I was a teenager when Koch was elected to his first term, and I thought his chutzpah, moxie and general bluster was admirable and probably just what the city needed when the collective morale of New Yorkers bordered on outright despair. Edward I. Koch was bold, he was optimistic, he knew New York was better than its financial crisis and crime statistics.

He lifted our city out of its financial woes, embarked on an ambitious public housing program, made some innovative criminal justice reforms and gave New York its swagger back. When I went off to college in upstate New York in 1980, I felt that I was leaving a city on an upswing, with a mayor who was steering us to a better place.

Then in 1982, Koch overreached, and the Greenwich Village pol set his sights on the Statehouse, a job that required living in upstate New York. He stumbled, making an ill-conceived joke about the sterility of the suburbs, and my college newspaper in Ithaca wisecracked in the headline of its endorsement for governor: “Koch for Mayor.”

The people of upstate and my colleagues on the college newspaper editorial board sent the fish-out-of-New York-harbor-water a message: Stay in the five boroughs, where you belong. Koch went on to re-election in 1985, the same year I returned to the city and became the editor of a weekly newspaper, The West Side Spirit, which not only covered the mayor, but had a weekly political columnist, Dick Oliver, who was one of Koch’s chief antagonists.

Koch, in his third term (there were no term limits then) started collecting lots of enemies and critics. His administration was beset by scandal, from the Parking Violations Bureau mess that led to the suicide of Queens Borough President Donald Manes to the imbroglio over Koch’s close friend, Consumer Affairs Commissioner Bess Myerson, whose romantic life with an alleged mobster led to one of the more bizarre scandals in NYC history.

Like a marriage that goes sour after a decade, Koch’s relationship with the city and its various constituencies curdled in his third term. The African-American community attacked him for his racial insensitivity, and Wilbert Tatum, the publisher of the city’s largest black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, put “Koch Must Resign” on his front page every week. For two years.
I was an eager young journalist, in my mid-20s, who was still awestruck to be covering larger-than-life figures like Koch and his ilk. I decided in 1987, two years before his ill-fated third stab at re-election, to write a long cover story: “Can Koch Make a Comeback?”

Unintentionally, Koch taught me one of my most valuable journalism lessons when he refused to grant me an interview because my newspaper— particularly columnist Dick Oliver—had continuously bashed him.

Undeterred, I did a “write around,” interviewing more than 25 people in the administration and in the New York punditocracy, and it became one of my proudest pieces of journalism: a balanced and thoroughly reported picture of a once-mighty mayor on the ropes and hanging on for dear life.
In 1989, David Dinkins dethroned Koch in the primary and unceremoniously sent him back to private life.

In the following years, when well-wishers on the street told Koch they missed him, he would reply: “The people have spoken. And now they must be punished.”

One year after he left office, I decided to write another profile of Koch. My last question in that interview was a throwaway line: “So now that you have all this free time, how do you spend it?”

Koch replied: “I go to the movies two or three times a week.”

The next morning, I phoned Koch.

“Hey, Ed,” I said, “how would you like to be the West Side Spirit’s movie reviewer?”

“What would you pay?” Koch replied.

“How about $50 a week?” I said sheepishly, knowing that I was already committing a high percentage of my weekly freelance budget.

“Fifty dollars a week?! I wouldn’t cross the street for $50 a week!”

“But we’re a small paper,” I said plaintively.

“Well, call me when you get bigger,” he said and then dropped the receiver.

The Spirit had recently become part of a chain of five weeklies in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and the Hamptons. I phoned each publisher about my idea, asked them to contribute $50 per week for a syndicated movie column—and presto, a critic was born.

“How about $250?” I offered the next day.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll start today. But I have some ground rules: I don’t do openings. I don’t do cinematography. I just tell the reader whether the movie is worth the price of admission.”

For the next 23 years, Edward I. Koch reviewed a movie or two each week, with his trademark + or –, symbolizing his thumbs-up or thumbs-down for the everyman’s film experience.

