A great article in Politico.com by Stephanie Simon acknowledges that the primary election in New York City was a rejection of Bloomberg’s education policies of the past decade. The rejection of corporate reform in New York City has national implications, as NYC was held up as one of the “stars” of the privatization movement. Similarly, the election of the insurgent slate in Bridgeport, Connecticut, showed that the public was reclaiming public education from the corporate reform crew running the state.
While the Network for Public Education did not take a position in the New York City mayoral primary, I personally endorsed Bill de Blasio and wrote articles on Huffington Post supporting his candidacy. De Blasio is the candidate who is likeliest to reject Bloomberg’s intense focus on testing, closing schools, and giving special preference to charter schools. De Blasio issued a press release making it clear that if he is elected mayor, he will place a moratorium on any new charters until there was a process for including the voice of the local community and parents.
The Network for Public Education endorsed the insurgent slate in Bridgeport, and we think we gave them an extra boost to carry them to victory over the machine slate.
Please join the Network for Public Education and help us as we help the candidates for office, especially for local school boards, who want to strengthen our public schools, not privatize them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane — what do you have in mind when you refer to reducing Bloomberg’s focus on testing? Aren’t the year-end standardized tests NYC students take mandated by state law? What can De Blasio do to reduce testing?
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Well, De Blasio could theoretically join with the UFT to lobby the legislature to change the law.
Unfortunately, that won’t happen, because one of the dirty little secrets of the Dark Age of so-called education reform is that the UFT leadership believes in and has enabled high stakes testing.
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I would love to see the mayor declare a three year moratorium on test prep and testing while he reconstructs a working school system from the wreckage Bloomberg left behind
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But De Blasio can’t unilaterally declare a moratorium on testing if the testing is mandated by NY law, right? The only course of action I can imagine is what Michael F. describes (leaving aside the important questions of whether De Blasio or the UFT would in fact do what he describes, and how the NY legislature would respond). Am I missing something?
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The tests are mandated by state law, but the consequences and all the bad uses of test scores for ranking and punishing are not.
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Yes the tests are mandated but how they use them varies by city/town. For starters they can stop using the scores of these flawed tests as the main way to rate our schools/teachers or make promotional or placement decisions. Maybe then our principals would stop feeling the pressure to run test prep factories from January to April and go back to places where children learn more than how to bubble in ELA and math test questions or write the same essay as every other kid in the room.
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National PTA includes a toolkit with guidelines for Community Engagement, as does http://www.communityschools.org
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