Get this: Mayor de Blasio is suggesting New Yorkers not re-elect him.
OK, he didn’t come right out and say it. But he did say voters ought to give him the boot come the next election if they conclude he’s not fixing our city schools.
“People have every right to hold me absolutely and totally accountable” for city schools, the mayor told lawmakers Wednesday. “If they find my efforts insufficient,” voters can “remove me, because we have a scheduled election.”
De Blasio made his comments while arguing to make mayoral control of city schools permanent, rather than just extend it three years, as Gov. Cuomo wants.
The mayor’s right: Mayoral control is about holding pols responsible for the performance of public institutions. Before 2002, when the unelected Board of Education ran the system, no one was held accountable.
Trouble is, de Blasio is taking ownership of a broken system where hundreds of schools are failing, nearly two out of three grade-school students are flunking their proficiency tests and the majority of African-American males will never see a high-school diploma.
And he has no real plans to fix it.
Nor can he plead poverty. On Thursday, Cuomo released a report highlighting schools that have been failing for as many as 10 years.
These include schools where more than 90 percent of the kids don’t meet grade standards. Turns out per-student funding for these failure factories is twice the average for an American school.
The mayor wants to keep these bad schools open and give them even more money. We have a better idea: If the schools don’t show signs of a turnaround on de Blasio’s watch, voters should do exactly what he says and remove him at the next election.