I endorse Maya Wiley for the Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York City.
There are many candidates in the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York City. Whoever is chosen will be the next mayor because the city is 3/4 Democrat and the Republican field is weak (Michael Bloomberg spent $100 million of his own money to win the mayoralty as a Republican and one of his top priorities was to persuade the state legislature to give him total control of the public schools).
My first choice initially was Scott Stringer, the City Comptroller, who has deep experience as a citywide official. Stringer was endorsed by the United Federation of Teachers because of his strong support for public schools. But his chances began to fade when a woman stepped forward to accuse him of groping her twenty years earlier.
Then two men emerged at the top of the polls: Andrew Yang and Eric Adams. Both have received large donations from GOP billionaires who support more charter schools.
The next top contender was Kathryn Garcia, a longtime city bureaucrat who has competence and experience. She was endorsed by the New York Times and the Daily News. With all of Garcia’s plans for change, the one area where she is weakest is education. Thanks to Bloomberg, NYC has mayoral control of the schools. Garcia has promised to lift the cap on charter schools (New York City already has nearly 300), to protect the elite public high schools, and to open more of them. she has shown little or no interest in helping the 88% of students who are in the public schools for which she would be responsible. She is a graduate of the city’s public schools, but treats them as an afterthought. For this reason, I cannot support her.
I endorse Maya Wiley. Wiley is a civil rights lawyer whose values and vision align with my own. She is not beholden to billionaires or the powerful real estate industry. In the debates, she shined as a fearless and principled advocate who did not defer to the front runners. She is committed to improving the lives of children, families, and communities. She is opposed to lifting the charter cap. A Mayor with a clear vision can hire outstanding talent to manage the city’s huge bureaucracy. What matters most is that she has a clear vision, grounded in a commitment to the public good.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Also: https://twitter.com/theanimalvoters/status/1402068858970771466
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I am a lover of animals, esp dogs and cats.
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As I was reading this post, I was scratching Susie, our dog, and reflecting that we need to select our leadership based on which candidate make an animal happy. We should just quit all this voting and put all the candidates in a room with a bunch of dogs, cats, and farm animals. We can see which candidates impress the animals and choose these. Then they can run for office. I call this the pet primary system. It is based on the idea that pets are people too, only without the natural sin.
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For the first time NYC elections are Ranked Choice Voting, you can rank, in priority order up to five candidates.. the candidate with the fewest votes ballot is transferred to their #2 choice, the process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes. You do NOT have to rank five.
I am NOT ranking Adams or Yang,
I am only ranking Stringer, Wiley and Garcia …
I will take days, maybe weeks to complete the count.
Early voting starts tomorrow
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I’m with you on this, Peter.
Stringer should not be DQ’d because of allegations suspiciously timed to torpedo him.
I have great admiration for Wiley and her progressive views.
And Garcia appeals to me because she is blunt about matters in a non-politician speak way, knows and respects civil service workers (I was one.) and has shown a non-ideological knack for getting things to work. A refreshing combination of competence and relevant KSAs not seen in City Hall since forever.
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I’m with you both. I feel Stringer was set up too close to election time. And the ugly thing was how this woman made jokes about the allegation in a comedy routine with no criticism. People jumped off too fast.
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I would have chosen Garcia, but then learned that she favors removing the charter cap entirely.
This, even though she is a graduate of the public schools.
To me, this means that the Mayor is admitting that he/she doesn’t have a clue about how to support schools and is turning the job over to private operators and hoping for the best.
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To me, Garcia is admitting that she believes union teachers are so inept that she wants to make sure NYC can have unlimited charters that use non-union teachers to be given the franchise to establish schools that teach the most motivated students whose parents commit to doing everything that is asked of them by the school if they want their child to remain.
Garcia is basically saying she already knows that inept union teachers would fail miserably if their students were all from highly motivated and involved families and had no learning or behavioral issues. Instead, Garcia wants to expand charters a lot so that those students from highly motivated families who have no learning or behavioral problems can be taught by the far superior non-union teachers those hard-working students deserve.
