In a Nov. 9 press release, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the current chancellor of education, Joel Klein, would be resigning to take a position as the executive vice president of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Cathie Black, the current CEO of the multi-billion-dollar Hearst Magazines, will be appointed as the new NYC school chancellor.
 Hearst Magazines CEO Cathie Black |
Black will have to be granted a waiver by the New York State Education Department in order to assume her position, because she lacks a master’s degree, professional certificate and teaching experience. Black attended parochial schools in Chicago growing up, and her children, while raised in New York City, attended private school in Connecticut. Despite her lack of experience with public education, Mayor Bloomberg can legally appoint the school chancellor without any checks or balances from parents, students or Department of Education employees due to a state law he pushed through the state legislature in 2002 at the beginning of his first term.
Black’s appointment is representative of a trend across the country of hiring corporate executives to manage the nation’s public schools. Black’s acceptance, together with Klein’s new appointment to the News Corp., signifies a deepening of this relationship in New York City. While Black has yet to make any detailed public statements outlining her strategy, she was quoted in the Nov. 9 press release as saying:,“My main goal will be to build on the work that has been accomplished during the Bloomberg Administration, and Chancellor Klein’s tenure,” meaning that NYC schools are headed for more public school closings, charter school openings and back-room deals with private educational management companies.
By passing the mayoral control law in 2002, which disbanded the Board of Education and created a Department of Education headed by the mayor, Bloomberg has effectively cut parents and school workers out of the equation in making decisions about city schools. In March of this year, a New York State Supreme Court judge ruled against the closing of 19 public schools because the Department of Education had committed “significant violations” of the state education law with its lack of community involvement.
Mayor Bloomberg, who is also the richest man in New York City with an estimated net worth of $16 billion, has no business presiding over the education of the city’s 988,000 public school students, when more than half this number of the city’s children are living in poverty. (Children’s Defense Fund, 2006)
Bronx high school teacher Rebecca Carter stated, “I’m discouraged that legislators still cling to the belief that we can improve our public school system by aligning it to a business model.” The education system should belong to the students, parents and school staff whose lives it actually touches, not a small circle of CEOs and VPs.
Parent, teacher and community organizations have already issued the call for Black’s nomination to be struck down, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation joins in that demand. Education does not belong to corporations or media moguls, it belongs to the people.
