A Catholic school graduate who once apprenticed as a carpenter before he became a vocational education teacher, Mulgrew always seemed ready to box rather than negotiate with the well-heeled crowd at Mike Bloomberg’s city hall. Or file a lawsuit. Mulgrew’s teachers union joined the NAACP to sue the city over what they saw as Klein’s destructive methods of closing schools. At one point, the courts required the city to have more public hearings and community input before they shut down the big schools and replaced them with smaller ones (and, of course, sidelined many teachers in the process).61 The case went back and forth in the courts, but in the end, the Bloomberg team still managed to close 164 schools (and open 654 including 173 charters).62
One confrontation in this era was particularly intense. When a local radio station, WNYC, and the New York Times submitted a Freedom of Information request to see the test scores of students, identifying the teachers in each case, the union leaders were furious. But Bloomberg’s administration handed over the data to the press. At one point, WNYC reported that the Bloomberg people had tipped off the press to request the test scores naming each teacher. Bloomberg himself was unrepentant. “We should have all of the data out there.”63
After that, Bloomberg’s relations with the union went from frosty to glacial. The increasingly bitter conflict provided an easy path for a pro-union Democrat to replace Bloomberg in 2014, to clean out Bloomberg’s administration and roll back many of his reforms.
* * *
It would be hard to criticize Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein for trying to shake up and reorganize New York City’s Byzantine and lethargic school system. The problem for many was that there was shake-up after shake-up, with too little time to recover.
“Slow down and consolidate,” advised education experts from the American Institutes for Research, a nonpartisan social science organization. The rapid pace of change and change and more change made educators worry that no one really knew what was happening. Researchers for the institutes suggested rather gently in 2011 that the mayor and his chancellor should “resist the temptation to continually tinker with the tools, even if they perceive the changes as clear improvements.”64
Hunter College education expert Joseph Viteritti also wrote about attempts to upend the old bureaucracy. “By the time Klein got to the third reorganization, educators and parents were confused. They wondered if Klein and his team knew what they were doing.” He concluded, “The result was chaos.”65
That view infuriated Bloomberg alumni. “The thing that characterized the Bloomberg era was an openness to try new things on behalf of the students. If they benefitted, it continued. If they didn’t, we would try something else. Several stages—later stages—contradicted earlier stages,” countered Eric Nadelstern, one of the most dynamic and outspoken leaders in Bloomberg’s education department.66
Asked about how he and the mayor dealt with such criticisms and even failure, Klein chuckled and remembered how the phone would ring at 6:00 a.m. with a very unhappy mayor on the line. “There were the stupid things like changing the bus routes in the middle of the winter,” Klein said, grimacing as he thought about the students left standing in the snow, the blast of phone calls from irate parents. “It’s like the old Ed Koch line [borrowed from La Guardia, no doubt]. When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut.
“The way you always deal with Mike—and this is so Mike—is that you go to him. He wants to know everything. You tell him this is going to be a painful period. He obviously was not happy with us. He says, ‘What were you thinking. Or were you thinking?’ That kind of stuff. But then he backs you. He’s very good about saying, look this was the right move at the wrong time, or something like that.”67
And if it doesn’t work? You change it, Klein said. “In the past in the field of education, when we have something that’s not working we put more resources into it; whereas, in the real world, when something’s not working, you usually put in fewer resources.” Expand and move money to the programs that are successful, not the ones that are struggling. It was a standard business practice.
* * *
One problem for Bloomberg was that his control of schools began to run out in 2009. The crowd of state politicians, who lost clout to Bloomberg and Klein, were ready to take some of it back when Klein and Bloomberg returned to Albany. Klein wanted a four-year extension of control, and the teachers union, whose leaders had begun to see Klein as a mortal enemy, were ready to fight.
Rather than deal with such a political difficulty, New York’s state lawmakers did what they often do in such cases—nothing. They simply allowed the law to expire after its seven-year run. Political leaders in the city scrambled to fill a sudden void by reestablishing a makeshift board of education. A furious Bloomberg called several legislators cowards for not voting, and even labeled one “meshugenah,” a Yiddish term for someone who’s completely bonkers.
One lawmaker shot back that the mayor was “treating us like we’re some people on his plantation.” Another, Senator Hiram Monserrate, called him “the Bernie Madoff” of education. (That was the same Hiram Monserrate who was thrown out of the State Senate a few months later for beating up his girlfriend.)68 Finally, the Senate returned to Albany a month after the law had expired and approved the bill to give Bloomberg back his power. The reconstituted Board of Education that met only once for nine minutes evaporated, to the relief of the mayor,69 who continued to control the schools for the rest of his time in office.
* * *
As criticism of Klein mounted, the mayor and Klein realized that it was time for the chancellor to go. Klein had become a liability, and like any drastic reformer, he had made too many enemies. “Did he stir things up?” Bloomberg said after announcing Klein’s departure. “You betcha. That was the job, and the great beneficiaries of that stirring were our children.”70 But aides saw that Bloomberg was also unhappy that Klein couldn’t do a better job of touting his success in improving the schools. By late 2010, Bloomberg felt the schools needed a better salesman. Or a saleswoman. His pick, apparently a spur-of-the-moment decision, turned out to be a disaster.