Garcia supports expanding charters because she cares about kids! And she knows if kids with no learning or behavioral issues are stuck in public schools with union teachers they would be failures — even if those public schools were like charters and excluded all students who weren’t highly motivated with supportive families, and even if public those schools were like charters and excluded the struggling students among that group. Because union teachers just don’t seem to know how to teach those students from highly motivated families the way the far superior non-union charter school teachers do.
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Me, too! Wiley got some big endorsements — AOC, Jamaal Bowman, and Hakeem Jeffries. The Hakeem Jeffries endorsement was shocking to me, given that he is very pro-charter and Wiley is not. If he spent the next 2 weeks actively campaigning, it would help.
Kathryn Garcia coulda been a contender for my vote. I like quite a lot about her EXCEPT her position is absolutely the most rabidly pro-charter, anti-public school of any Democrat in the race. She doesn’t just want to rapidly expand charters, she wants as many charters as possible. Clearly she is completely owned by the billionaires whose desire is to undermine public schools.
Given Kathryn Garcia’s rabid desire to take money directly out of public schools in order to outsource the job of teaching only the students who are profitable to teach to privately operated charters, I can only imagine what Garcia’s plans for sanitation are.
It shocks me that union sanitation workers supporting Garcia are so short sighted that they don’t realize they are very likely next in line for “charterization” if Garcia wins. Given her love of privatizing the least expensive jobs providing public services, Garcia very likely plans to use a significant amount of money from the NYC household sanitation budget to give to privately operated “charter” sanitation companies that use non-union labor. Those charter sanitation companies will be paid generously to pick up trash from any household that signs up with them – with the important caveat that at any time the charter sanitation company can decide that they no longer want to service that household. Given Garcia’s obvious belief that union workers should always step in to do the jobs that non-union workers at private companies funded by taxpayer dollars are unable to do, it seems clear that Garcia would order the union sanitation workers in city trucks to pick up trash in all households that the private companies no longer want to service.
Presumably, given her love of privately operated charters in education, Garcia wants to be able to point to the union sanitation workers whose trucks pick up the trash of all of the households those charter companies don’t want to service and say “see, look how inferior these overpaid and lazy union sanitation workers are – they just can’t seem to do as good a job as these miracle performing “charter” sanitation companies that use superior non-union labor.” (No mention will be made of Garcia’s policy of guaranteeing that any “charter” sanitation company has the choice not to service a household anymore because Garcia will always order city sanitation trucks using union labor to do that job so the charter sanitation companies can continue to brag about being so much more “high performing” that they deserve even more money from the NYC sanitation budget.
Kathryn Garcia’s belief that good public policy is taking taxpayer money from city agency budgets to pay private companies to provide the least expensive to provide services makes her unfit to be Mayor. And if she would only do that to public schools but not sanitation because she is getting huge money from people who want to privatize public education and no one is giving her big money to undermine the public sanitation department, that should also disqualify her.
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Charter schools are very far down the list of my concerns this election cycle.
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FLERP!
NYC has one huge problem, partly related to where you say you live . And it is not crime. The Pandemic and years of advances in tech have severely impacted the Commercial Real Estate market in almost every major city. Commercial office space drives employment and revenue.
Even if a small portion of people continue to work remote, it will depress employment and revenue. Residential conversion will never replace that revenue.
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I know what I see outside the window and on the block.
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But yes, you are correct about that huge problem.
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Charter schools are not far down the list for the libertarian and Republican billionaires backing Yang and Adams. It’s very important to them because so much money is riding on it — for them. And if they care about the money they’re making off school privatization, they also care about all the ways they keep themselves rich by degrading the quality of life for everyone else. Privatization goes hand in hand with deregulation and trickle down economics, policies affecting nearly everything and everyone.
Allowing Republican billionaires to support you should be a disqualification in a Democratic primary. It actually is a disqualification if the voters are made widely aware of the billionaires’ contributions.
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This is my home. I’m an utterly typical person in that what matters to me, my neighborhood, my district, my borough, and my city is more important than opposing the things that billionaires support.
