Danger

The ed deformers want to finish off the NYC public school system before Mayor Bloomberg leaves office and mayoral control is ended.

They want the union busted, the schools privatized, teachers made at-will employees who can be fired at a moment's notice (kind of like Cathie Black) and computers to replace teachers in most classrooms.

Cathie Black was a distraction from those goals.

Dennis Walcott will be just what the deformers want - a competent, skilled politician and jive artist who will talk about how all the mayor's privatization moves are "for the kids" even as he closes schools, lays off teachers, fires other staff, replaces teachers with computers, adds more testing and test prep to the system, and otherwise remakes the school system into a Bill Gates wet dream.

Here is what Walcott said Cathie Black's job was in the New York magazine article about her earlier this year:

Yet her main task for the next three years is to win grassroots hearts and minds so that the changes go down more smoothly and the results generate more love for Bloomberg. “The distrust in the system is real. We understand that,” says Dennis Walcott, Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for education and community development. “But at the local level, for the most part, people think their child is doing better and getting a better education. Part of our challenge is to make sure people understand the connection to Tweed and to this administration. Cathie is acclimating herself to this new world, but her style and personality will allow people to see things differently and hear them differently and build trust where people are distrustful.”

Obviously Black wasn't able to do that.

Now Walcott will try his much more skilled hand at the task.

Make no mistake, Bloomberg chose Walcott because of who and what he is as much as for what he knows.

As a man who went through the system himself, who had his kids go through the system (and now his grandkid), as a black man and former New York Urban League president, Bloomberg is hoping that Walcott can quiet the unhappy parents of color in the system who showed up at PEP meetings and regularly booed Ms. Black (and Klein before her.)

It's a cynical move but a smart one, and Bloomberg knows it.

Try and sell the neighborhoods on the complete destruction of the system without them really knowing that's what's happening until it's too late.

Make them think the destruction Bloomberg is wreaking upon the system is not really destruction at all.

There is much danger here with Black gone and Walcott in.