{"id":1540,"date":"2009-02-06T13:59:34","date_gmt":"2009-02-06T17:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1540"},"modified":"2009-02-06T13:59:34","modified_gmt":"2009-02-06T17:59:34","slug":"klein-compares-bloomberg-to-putin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1540","title":{"rendered":"Klein compares Bloomberg to Putin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, he didn&#8217;t, but at the mayoral-control hearing in Albany, <a href=\"http:\/\/gothamschools.org\/2009\/02\/06\/to-chancellor-assembly-members-offer-a-litany-of-complaints\/\">according to the indefatigable Elizabeth Green<\/a>, <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Klein defended himself passionately, arguing that mayoral control is a democratic governance structure, not an authoritarian one, as some members painted it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The logic here is weak: under that view, a plebiscite dictatorship is democratic because every few years the head honcho could be kicked out of office.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I think there are multiple reasonable approaches to the policy question, such as UFT&#8217;s &#8220;you need two (more) righteous people to save Gotham&#8221; proposal of giving the mayor a plurality on the main policymaking body (so the mayor and chancellor would have to convince 2 out of the other 8 members) or something that would give an independent body subpoena authority and the responsibility and right to issue reports on the schools. <\/p>\n<p>But the gist is to inject public accountability beyond the one-person constituency of Joel Klein. I&#8217;m a little curious why advocates of mayoral control don&#8217;t grasp the fundamental irony that you don&#8217;t create accountability by removing it. There are multiple ways of addressing the messiness of urban politics, but if the appointed chancellor has spent several years ignoring parents, he&#8217;s getting his natural comeuppance today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, he didn&#8217;t, but at the mayoral-control hearing in Albany, according to the indefatigable Elizabeth Green, Klein defended himself passionately, arguing that mayoral control is a democratic governance structure, not an authoritarian one, as some members painted it. The logic here is weak: under that view, a plebiscite dictatorship is democratic because every few years [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability-frankenstein","category-education-policy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-oQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}