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Good! Tell the billionaires to get out of your city with your vote. Your mayor should care about you and your home, not about outsiders with ulterior motives.
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FLERP!
If I had to guess, I would say you are animated by a quality of life issue.
Having to do with deBlasio relocating the homeless population. Then the Pandemic exacerbating the problem . As in the homeless hotel on the upper West Side. In my opinion we have to distinguish that quality of life issue from the increase in shootings and homicides we saw last year. Which was drug related as the unemployed went back to selling drugs stepping on turfs. And not for the most part in Midtown North or South .
I would say that you can blame the homeless mentally ill problem on Reagan as he emptied out the Hospitals for the mentally ill in the 60s to save dollars and cut taxes. Starting a National trend.
From a social stand point was it the wrong policy not to incarcerate the
non violent ill. I understand your feelings but I don’t see us solving this without a substantial investment in Social Services. Something we are not willing to pay for. Of course if those billionaires paid the same tax rate as this retired electrician we would be able to afford a lot.
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“I would say that you can blame the homeless mentally ill problem on Reagan”
Lol, good lord.
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I have a long list of things, none of them good that date back to Reagan. I did say every body followed suit and de institutionalized the mentally ill. . But I take that back. He also severely cut the Federal program funding the States for Mental Health as President. . So in your opinion policies set 40 -50 years ago have no relevance today .
Diane might be interested to hear that”A Nation At Risk “,a 1983 Reagan administration fairy tale did not set the narrative of failing schools instead of failing economic policy.
And that No Child Left behind has not left a 20 year and counting legacy.
.Apparently he was unable to remember as well(as in Iran contra ) . And that was before dementia set in. Or perhaps not.
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Joel,
You are right to cite Reagan when talking about the homeless mentally ill. The movement to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill instead of warehousing them for the rest of their lives in asylums was the right one and the people advocating it are not to blame. But Reagan represented the philosophy that society is better when rich people pay low taxes and budgets are cut. The Republicans supported deinstitutionalization because it saved a lot of money, but did not support spending the money to provide the kinds of homes and services that people with mental illnesses need.
Some people seem to think a return to “lock them up forever” in asylums is a good public policy. It would certainly leave the streets empty of homeless mentally ill. But surely as a society we can figure out how to provide housing and services for people who are mentally ill and on the street. It will be complicated – do you “force” someone mentally ill to be treated? But the Republicans never want to find solutions — their game is to seize power in order to find problems they can blame on Democrats, not offer up any way to solve them.
I thought New York City had a homelessness problem. Then I visited a few cities on the west coast. I don’t think New Yorkers can imagine what people who live in west coast cities experience.
And it isn’t simply the mentally ill who are homeless. There is a near unsolvable tension between those who want to live in places where it is too expensive for them to live, and those who want to forbid them from being there. I wonder if FLERP! has found any politicians who support policies to deal with the homeless problem, and if so, what those solutions are.
I have heard ideas that seem good at first, until I hear critics ask pertinent questions. (For example, what if LA built a huge community of very low cost housing for those living in the street, but what if the people living in the street did not want to live in that housing or would live in that housing but only if it was located in a different place?)
I wish we had two parties who wanted to find solutions. Too many politicians, most of them Republicans (but some Democrats), are only interested in what can get political mileage.
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NYC public school parent
Look at that ,we agree again.
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My experience as a NYC dweller from 1973-1992 [5 yrs Manhattan, 12 yrs Brooklyn]: homeless and mentally ill already lived on the streets in the early/mid-‘70’s, although not in huge numbers. I assume that had something to do with city being bankrupt at the time. The # of mentally-ill on the street hugely increased in the early ‘80’s, followed quickly by a big increase in the # of homeless in general – by mid-80’s the streets resembled those of a 3rd-world city. That mysteriously got better by end-‘80’s. All that couldn’t have just been about Reagan: it had to be about Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch as well. [Perhaps the latter 2 helped things get better, I don’t know]. In early ‘90’s we had the amazing transformation of Times Square from red-light porn to world-class theatre district under Rudy Giuliani… But at the same time, the crack epidemic had made it to our mid/ upper-mid class Bklyn nbhd: street crime was up, and every a.m. the playground of the midsch was strewn with needles & vials!
