City Council Member Charles Barron stood up from his seat at Hostos Community College yesterday just before Mayor Bloomberg began his State of the City address and thanked the crowd for coming.

“Now that I have your attention, I think the city needs some changes,” the long-shot mayoral candidate said. The audience laughed softly before the headline speaker took the stage.

Mr. Barron, Democrat of Brooklyn, may have been the first, but he wasn’t the only mayoral aspirant trying to steal the spotlight from Mr. Bloomberg to provide his own prescription for the city.

The most formal rebuttal came from the speaker of the council, Gifford Miller, who, alone among the candidates, goes up against the mayor on a regular basis at City Hall. Immediately after the mayor’s speech, Mr. Miller held his own news conference, with prepared remarks, to attack Mr. Bloomberg on everything from education reform to homelessness to dealing with the MTA. The Manhattan Democrat also provided a synopsis of issues “we didn’t hear” in the speech.

“We heard a lot of talk from the mayor about education today, but no amount of talk is going to change the fact that our schools are in trouble,” Mr. Miller said in a conference room two floors above the auditorium where the mayor delivered his speech.

“Although getting control of the schools is the best thing this mayor accomplished, the promise of mayoral control is unfulfilled for our children,” he told reporters. “Under this mayor, mayoral control has meant a bureaucratic reshuffle instead of a radical change in fundamentals.”

The council speaker chided the mayor for failing to improve student test scores, disrespecting teachers, and focusing on barely a dozen problem schools to address school safety, rather than all public schools. He cited the need for smaller classes, quality teachers, safe schools, and strong after-school programs, but he did not offer any specifics on how he would fill those needs.

Like the other mayoral candidates, Mr. Miller used his platform to counter the list of accomplishments the mayor cited. Those issues, which Bloomberg is pushing for Manhattan’s far West Side, have already emerged as key campaign themes.

For all of Mr. Miller’s attacks on the administration, the speaker still has to win the Democratic primary before he will face the mayor. The former borough president of the Bronx, Fernando Ferrer, is still the only Democrat who bests Mr. Bloomberg in head-to-head match-ups in polls. Aides to Mr. Miller said he will need a coalition of Jews, Manhattanites, blacks, and outer-borough Catholics to unseat the mayor, in spite of the city’s 5-to-1 Democrat to Republican ratio.