Michael Daly: This Ain't Egypt, Bloomberg

Mayor Moneybags criticized parents, students and teachers who protested at Thursday's Panel for Educational Policy and said that they were an embarrassment to New York City, an embarrassment to New York State and an embarrassment to the country.

Here are his remarks from his Friday radio show:

“This is embarrassing for New York City, for New York State, for America,” Mr. Bloomberg said during his weekly appearance on WOR-AM. “This is not democracy, letting people yell and scream. That’s not freedom of expression — that’s just trying to take away somebody else’s rights."

UFT president Mulgrew responded, calling the mayor Hosni Mubarak after the Egyptian dictator and pointed out that the PEP is a rubber stamp for the mayor's policies and about as democratic as the old Politburo:

The outraged parents, students and teachers union officials, though, said the mayor's comments were the real embarrassment.

Teachers union official Michael Mulgrew, who joined in chants of "fraud" on Wednesday and a walkout during Thursday's meeting, suggested a nickname for Bloomberg based on his remarks: "Mayor Hosni Mubarak."

"It's clear that Mike Bloomberg has the same idea of democracy as Hosni," he said, referring to the protests in Egypt. "For him to bring up democracy -- anything about democracy -- when speaking about a (Panel for Educational Policy) meeting is beyond hypocrisy, because the last time the PEP panel said the mayor was wrong, they were fired."

In 2004, the mayor removed panel appointees critical of his plan requiring students to earn a minimum score on state exams before being promoted to the next grade.

The panel, which functions as a school board, is seen as a rubber stamp to Education Department policy since the majority of the members are appointed by the mayor.

Panel members have never voted down a school closing - or any significant policy made by the agency.

Today NY Daily News columnist Michael Daly joins the chorus against Bloomberg. Here is his entire column - a broadside against Mayor Moneybags and his authoritarianism:

"This is not democracy, letting people yell and scream."

No, that was not Hosni Mubarak talking about the demonstrators in Egypt.

That was Mike Bloomberg talking about the parents, teachers and students who turned raucous at two meetings preceding a rubberstamp vote to close 22 schools.

How does Bloomberg propose NOT to let them yell and scream in an actual democracy? Eject them? Lock them up?

Bloomberg went so far as to say they had embarrassed their city, their state, even their nation.

He did not seem to consider that they were roused to fury by much the same feeling that rouses the protesters in Cairo. This is the sense that whatever you say in more reasonable tones will be ignored.

Bloomberg is no Mubarak, silly sound bites by teacher's union boss Michael Mulgrew aside.

But, the folks in that auditorium at Brooklyn Tech had no more real voice than the folks in Egypt.

Schools Chancellor Cathie Black and the ruling majority of the panel on stage are mayoral puppets. They hardly even pretended that whatever the people in the auditorium had to say made much difference.

"Not one person on the panel was actually listening," said Charm Rhoomes, who was there Thursday night as the mother of a student at Jamaica High School and the president of its PTA. "Even Cathie Black. She was on her BlackBerry."

Rhoomes came with her 16-year-old son, Shawn Nevers, and did not join in the yelling. She understands those who did. "They know that whatever they are saying is falling on deaf ears," Rhoomes said. "The decision was already made. It was horrible."

The only ears that mattered were not there. The mayor would hear afterward of what he deemed shameful behavior. He would say, "When you're yelling at a meeting like they had ...you're yelling at the teachers, you're dissing them, you're dissing the principals, you're dissing the school safety officers, you're dissing the custodians, you're dissing the taxpayers paying for it."

They were really dissing the mayor. And to demonstrate their outrage, a good number of them staged a walk-out. Rhoomes stayed, and calm had returned when it came her turn to speak.

"There was no shouting, there was no screaming," she recalled.

Had they bothered, the minions on the stage would have had no trouble hearing Rhoomes as she spoke with a Caribbean lilt of her son, who never misses school and gets good grades and was so thrilled when he was admitted to college-level math. He attended one class only to be told at the second that it had been dropped from the curriculum because the teacher had been cut. He would still love to have college math, but he does not want to lose the school where he has worked so hard. "He still loves the school," she said.

