Bloomberg's Corporate School "Reform" in Complete Chaos.

[Smarmie Doofus]

Chancellor Black is gone, baby, gone. Plus, the State Ed Sec ( the apparatchik whose arm Bloomberg twi$ted to get the required waiver for the ludicrously unqualified Black to take office) resigned on the same day.

Good god what a system. It's not just the school system; it's the political system. Why does it routinely produce people who have no idea what they're doing? And who DON'T *CARE* that they don't know what they're doing.



Updated, 6:02 p.m. | Cathleen P. Black, a magazine executive with no educational experience who was named New York City schools chancellor last fall, stepped down Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced.

Mr. Bloomberg called Ms. Black into his office Thursday morning and urged her to resign, officials said, ending a tumultuous and brief tenure for the longtime publisher. Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference that he and Ms. Black had agreed that a change was required.

Ms. Black’s resignation, which follows a series of high-level departures at the Education Department, was nearly as surprising as her appointment. When Mayor Bloomberg plucked her from her post as chairwoman of Hearst Magazines to run the nation’s largest public school system, people in New York and across the country — including some of the mayor’s closest aides — were stunned.

Ms. Black will be replaced by Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott, who has long aided the mayor in educational matters, Mr. Bloomberg announced at the news conference, at 11:30 a.m. at City Hall.

“I take full responsibility for the fact that this has not worked out as either of us had hoped or expected,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “But now it’s time to look forward, not back.”

Ms. Black’s time as chancellor was troubled from the start. During her three months on the job, she offended parents with an offhand joke about birth control and bewildered City Hall aides when she seemed to mock a crowd of parents protesting the closing of a school. Aides complained that she required intensive tutorials on every aspect of education policy. And on Monday, a NY1-Marist poll put Ms. Black’s approval rating at 17 percent, the lowest ever for a Bloomberg administration official.

Inside City Hall, mayoral advisers said, there was a growing sense that Ms. Black could no longer do the job. But Mr. Bloomberg is famously reluctant to


http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/cathie-black-is-out-as-chancellor/?ref=nyregion

[MichiganVote]

1. Nice plan Bloomberg. One person can wreck a whole plan? Not much of a plan rich boy.

[femmocrat]

2. Good news!

Walcott is actually an educator, too!

"Walcott has a host of educational experience, from his elementary school education at Queens' P.S. 36, J.H.S. 192, and Francis Lewis High School, to his 10 years spent as a kindergarten teacher in Southeast Queens, Bloomberg said.

(snip)

"He holds two Masters' Degrees in Education and Social Work, logged three years as a foster care worker, led the NYC Urban League for more than a decade, and founded the Frederick Douglas Brother-to-Brother mentoring program, Bloomberg said."

Read more: http://www.dnainfo.com/20110407/downtown/dennis-walcott-stark-contrast-cathie-black#ixzz1ItXpSRpD

[DeSwiss]

3. “But now it’s time to look forward, not back.”

- I thought that was somebody else's line and that it only applied to war crimes?!?!

K&R

[Smarmie Doofus]

4. It's the political cliche of the moment.

We keep "not looking back" and we keep making the same friggin' mistakes over and over.

[Starry Messenger]

5. Good question:

It's not just the school system; it's the political system. Why does it routinely produce people who have no idea what they're doing? And who DON'T *CARE* that they don't know what they're doing.

Do you think that perhaps in the absence of any new and fruitful financial frontiers to conquer, we're seeing more of these useless but monied people force their way more and more into the public sector? They never cared before that they didn't know what they were doing, because they had the support of their oligarchy. Now that they are forced to interact with us, the great unwashed, their deficiencies are much more striking and public.

[Smarmie Doofus]

6. What gets me is the assumption they ( and others) make that...

... because someone is good at task A he/she is therefore good at task B, C, D and so on. ( They should ask us about Gardner's multiple intelligences; tee-hee!)

In fact there's little and sometimes *no* carry over. Bloomberg may have been uber-clever at making money selling "financial information" a ( whatever the f. that is) but he's a demonstrable political imbecile; witness the appointment of the hapless and hopeless Black, among so much other bungling, tone-deafness and misrule.

Leaving aside for the moment all of his other charming qualities( arrogance, dishonesty, narcissism etc.), the man is not particularly *bright*.

>>>>>Do you think that perhaps in the absence of any new and fruitful financial frontiers to conquer, we're seeing more of these useless but monied people force their way more and more into the public sector? They never cared before that they didn't know what they were doing, because they had the support of their oligarchy. Now that they are forced to interact with us, the great unwashed, their deficiencies are much more striking and public.>>>

I'm not sure. Before Bloomberg there was Rockefeller ( Nelson and Winthrop and Jay). The mega-rich usually content themselves with low profile governance ( "Why run for senator when you can simply buy one?" I heard Gore Vidal say once.) But there have always been those among the moneyed class for whom public life had an irresistible allure.

I think Bloomberg is a classic narcissist. His biggest disappointment seems to be that the possibility of the presidency is now completely closed off ( knock on wood) and that hope kind of kept him on his game ( such as it was) during the first two terms, thru which he served incompetently but wielded his $$$ and influence with sufficient adroitness so that his incompetence could remain mostly undetected.

The ooomph has gone out of him in his last term. And it shows. He doesn't really know *what* to do with himself.

[JHB]

7. If you want to take "full responsibility", Mike, why don't you...

...resign from the third term (term limits? not for moi) you bought.