On Super Tuesday, we will find out whether the huge cash spent by Mike Bloomberg is enough to win any primaries. Current national polls show him number two, behind Senator Sanders. There is no reason for him to be polling high other than the many millions he has lavished on advertising and staff, outspending all the other candidates combined. The best we can say for Bloomberg is that he is not propelled forward by billionaire cash. He is one of the richest men in the world and he doesn’t need any contributions from others.
As mayor, Bloomberg tried to run the public schools like a business. He showered favor on the charter sector, because he believed that private management was superior to public management, even though he had total control of the schools. He is the quintessential corporate reformer, focused on data (testing) and the bottom line. Schools with high scores were good, schools with low scores were closed, regardless of the challenges they faced.
In this article, Jake Jacobs writes about what he experienced as an art teacher in New York City during Bloomberg’s mayoralty, which lasted 12 years, despite the City Charter’s term limit of two four-year terms.
He writes:
Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City now running for President, often brags about being one of the most prolific charter school creators in the United States. Bloomberg says he “absolutely” intends to expand charters in his federal education plan. This is a serious threat to public education, especially given Bloomberg’s history of using his fortune to shape policy.
Since 2013, Bloomberg has been one of the nation’s biggest donors to candidates and ballot initiatives promoting charters and vouchers, giving more than $4 million to candidates in New Jersey, Colorado, Minnesota, and Louisiana, often through “dark money” PACs. In California, Bloomberg spent a whopping $39 million, backing both Democrats and Republicans who support charters. In Pennsylvania, he gave $6 million to pro-charter incumbent Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, who won re-election with a narrow 1.5 percent edge, and ended up casting a critical vote for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
New York City teachers are vocal critics of Bloomberg, who not only used public money for school privatization but usurped the power of elected community school boards as the state granted Bloomberg “mayoral control” of New York City schools in 2002.
Bloomberg proceeded to appoint corporate attorney Joel Klein as head of New York City’s education department. Klein began a “test-and-punish” regime, which led to the closure of 150 schools and earned him an 80 percent disapproval rating with teachers
As an art teacher during the Bloomberg years, I saw the nightmare firsthand. When the former mayor cut funding for arts programs by 47 percent, over a quarter of public schools went without a full-time arts teacher; in black and brown neighborhoods like the South Bronx, it was more than half. Elementary schools were hit the hardest, with a staggering 92 percent “out of compliance” with state mandates for art.
At times, this meant teaching in an overcrowded middle school with one box of colored pencils and one box of markers to last a whole year. Forget about erasers, glue, scissors, painting supplies, charcoal, poster board or technology. I was lucky to have enough copy paper for my students to draw on.
Forget about erasers, glue, scissors, painting supplies, charcoal, poster board or technology. I was lucky to have enough copy paper for my students to draw on.
When I was a student in 1980, my New York City middle school had a dedicated art room (with a working sink), a full band program, separate orchestra and chorus programs as well as dance, a full ceramics studio and shop class.
Today, middle schools in the city are lucky to have just one teacher in an arts discipline. We can trace this directly to Bloomberg’s “Small Schools Initiative,” where large schools were broken up into small academies, and the number of administrators tripled as class sizes grew and student services disappeared.
Bloomberg’s claims to have made gains on test scores while reducing racial achievement gaps ended up being disproven. By 2014, New York City was the most racially segregated school system in America. Under “stop and frisk,” Bloomberg’s racist policing policy, many of my students were searched for no reason. It didn’t help that Bloomberg’s pro-developer housing policies accelerated the gentrification of New York City, leading to the displacement of low-income renters of color.
While Bloomberg was particularly bad for the arts, he impacted teachers across all subjects. In 2011, when teachers learned that New York State’s new “accountability” metrics would use student test scores in teacher evaluations, Bloomberg went even farther, threatening that test scores would be published in the newspaper alongside the name of each teacher. With this, the best math teachers in my school transferred out to schools in more affluent neighborhoods.
I first started writing about New York’s absurd accountability policy in 2013, after being told my evaluation as an art teacher would be based on math scores. I was offended by the waste and fraud and by 2016, the state Supreme Court had indeed ruled that the formulas used to calculate teacher ratings were “arbitrary and capricious.”
Rooted in cost-cutting practices from the corporate world, Bloomberg’s harmful education policies are today being papered over as his money cascades through the media. Spending $220 million on advertising in January alone, Bloomberg is even blanketing platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and podcasts.
So if you see effusive, rainbow-pooping endorsements of Bloomberg, it’s likely because of this unprecedented and highly deceptive media blast.
Read the whole article. It is very instructive.
Diane Ravitch's blog 