(From The New York Post, August 25, 2010)
New York won a big prize yesterday: $700 million in federal funds from Team Obama’s Race to the Top competition.
But the real victory took place months ago, when lawmakers — for the most part kicking and screaming — agreed to reforms required by the feds as a precondition to the big payday.
Chief among them: boosting the state cap on the number of charter schools. With or without the money, schoolkidswill long be the beneficiaries of that.
But make no mistake. None of it came easy.
The teachers unions and their pawns in Albany — Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver, Sens. Bill Perkins and Suzi Oppenheimer, etc. — fought tooth-and-nail to thwart charter growth. (The unions hate charters, because they’re usually non-union schools and boast records that blow away those of labor-run schools.)
They also went to war against another key reform — using student test scores to evaluate teacher performance — and succeeded in watering it down.
Only after heroes like city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Joe Williams of Democrats for Education Reform — and a long campaign by The Post — did lawmakers finally cave in and boost the cap.
Not that they suddenly put kids first, of course. No, the pols merely feared being blamed for losing the $700 million in Race to the Top funds.
Hey, whatever it takes.
So, it was just a tad disquieting yesterday to see a gaggle of the usual suspects grabbing credit for securing the dough.
Actually, it was disgusting.
United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, for example, actually claimed that the unions “took a big role” in getting the reforms passed.
We wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the skies had darkened at that point, and lightning struck him down — the union boss having done everything in his power to kill the reforms.
Silver spoke of the “the commitment we have made” to students — even though he himself led the Assembly as it actively stalled reform for months.
And yet, as Mulgrew, Silver and other hangers-on dissembled at City Hall yesterday, Williams — who really led the good fight — was notably absent.
That reflects poorly on Mayor Bloomberg.
Yes, the money is great for New York.
But the reforms are better.
And they came despite, not because of, their foes — no matter what they insisted yesterday.
That’s worth remembering.