What happens in New York City schools right now gets a lot of attention because the mayoral control model is one which is being contemplated in cities from coast-to-coast. So an awful lot of attention is paid to test scores and reorganization plans and who was or wasn’ consulted about this change or that.
But sometimes it is easy for those of us who are close to the action to forget that it was only a few years ago, on the eve of Mayor Bloomberg winning control of the 1.1 million student school system in 2002, that we were looking at a governance structure where all sorts of crazy things took priority over the education of our kids.