The Banana Republic Of NYC, pt 2

an excerpt from Leonie Haimson's great article in the huffington post

Here in New York City, we are living in a banana republic known as Bloomberg, Inc. This sad reality is most apparent when it comes to our public schools.
Our Board of Education, which the Mayor decided to rename the Panel on Educational Policy, was called into session on Thursday, with only one hour's public notice, to rubberstamp a school budget that contained $400 million in cuts to our schools.
Hours later, the City Council approved a capital budget for school construction that is widely acknowledged to be inadequate to alleviate the massive overcrowding and excessive class sizes that are common in the schools of this city. These are the very conditions that six years ago, our state's highest court declared deprived the city's children of their constitutional right to an adequate education. The Court ordered the state to provide more funding to our schools, which started in 2007; but instead of lowering class sizes, classes took their largest jump upward this fall in ten years.
Chancellor Joel Klein has repeatedly announced that he has no intention of reducing class size, despite the state mandate to do so, and has been repeatedly cited for misusing hundreds of millions of dollars meant for this purpose, as reported in audits by the State Comptroller and the State Education Department. Indeed, if he has his way, Klein recently announced, he would shrink the teaching force by 30 percent, forcing class sizes to increase even further.
Only two of the top twenty executives at the Department of Education are educators, while the rest are former lawyers and management consultants. Instead, the Mayor's decisions are influenced by a small group of billionaires, including Eli Broad, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and Mort Zuckerman, none of whom would ever consider sending their own children to a New York City public school.
While these moguls continually praise Klein's leadership, even though he has allowed class sizes to remain at thirty or more for hundreds of thousands of students, they themselves send their children, as did Bloomberg and Klein, to private schools where no classes are larger than fifteen.