Whatever her credentials as the former head of the USA Today newspaper and the longtime president of Hearst Magazines (Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle, etc.), Cathie Black was not qualified to run one of the nation’s most complicated school systems. Merryl Tisch, the state chancellor, was aghast when she learned about Black, and she forced Bloomberg to install a respected educator, Shael Polakow-Suransky, as a kind of shadow chancellor. Black scrambled for support from her many friends in the media. Email exchanges show a frantic effort to get Ivanka Trump, Suze Orman, Deborah Norville, Nora Ephron, and Gloria Steinem to sign letters of support. She wanted Oprah to provide a good quote to the Daily News. In an email to Gayle King, later a CBS morning news anchor and Oprah’s best friend, Black sounded frantic. “All of this is coming down to the wire,” she bleated. Asking King to help with “a brief, exclusive call with Adam Lisberg of the Daily News in which Oprah would offer her support.”71
Even Oprah couldn’t help, as it turned out. Insiders complained that Black wasn’t prepared to dig in and learn the details. And some of her meetings with parents made matters worse. During one session in Lower Manhattan, parents were complaining about crowded schools when Black said, “Could we just have some birth control for a while?” Angry parents didn’t see the joke.
And during one particularly noisy session as parents protested the closing of a neighborhood school, she provoked a loud “Awww” from the crowd when she pleaded for sympathy. In response, she returned the “Awww” for the television cameras. She looked like a society matron peering down her nose at those poor unfortunates who were not rich enough to send their children to the city’s private academies.
Most parents and teachers started counting the days until she left. When she did, 95 days after taking the job, Bloomberg said, “I take full responsibility for the fact that this has not worked out as either of us had hoped or expected.” Then he anno
unced that the new chancellor would be Dennis Walcott, a veteran educator who had worked hard as a deputy mayor to promote Bloomberg’s education agenda. The next two years would be quiet by comparison.
What had stunned people around the city was how quickly the mayor had chosen Black, how little advice or counsel he had taken from those around him. Was this the hazardous side of relying on those lightning-fast instincts, the Salomon broker who pushed the “Buy” button, who often saw success come in mere seconds? When the gut speaks, you listen. But sometimes, of course, the gut is wrong.
Much later, Bloomberg was meeting guests at his foundation when he suddenly began talking about the Black fiasco. “I want you to know that Cathie Black gave up an awful lot to do that job. Some of those boards . . . they earn $250,000 a year.” He paused for a breath, then added, “Once Mort and Rupert turned against her, I knew.” That is, once Mort Zuckerman’s Daily News and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post turned against her, she had to go. He sounded irritated, mostly at himself, for this obvious chip in his legacy.72
* * *
How did he do as CEO of the largest public education system in the country? Even if Bloomberg’s successor had picked education officials who spurned all things Bloomberg, he streamlined a sluggish bureaucracy and made improvements for many students. The abysmal four-year graduation rate that had stalled for years at around 50.8 percent as Bloomberg arrived rose to 66 percent by the time he departed, with even higher graduation rates in the new smaller schools.73
Independent research had begun to validate the push for these smaller schools. One study from researchers at New York University, Syracuse University, and Arizona State University concluded that “the introduction of small schools improved outcomes for students in all types of schools, large, small, continuously operating and new. Small school reform lifted all boats.”74
The big “drop-out factories,” as the Times editorials often called those high schools with three thousand or more students, had graduation rates of 62.2 percent, better but still too low. Students at smaller high schools of about four hundred students had graduation rates of 71.6 percent, or sometimes higher. Most graduated in four years, not five, and many went on to college. For young black men, 42.3 percent went from a small school to college, as opposed to the control group of 31 percent.75
Bloomberg had succeeded in adding choice for public school students in New York City.76 Maybe it was not the full cafeteria the businessman/mayor had envisioned, but there were many more possibilities for many more students. He introduced accountability practices and tried to find better ways to assess teachers’ skills in the classroom. He and Klein pared back the stultifying bureaucracy allowing successors to start from a simpler bureaucratic base. (It’s always easier to add layers of people than subtract them.) And most important of all, he took control of the entire system, boasting about any progress, but, in a way that was almost unheard of for a politician, also shouldering the blame when things went wrong.
His efforts resulted in educational reforms that were “among the most ambitious of any large urban system in the country,” as one important group of education experts found toward the end of his time as mayor.77 His failures meant that no future mayor or chancellor would try those particular options, and his successes were far more modest than he had hoped. But primarily because he took responsibility for the schools and put his emphasis on the students—or the customers for this massive enterprise—Michael Bloomberg left the nation’s largest public school system better off than he found it.78
Were there still problems? Plenty. Union leaders had a long list. Bloomberg moved too fast for some communities, and he and Klein stubbornly refused to acknowledge much of the criticism about the upheaval created by his reforms. The reliance on test scores became an embarrassment when tests were made more difficult and scores dropped. Graduation rates went up, but too many students needed extra help in college or at a new job. His choice of Klein and later Cathie Black sent a message that he valued noneducators more than those who had dedicated their lives to the classroom.