P.S., We loved living in NYC despite all that, & resisted moving even after my husband was reverse commuting to NJ. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the needle-strewn local midsch. By then against all odds we’d borne 3 kids in 4 yrs, & knew we couldn’t afford private middle school for 3 kids…
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Diane why are you so quick to jump off of stringer’s ship? Just because of an allegation 20-30 years ago with not a shred of proof – and – like a reader posted above me – she made a joke about it in her comedy routine. this is clearly a political hit as the GOP mob knew Stringer was a shoe in so they had to do something
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I am not a New Yorker, so I was not/am not familiar with the allegation against Stringer. However, my first thought was that an accusation of sexual harassment seems to be the go to method of getting rid of political opponents. It’s a good way to tank a candidacy since the candidate cannot effectively dispute the charge in a timely fashion. If I were Stringer, I might be tempted to go after the accuser through the courts.
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Two women have made accusations against Stringer. I think these claims are fake and politically motivated, but they have damaged his chances. Yang and Adams are ahead in the polls. They would be at the bottom of my list.
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I wish voters could know from where the funding comes in the Super PACS. We can find a great deal about candidates by following the money. In looking for info on candidates’ platforms, I came across this Chalkbeat article that compares where the NYC candidates stand on education in various issues. https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/6/10/22528710/nyc-mayoral-race-2021-education-schools
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Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse and commented:
Maya Wiley should become the next mayor of New York City … if the working class that makes up the majority of voters want to take the power away from the greedy, extremist billionaires that control the city as if they are all Darth Vaders.
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As a CT voter I have no power under my name but will recommend to my NYC 48 yr old son!
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I was excited about Garcia until she said she would lift the charter school cap. Major downer for me. But you said much more eloquently than I could.
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Yes, that should disqualify her as a choice for public school supporters. It does surprise me that some posters here are willing to overlook that. I do think Garcia has some very good policies, but the damage that her education wishes would do is unimaginable. Unlimited charters all over NYC, all funded with money from the public school budget, and neither the Mayor nor the DOE has any authority over them at all. A recipe for disaster.
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Eric Adams: “With new technology you don’t need school children to be in a school building with a number of teachers. It’s just the opposite. You could have one teacher teach 300-400 students.”
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This is why you can’t just ask politicians about charters.
You’ll get all kinds of incredibly bad answers if they’re asked about public schools.
Not a resident of NYC and I know nothing about it, but I can tell you from experience in Ohio that charters/vouchers are only half the story in ed reform- the cheap, gimmicky junk they push into public schools is easily as important as their promotion of charter schools.
You get the whole package when they capture local government- you get unlimited charters – in Ohio they proudly boasted they “flooded” areas with charter schools- but you also get LOUSY public school policy.
A double whammy for public school students.
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More rigorous and unbiased ed reform analysis:
“The 74
Mark your calendar: The 74 and
ppi
will mark the 30th anniversary of the nation’s first charter school law with a special panel discussion assessing the movement and the moment — at 1 pm ET June 16”
PPI is a Right wing lobbying group and The 74 promotes charter schools. They assembled 4 paid charter school promoters to “assess” charter schools.
I think I know how this “assessment” comes out. A+ for charter schools.
Next up: “vouchers- extraordinary or just excellent? Paid voucher promoters weigh in”.
Why bother using words like “assessment”. This is a lobbying campaign. Nothing wrong with it- they’re all paid to promote these schools. Just own it. They have an ideological preference for privatized schools and private schools. They wouldn’t have been hired at any of these orgs or foundations if they didn’t.
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Broad’s $100 million gift to Yale—along w/ its School of (Reform) Management—nicely fits the narrative as well. Just an easier step to TFA-to-leadership-policy in a few years.
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I am curious about what folks think about using evidence based teaching practices like those advocated for here: https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/evidence-based-teaching-practices/ . It seems to me that having evidence and measuring learning are intimately connected.
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This went in the wrong place. Please delete
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