New York parents and schoolchildren beware: Mayor Bill de Blasio doesn’t see you as part of his “team.”
That’s the clear takeaway from what the mayor told City Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens) after Holden confronted him about the rampant fraud at Maspeth HS.
De Blasio’s words, according to Holden: “It’s good that you gave it to me, but if you want to be on my team you have to play like a team member,” and wait quietly for City Hall to do . . . something, maybe, eventually.
Maspeth whistleblowers came to Holden at the end of July with a trove of hard evidence of no-show classes, rampant grade- and test-fixing and other ways to graduate seniors under false pretenses. The councilman took it all to City Hall, requesting urgent action by the Department of Investigation. He then shared the info directly with the DOI . . . which passed it on to the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools.
Yet when four whistleblowers came to Holden’s office the next week for face-to-face reporting, the SCI said it had no rep to send. Indeed, it handed the whole hot potato on to the Department of Education’s in-house investigators.
Since the DOE answers to the mayor, Holden reached out to de Blasio after two weeks with nothing happening. He urged the immediate removal of the apparently crooked school leadership before classes began. That’s when the mayor answered with his “team player” comment.
So the whistleblowers wound up taking it all to The Post’s Susan Edelman, who blew the scandal wide open in the Sept. 15 paper.
Meanwhile, Maspeth’s administrators remain in charge as the DOE’s “investigation” plods along. “If any improprieties are confirmed to be true, immediate action will be taken,” says City Hall spokeswoman Jane Meyer. Smoking-gun evidence of no-show classes — with neither a room nor a meeting time even scheduled — isn’t enough?
The DOE’s practice of delaying action for a year or more in such cases is all too familiar. And the mayor’s constant efforts to choke even high-performing charter schools leaves us unsurprised that he puts politics ahead of educational opportunity.
Even so, we’re shocked that he actually thinks that “a team member” would go along with keeping the public in the dark about large-scale educational fraud.
This isn’t the “team player” mentality of a public servant, but of a Mafia made man.