One of his strongest critics, Diane Ravitch, saw Bloomberg as a destructive force killing neighborhood schools and giving charter schools an unfair edge, as opposed to the needy students left behind. “Managerialism without experience,” she called it.79 When a new mayor was elected and named an educator as the new chancellor, Ravitch celebrated. “The era of punishing, blaming and shaming professional educators is over . . . This is a great turn of events, not only for New York City but the nation.”80
Despite any missteps, the mayor would always emphasize that his highest priority was the students. He made that view especially clear one day in 2007 when the teachers union and the newspapers were railing about his latest upheaval. He attacked the teachers union for trying to roll back his reforms. He took aim at the newspapers that criticized him daily. He even compared those naysayers with narrow interests to the National Rifle Association, leaving open the question about whether he was including the teachers union in that group.
Then, when one reporter asked whether he classified everybody as being either “with us or against us,” the mayor exploded. Wagging a finger at the journalist to emphasize every word, Bloomberg raised his voice to full volume.81
“No! No! No!” he said as a few of his supporters applauded. “You’re either with the children or against the children. With ‘us’ doesn’t matter.”82
15
OFF HOURS
“What’s great about golf, it’s just about you.”
—Bloomberg, about playing with Tiger Woods, 2018
By the time he was an international figure about midway through his years as mayor, Mike Bloomberg’s image was fixed in the public eye as the businessman-mayor in a suit, often a dark $2,000 suit, white shirt with either a purple tie, as in Mike Bloomberg, the independent, or later, a bright green tie, as in Mike Bloomberg, the environmentalist.
Mostly hidden from public view were the times when the mayor had on helicopter earphones and his hands on the controls of his favorite flying machine. Or the times when he could be seen in garish, golfing outfits—the taxicab-yellow or salmon-pink open-collared shirts, the Bermuda shorts that needed only oxfords with cleats to have him ready for the first tee.
Bloomberg had for years carried his engineer’s curiosity into his after hours, often in pursuit of the Wall Street broker’s high-risk pastimes. He loved the aeronautic intricacy of the whirlybirds and the interlocking calculations of flight—wind speed, engine speed, drift, fuel consumption. And he attacked golf the way you would build a bridge—this bit goes this way, this bit goes that way. If it doesn’t sound like fun or relaxation to most of us, it was his version of relief.
Bloomberg remembered taking his first flight in a private plane in 1973, and he recalled the details vividly. It was a twin-engine Beech Baron, and he was with Dick Rosenthal and another colleague from Salomon Brothers. It was the same Dick Rosenthal who engineered Bloomberg’s firing in 1981 and who died piloting another Beech Baron in 1987.
Bloomberg soon got his pilot’s license (he still keeps it in his extremely organized wallet and will proudly show it to anybody who asks). And he flew fixed-wing planes or helicopters whenever he could get to an airfield. Bloomberg moved to piloting helicopters, he said, because they are “a lot more fun.” He added, “If you take your hands off the controls [in an airplane], it will tend, for a brief period anyways, to continue to go same speed, same altitude, same direction. A helicopter right away will start going [down].” The copter needs all your senses, hands, feet, eyes, ears. “I like to fly it, so I never use the auto pilot because that’s so fun,” he explained. It is a rich engineer’s perfect gizmo, a place to lose yourself in the complicated calculations of vortex and speed, rotation and lift or yaw (to turn left or right).
Twice in the earlier years, he almost crashed. Once, in the winter of 1976, he was in a rented helicopter, an Enstrom F-28, when smoke suddenly filled the cockpit. In his telli
ng, he calmly turned off the engine and used emergency auto-rotation procedures to land on a tiny island off the coast of Connecticut. It was so tiny, so the story goes, that the tail of the helicopter was in the water when he was rescued by the Coast Guard.1 Nearly twenty years later, he was taking a nephew on a sightseeing trip above Manhattan when he heard a popping noise and the aircraft suddenly lost power.2 With aviation crews assembling fire trucks on the ground, Bloomberg managed to guide an aircraft that had become what he called “a very heavy glider” back to a Westchester airfield, where he landed safely, to the great relief of everyone, especially his sister and her young son.3
Soon after that, Bloomberg could afford his own executive jet, and he also would start bringing along a copilot, mostly to sit and watch him fly the plane. “If I’m unconscious,” he explained with a grin, “that’s when they take over.”4 Or, of course, the copilots would get plenty of flying hours when Bloomberg was napping in the cabin—his way of turning a flight to Europe or across country into a useful time to sleep.
On the ground, Bloomberg discovered golf, a game he became more serious about shortly before he ran for mayor in 2001. It was the latest in a long line of athletic pursuits, none of them a lazy diversion, even for a part-time sportsman. Bloomberg took his play seriously. In college, he was an avid ice-skater. The stress of Wall Street often drove him into the streets of New York to run off a bad day. And soon, when he had the money, he spent time in Vail—schussing and snowboarding like a teenager. (One story told in Bloomberg’s skiing community was that he apparently shocked his daughter by wearing a baseball hat and fake ponytail [no helmet?] as he rode a snowboard down the teen’s favorite mountain).5
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 20