling the promise of the charters, de Blasio provided a spine-stiffening defense of the “common” school, and his base ate it up: The unions loved it, parents whose kids were not in charters loved it, and many of de Blasio’s fellow Park Slope progressives loved it.

That’s been one of the charter opponents’ most galling tactics; they’ve made charters the subject of a class war, with charters as “the enemy”, notwithstanding that (especially in the city) they are the lifeboat for the underserved minority, and the students that the “common” schools have given up on.

So the new mayor must be feeling whiplash after the outcry that met him as he began to carry out a popular campaign pledge: slow down the charter co-locations and shift more money to traditional public schools. That the charter community opposed the mayor wasn’t a surprise. It was their political strength, organization, and popularity that caught de Blasio off guard.

From the rhetoric, you’d think de Blasio had personally bounced kids out of charter schools across all five boroughs.

Slate goes on to defend De Blasio.

But charter proponents know that it’s a short jump from “slowing down co-location” (in real-estate-starved NYC they put charter schools in the same buildings as public schools) to shutting down schools.  The left hates charters, and the slippery slope is very, very real.

2 thoughts on “De Blasio: The Left’s Id

  1. New York needs a David Dinkins or a De Blasio once a generation to remind itself what happens when they don’t hire a good manager to run their city, and instead elect a politician with an ideology to flog.

  2. I totally agree, but I wonder if today’s NYC (or USA for that matter) is capable of learning that lesson. Today, much of what should dissuade them is accepted practice, or ideology, by the MSM, disinterested voters, their majority political party, and nearly a generation that didn’t explain it to them. Add to that far fewer perceived consequences, aka “social safety net”, and many new voters who don’t speak English and came from places where an honest, good leader was as rare as indoor plumbing. For a minute there I thought I was channeling MPLS.

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