Deja Vu All Over Again

As I was writing my blog entry yesterday, I was overcome with a strange sense of deja vu. Has that ever happened to you?

It occurred when I heard the words "15,000 layoffs" from Mayor4Life's lips. I got the feeling that it wasn't the first time I'd heard them.

As it turns out, I was right. More right than even I bargained for. Mayor4Life and his stooge, Joel Klein, threatened to lay off 15,000 teachers once before. Check out this article from Gothamschools and see you notice anything creepy about it. Besides Klein's face, I mean.

Points for you if you noticed the date of the article. It was January 28, 2009--exactly two years to the day ago that the mayor last threatened to lay off exactly the same number of teachers.

What's going on here? Is this mere coincidence, or is the mayor calling plays from his old playbook? If you'll notice, Klein even used many of the same words that Bloomberg used yesterday:

“We don’t want to lose personnel,” he said later. “Particularly, we don’t want to lose young talented people that we’ve recruited in recent years.”

Clearly, Bloomberg is trying once again to force a change in seniority laws by threatening to axe new teachers. It didn't work last time, and it will fail again. State politicians must know that it's political suicide to change seniority--not because of the teacher's union, but because ALL unions would then be subject to the same threat. This is the third rail of state politics.

The mayor pulls out this threat annually, the way the mayor of Punxsutawney, PA pull out the groundhog every year. The only difference is that in PA, a mayor wearing a big hat pulls a rodent from the ground, whereas in NY, a rodent pulls a trick out of his hat.

As I was writing my blog entry yesterday, I was overcome with a strange sense of deja vu. Has that ever happened to you?

.

A New Kind of Mayoral Control

It looks as if the State senators will come out of hiding and pass the mayoral control bill back into law with few modifications. Then, if they see their shadows, we will have six more weeks of winter. No, that's Groundhog Day. The rodents in the state legislature portend five more years of dictatorial rule.

It no big surprise that the mayor's money talked. Billions of dollars together tend to speak pretty loudly. However, there is a sliver of hope that rarely gets talked about these days. While the mayor gets to control the schools, let's remember that we, the voters, control who the mayor is.

Voting Bloomberg out is the ultimate in mayoral control. I know some of you think he is invincible, but I think the cracks in the mayor's highly polished image are beginning to show. Witness how he angrily stared down a disabled man who had a difficult time turning off a tape recorder. Remember how he told parents that they should leave the teaching decisions to teachers (the very ones he cut out of the decision making process). Consider his silence as Eva Moskowitz plays Capture the Flag with PS 123. Think of the phony reconstituted BOE he stuffed with his own deputy mayors. Add in his power grab for a third term as mayor in defiance of the will of the people who twice voted for term limits. Finally, remember his moronic hyperbole in stating that there would be riots in the streets should one word of the mayoral control bill be changed.

So no, we probably can't stop the return of mayoral control. But we might be able to stop the return of Mayor Mike.