One night a few months after he started, a friend called to tell me he saw Koch on the Johnny Carson show saying he had seven jobs in his post-mayoralty career but his favorite one was writing reviews for a chain of weekly newspapers.

Now that we all mourn the loss of a colorful New Yorker and a man who relished being called Hizzoner, I take some comfort that a young editor’s gimmicky idea to grab attention in a tough media town gave Koch some joy.

If they serve popcorn in heaven, I hope Koch has found his seat and is taking mental notes on the show unfolding before him.

This time, perhaps he’ll notice the cinematography.

Tom Allon, a 2013 candidate for New York City mayor, is the former editor and publisher of this newspaper.

NADLER, CUOMO ATTACK DELAY IN SANDY AID
The House of Representatives’ failure to vote on a $60 billion Hurricane Sandy disaster aid bill last week prompted a number of angry responses by local elected officials representing the storm-ravaged city.

“This is a betrayal of the millions of Americans who are struggling after Sandy and a trivialization of the loss of more than 100 American lives,” said Congressman Jerrold Nadler. “Not taking up the $60 billion Sandy funding bill will mean that many Americans could remain homeless, the rebuilding of homes and businesses across the Northeast will be delayed, and the coastal infrastructure of the region will remain damaged and vulnerable to the next storm.”

He noted that agencies including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could not proceed with major repairs until funding is secured.

Local governors were similarly incensed. “This failure to come to the aid of Americans following a severe and devastating natural disaster is unprecedented,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a joint statement with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “The fact that days continue to go by while people suffer, families are out of their homes, and men and women remain jobless and struggling during these harsh winter months is a dereliction of duty.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed more patience about the delay. “You know, democracy is something that takes a while to come together and to get the results,” he said. “As long as it turns out that we get the monies that we think are appropriate for the federal government to send to a part of the country that’s had a major natural disaster, all’s well that ends well.”

The House cast a preliminary vote to direct funds to the National Flood Insurance Program on Friday, and has scheduled to vote on the remaining aid on Jan. 15, the first day of legislative business from the new 113th Congress.

FIRE FATALITIES DROP TO LOWEST NUMBER EVER
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano announced last week that 2012 saw the fewest civilian fire deaths in New York City history. Fifty-eight people died in blazes, four fewer than the former record low of 62 deaths in 2010, and a 12 percent decline from the 66 deaths in 2011. It was the seventh consecutive year that fire-related deaths have numbered under 100, which has occurred only 12 times since the city began keeping records in 1916.

The top two causes of fire-related deaths last year were accidental electrical fires and smoking. Forty-three percent of those killed in a blaze were over the age of 70, and 79 percent of the fatal fires struck where there were no working smoke detectors.

Bloomberg and Cassano also announced that FDNY’s Emergency Medical Service set a new record last year for fastest average ambulance response time: The new record, 6:30, is down one second from 2011’s previous record.

“With a record low number of murders and shootings and the fewest fire deaths in our city’s history, 2012 was a historic year for public safety,” Bloomberg said. “The FDNY has consistently improved fire safety over the past decade and has continued to drive response times to historic lows. These achievements and the efforts by our firefighters, EMTs and paramedics to save lives—while putting theirs on the line—is the reason fewer New Yorkers died as a result of fire in 2012 than ever before.”

POLITICAL MEMORABILIA SHOW TO HOST ED POTTER AWARD
The American Political Items Collectors’ Big Apple Ed Potter Chapter is sponsoring its 25th annual Political Collectors Show on Sunday, Feb. 3. The show will run from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue, 325 E. Sixth St., and will feature over 10,000 political items for sale, including buttons, posters, mugs, bandannas, watches and clothing that cover the presidencies of George Washington to Barack Obama, as well as a special exhibition of political memorabilia from the 2012 election.

The show will also include the presentation of the fourth annual Ed Potter Memorial Awards, named after the political memorabilia collector, which are given to those involved in the political process who have used political items and artifacts in their campaigns. This year’s recipients are New York State Assemblyman and City Councilman Adam Clayton Powell and Manhattan Media’s own CEO and mayoral hopeful Tom Allon.

