Local politicians have continued to voice support for a West Harlem middle school slated for closure, taking aim at New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott.
On Thursday, a meeting to discuss the planned elimination of the sixth through eighth grades at the Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing Arts drew scores of angry parents and teachers. And at a Tuesday night meeting at the 26th police precinct, City Council member Robert Jackson and several other politicians joined the chorus of support for Wadleigh.
“The motto is, don’t close it, fix it,” Jackson said, arguing that with only 100 students, Wadleigh shouldn’t be difficult to improve.
The Panel for Educational Policy is due to vote on the closing or downsizing of 25 city public schools, including Wadleigh, next Tuesday. Bloomberg appoints eight of the panel’s 13 members.
“We have mayoral control there—the mayor is in control. In any other country, you call that what?” Jackson asked the 25 people in attendance, before answering his own question: “A dictatorship.”
“I have called that panel publicly a rubber stamp,” he added. “They do whatever the mayor wants to do.”
Corey Ortega, a special assistant to State Assembly member Keith Wright, was also critical of Bloomberg and Walcott at the New York Police Department’s 26th Precinct Community Council meeting on Tuesday night. Ortega said that Wright is planning to draft legislation to repeal mayoral control of the panel.
Wright believes that the “A” grade Wadleigh received three years ago in the city Department of Education’s evaluations is an indication that the school has promise, Ortega said. The school, he said, has suffered under the watch of ineffective administrators.
“If we can’t change 100 students, then damn, something’s wrong,” Ortega said.
Jackson also lashed out at Walcott, as well as former Schools Chancellors Cathie Black, Joel Klein, and Harold Levy. All of them, he said, did not come from schools backgrounds, and made the city think that the only way to improve education is to eliminate low-performing schools.
Several other politicians took swings at Bloomberg and his education policies on Tuesday. At a news conference on the steps of City Hall, four of the Democratic candidates for mayor blasted the Bloomberg administration’s plan to shut down a record 62 schools.
“It’s very easy to close a school. It doesn’t take real leadership,” Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said at the news conference.
“To too many people over at the Tweed building, closing a school is a panacea,” Public Advocate Bill de Blasio said. “They think it will solve all our problems.”
Stringer and de Blasio were joined by Comptroller John Liu and former Comptroller Bill Thompson, as well as representatives from the education advocate groups Class Size Matters, Advocates for Children of New York, and New York Communities for Change.
26th Precinct Community Council meetings are rarely attended by politicians’ representatives, let alone politicians themselves, so Jackson’s and Ortega’s appearances were unexpected.
Jackson said he decided to come to the council meeting, on 126th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, since he had just given a guest lecture in a Columbia class.
He spoke, alongside Walcott, in former New York City Mayor David Dinkins’ class, “Practical Problems in Urban Politics,” at the School of International and Public Affairs.
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