In the political arena, all eyes are on the Presidential race.
But in New York City, candidates for Mayor are lining up supporters. The election is 2013, when Mayor Bloomberg’s rocky third term ends.
It appears that the favorite of the charter school hedge fund crowd is Christine Quinn, City Council speaker. Quinn, a close ally of Mayor Bloomberg, seems likeliest to keep his policies intact. To say that parents do not like his school-closing policy would be an understatement. The brute fact is that there is a lot of money on the privatization side of the agenda.
The question is whether any of the candidates will stand up for public education and block the insertion of charters into public schools that are already overcrowded.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Pay attention to that fellow NYC teachers, so those of you that live in the five boroughs do not vote for her or anyone else he endorses.
FIRE DUNCAN! Hire Ravitch!
There is little difference between Quinn and Bloomberg.
Harvard has yet to produce a psychometrician who can measure the awfulness of Christine Quinn, who (along with the Mayor) sat back and let a 160 year-old hospital in her district (St. Vincent’s) close, resulting in the loss of three thousand jobs and medical care for residents of Lower Manhattan, all to enable a luxury real estate play.
Her awfulness is beyond dispute, as is her being the proxy candidate for Bloomberg, but unless mayoral control of the schools is repealed, no one should expect much change. Yes, the in-your-face contempt of Bloomberg/Tweed may soften, but the Shock Doctrine policies will remain mostly the same: austerity for the public schools along with special deals for favored charter operators and electronic classroom scam artists, instability and disruption, school closings and teacher scapegoating.
New York is one of the main circuit boxes of global capitalism, and is ruled by FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) like few places on earth. In the unlikely event that someone who might raise a peep about the testing/ school privatization regime is elected mayor, some worthy from the New York City Partnership or equivalent power center will take them aside and give them the “Look, kid, this is how the world works, so just let things happen” speech.
And none of them will need to be given that speech: all Power’s emissary has to say is the name, “John Liu,” and they’ll get the message.
The urban public schools are going to need many, many things if they are to recover from this Dark Era; one of them has to be the release of the executive stranglehold over them, as wielded by neoliberal mayors representing FIRE to the exclusion of all else.