Different Democrat?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
A candidate for the Democratic nomination for attorney general of New York, Charles King, dropped by our offices Monday and told us he supported lifting the current cap limiting the number of charter schools statewide to 100. It’s a courageous position for a Democrat, given the clout of the teachers unions, and an encouraging sign that Mr. King’s candidacy may depart from the party line. Mayor Bloomberg’s school chancellor, Joel Klein, has also called for lifting the cap. That would allow the creation of more schools whose managements aren’t bound by union contracts that limit the number of hours in the school day and days in the school year and that make it difficult to fire subpar teachers or reward high-performing teachers.
Mr. King’s courage doesn’t extend to supporting school vouchers that would allow poor students stuck in city schools to enjoy what he enjoyed – the benefit of a private-school education. Mr. King is a graduate of Fieldston, and his children have the option of the public schools in Rockland County, where he lives. Not so the poor students stuck in New York City without vouchers. He has bought into the nonsense that vouchers would hamper efforts to improve public schools.
But in other respects, Mr. King is showing signs of being a different kind of Democrat. He told us that as attorney general he would focus on rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse in education and health care. He said he’d remain vigilant with respect to the financial issues that the current attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, has emphasized, but that he’d favor “leaving Wall Street to be regulated by an awakened SEC.”
Mr. King, 46, has experience as a lawyer, a nonprofit executive, and an official in the Clinton administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development. Some of the other candidates for the Democratic nomination include Mr. King’s former boss in the Clinton administration, Andrew Cuomo; a former public advocate of New York City, Mark Green, and two state assemblymen, Richard Brodsky of Westchester County and Michael Gianaris of Queens. There is plenty of time left between now and the primary, but if Mr. King keeps on in this vein, he may yet provide some welcome challenges to the liberal orthodoxy that obtains in the New York Democratic Party.
