Moskowitz Endorses Bloomberg

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.

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NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

The endorsement of Michael Bloomberg for mayor by one of his toughest critics, the chairwoman of the City Council’s education committee, Eva Moskowitz, is yet another indication that the New Yorkers who are serious about education reform are backing Mr. Bloomberg for re-election. Our columnist Andrew Wolf, another often caustic critic of Mr. Bloomberg on education issues, summed things up in a column in Monday’s Sun, saying that he expects to vote for the mayor’s reelection because on education issues his Democratic opponent, Fernando Ferrer, “offers voters nothing.”


Not, of course, exactly nothing. What the former president of the Bronx does offer on education is two things – litigation and taxation. Mr. Ferrer was until recently a member of the board of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the group whose lawsuit against New York taxpayers won a judgment requiring them to cough up $23 billion more for schools. The theory seems to be that this would be directed toward funding for New York City public schools. The City Council had to convene a panel to figure out what to do with this lucre, and the panel is plotting to steer billions to educational consultants.


The billions will come not only from taxpayers outside the city but also ordinary New York City taxpayers and will flow into a government education monopoly that, as Ms. Moskowitz pointed out in her budget guide for parents, already spends about $20 billion a year on 1.1 million students. That works out to about $18,000 a student, enough to hire a teacher for $120,000 a year for every 10 students, and still leave $60,000 a class for school supplies, textbooks, and renting a classroom. Catholic schools – the sort that Mr. Ferrer himself attended as a child – do the job at a fraction of the cost and get better results in terms of student achievement.


The amount of taxpayers’ money that the Ferrer-allied campaign wants to lavish on the schools is so large that the City Council had to convene a commission of outside experts to figure out how to spend it. One can differ with the Bloomberg administration on its lack of support for school vouchers. The national test scores released yesterday suggest that all of the recent achievement gains touted by the administration may not be independently confirmable. Ms. Moskowitz has been sharply critical of the administration at times on matters from the capital budget to the availability of toilet paper. Yet for all that, on education, Mr. Bloomberg is better than the alternative.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

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.


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