This magnificent working mother of three was speaking from her very core, the place of her greatest hopes and deepest fears. There is really no measure for the disrespect that the people on the stage showed her.

"They were absolutely not listening," she recalled. "There was not one person I could see that was listening."

The dis far outdid the dissing the mayor called a national disgrace. It may be bad manners to shout at a meeting. It is truly shameful to sit there and ignore the heartfelt and considered words of a mother who is everything a mother should be.

The meeting ended with a sham vote to close the designated schools, including Jamaica High. I'll tell you what's not democracy, Mr. Mayor. Democracy is not a vote whose outcome is pre-ordained by the boss.

Afterward, Rhoomes and her son journeyed home across Brooklyn and Queens. He had school in the morning. He got there on time, ready to make the best of it, just like his mother said at the hearing where nobody listened.

Bloomberg is no different than any of the other education deform people - from Obama to Duncan to Rhee to Gates.

They don't listen to others, they don't care what anybody else has to say and they think ONLY they have all the answers.

In a classroom, a teacher would have to write these kinds of kids up - the ones who are so selfish and self-centered, they cannot get along with others and absolutely HAVE TO HAVE THEIR OWN WAY - and send them for counseling.

Unfortunately in the "real world," they have all the power.

Which is why, after nine years of NOT being heard by Bloomberg and the NYCDOE braintrust, the anger on the other side is becoming palpable.

NYC Educator said he has never seen anger against the DOE like he saw the other night at the PEP meeting:

I've never seen anger like this before, even at these meetings. It's palpable. Several speakers made references to Egypt, rising up against tyranny. Mayoral dictatorship is a bad policy and must end. And absolutely everyone at the meeting last night could see that New York City has had just about enough of it. Those feelings aren't going away, and neither are any of the people who took their time to show Ms. Black she's not in her penthouse anymore.

People are fed up with the corporate education policies that purposely starve large schools that serve the neediest children in order to close them and reopen them as charter schools with non-unionized staff.

People are fed up with the school closure policies that is designed NOT to improve schools but to disrupt the system, punish traditional public schools and reward charter schools.

People are fed up with the emphasis on testing over teaching, standardized assessment over rich content and varied curriculum, and rote learning over critical thinking skills.

People are fed up with a mayor so detached and imperious that he appoints his girlfriend's Upper East Side drinking buddy to be schools chancellor.

People are fed up with a mayor who circumvents the law to illegally run for a third term, spends hundreds of millions on that re-election bid, then win by only 50,000 votes but governs like he has a million vote mandate anyway.

People are fed up.

And in a democracy, when people are fed up, they can protest the policies the elected officials - even oligarchs like Mayor Moneybags - are imposing upon them.

That is what people were doing on Thursday night at the PEP and it is good to see a columnist like Daly note just how democratic those protests were and just how authoritarian Bloomberg's reaction was.

It is interesting how the ed deform movement really thought the zeitgeist was moving their way this year - Rhee in place in D.C. and on the cover of TIME with her broom ready to sweep away traditional public schools and unionized teachers, Bloomberg back for a third term to finish off what hasn't been destroyed by his ed deform policies in NYC, Obama in the White House quintupling the punitive measures in NCLB and promoting policies that demonize teachers and traditional schools, and "Waiting for Superman" winning an Oscar and giving the ed deform movement the "teachable moment" they need to complete their ed deform policies nation-wide.

But Rhee is gone into private lobbying, Bloomberg is getting heavy pushback on his ed deform policies and some pretty harsh criticism in the media for them, Obama's chances of getting NCLB Jr. through a Republican/Tea Party Congress aren't looking so good and "Waiting for Superman" was snubbed by the Oscar Academy after it became clear the film was less a documentary and more a propaganda film with made-up scenes and false "facts".

The zeitgeist in education now is that the people who actually run schools on a daily basis - the teachers and administrators - and the people who send their kids to the schools - the parents - are pushing back against the imperiousness of the corporate education deform movement and clamoring for the return of democratic education policies decided by the people, not authoritarian ones decided by the oligarchy.

This ain't Egypt. Even if Bloomberg, Obama, Rhee, Klein, Gates, et al. think it is.