Hopeless Blas
Why can’t he stop acting so corrupt?
HELLO? Just as Mayor de Blasio is to meet with federal prosecutors to talk possible pay-to-play with the city’s teachers union, that same union fulsomely endorses the mayor for a second term. Awkward? You might say. Really. Why not take a bright red Sharpie and draw a fat circle around that $350,000 American Federation of Teachers “donation” to de Blasio’s now-defunct-but-certainly-not-forgotten Campaign for One New York slush fund — followed days later by the $9 billion contract the mayor laid on the union’s local affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers.
This may or may not have been a crime — among other things, that’s what the feds are trying to figure out — but the notion that it’s not in spirit payto-play is ludicrous.
The only real question is why de Blasio and the UFT decided to rub US Attorney Preet Bharara’s nose in the mess at this potentially critical moment. At least two grand juries are sorting out the de Blasio governance style, after all.
The answer is simple: The mayor came to office marinated in hubris, and this has informed virtually all of his (many) political and policy pratfalls.
So, irrespective of Bharara, de Blasio picks this means, and this moment, to remind potential mayoral challengers that he is in fact the Big Dog on the block right now — and the UFT is delighted to oblige. What a team. The union certainly has prospered under de Blasio. Quite apart from its $9 billion payday, the mayor has marched to the UFT’s drummer on charter schools and teacher evaluations — the fewer the better — and Mike Bloomberg’s hard-won, but modest, school reforms have all but vanished.
The kids come up losers, as always. But they count for little more than props for the union — and, by extention, for the mayor.
And that’s where the real corruption lies.
Not to discount the value of that $350,000 union slush fund spiff, which Bharara will figure out anyway, de Blasio’s wholly undemanding relationship with the UFT amounts to a profound betrayal of his responsibility to the city’s 1.1 million publicschool children.
Whether he believes the UFT way — no competition, no standards and only marginal success — is the best way, or whether he’s doing it cynically, for the endorsement, doesn’t really matter.
His Department of Education will consume more than $25 billion this year, and in return taxpayers will get a 30-plus-percent high-school dropout rate and a graduating cohort largely unable to do college-level work without substantial remediation.
Fact is, teachers are spending less time in the classroom now than they did when de Blasio arrived, thanks to the fat-cat contract the mayor gifted them. This is a small thing in context — but quite telling nevertheless: Little things add up.
Apart from a minor kerfuffle over classroom discipline in the early grades, there’s not a single thing the UFT has wanted from the de Blasio administration that it hasn’t gotten.
And now the endorsement — the penal law notwithstanding, about as corrupt a bargain as can be imagined.
How much actual value it brings is open to question, of course. The last winning mayoral candidate endorsed from the outset by the United Federation of Teachers was David Dinkins, way back in 1989. (Yes, it got on board with de Blasio four years ago, but only after losing with Billy Thompson in the Democratic primary.)
This isn’t to suggest UFT backing is beanbag. It ain’t — even if a huge chunk of union members live outside the city and thus can’t vote for de Blasio anyway.
The union can bring formidable organizational strength and — need it be said yet again? — money to any citywide campaign. (Hey, $350,000 to the Campaign for One New York speaks for itself, no?)
So the candidates and all the municipal unions quid pro each other’s quos. It’s the New York way. And it’s all legal. Up to a point. Whether de Blasio has crossed the line is the question — the same question, it’s worth noting, that was asked of erstwhile state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos right after they attracted Bharara’s gimlet eye.
Now the two ex-lawmakers are on their way to prison — even as de Blasio waves a red flag at federal prosecutors.
He may come to regret that.