Admission is $3 for adults and free for children under 16. For more information, call 212-764-6330.

Photo of Jerry Finkelstein by Jake Price

The last of the old-style publishing and political power brokers in New York City left us for the great cigar bar in the sky this week.

Jerry Finkelstein, a legendary newspaper publisher and political kingmaker, was my boss and mentor for 15 years. I am among many in New York who will mourn his death and will try to celebrate his colorful, charismatic life with fond reminiscences of a man who could have leapt off the pages of a Damon Runyan novel.

Everybody in New York’s local political world in the late 20th century had a favorite Jerry Finkelstein story.

One of mine is the tale of how he launched Barbara Walter’s television career back in the 1950s.

At the time, Finkelstein owned a public relations firm with the late political guru, Tex McReary. Two of their employees were young hotshots, William Safire (who later went onto fame as a New York Times columnist) and a young woman named Barbara Walters.

After two years toiling at the firm, Walters went into to see her boss, Mr. Finkelstein, to ask for a raise.

“Not yet, sweetheart,” Finkelstein said, with a cigar dangling from one side of his mouth.

And with that, Walters turned around, quit and sought her fame and fortune in television.

Safire, one of the great political columnists and linguists of his time, once inscribed in one of his books he gave to Finkelstein: “To Jerry: Who taught me all I know, but not all he knows.”

That summed up Jerry Finkelstein’s genius. He was always two chess moves ahead of you and you had to listen closely to his quiet instructions to glean a lesson. If you weren’t on your toes, you’d miss a thing or two.

In his younger years, he was a political reformer, who was a major player in Robert Caro’s famous New York City tome, “The Power Broker,” which was about the life and times of Robert Moses. Jerry was proud that he was one of the few people who stood up to the all-poweful master builder, Moses, and he learned a lot about how to pull the levers of power from those early political wars.

Finkelstein was also a pioneer in publishing — building a mini-empire in legal  newspapers  (The New York Law Journal and National Law Journal), in weekly community newspapers (a chain of 23 weeklies in the metropolitan area in the 1990s) and helping to to build a powerful resort newspaper in the Hamptons (Dan’s Papers). (He was the owner of Manhattan Media papers Our Town, the West Side Spirit, Chelsea Clinton News and the Westsider from 1986 – 2001.) He also started The Hill, D.C.’s powerful political newspaper that covers Congress and the White House.

I’ll never forget his wise advice to Dan Rattiner, whose 28-page weekly newspaper was struggling in the Hamptons in the late 1980′s until Finkelstein bought it: “Dan, there are three things you have to do to grow your newspaper. First, put a glossy wrap on it each week so you can get luxury advertisers like Revlon. Two, hire 10 kids every Saturday to throw the newspaper on every mansion lawn in Southampton and East Hampton. And three, stop being a schmuck who writes about the fishermen and start writing about the moguls who come  to  the Hamptons.”

Dan, wisely, followed these instructions to a tee. Within two summers under Jerry Finkelstein’s tutelage, Dan’s Papers went from 28 pages to 324 pages some summer weeks. Dan called me in a panic one late June day and said: “I have a crisis. I just called the printing plant and they can only print 324 pages and I have advertisers that we can’t fit into our July 4th edition. What should I do?”

I said: “What should you do? Thank whatever g-d you pray to that you met Jerry Finkelstein.”

Jerry was a political mastermind who was able to convince Robert Kennedy to run for Senator in New York in 1964. Jerry knew how to play both sides of the political aisle and became close to not just Kennedy but also to Republicans like New York Governor and later U.S. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Senator Alfonse D’Amato. Jerry was even able to maneuver and spend a small fortune to get his own son, Andy Stein, to be elected City Council President, a heartbeat away from being New York City Mayor in the late 1980s.

Jerry Finkelstein was all about family — he had a wonderful, loving wife of more than six decades, Shirley, two sons who revered him, eight grandchildren who he doted on and who loved him dearly and many loyal friends who stayed with him until his last days at America’s most expensive nursing home, The Carlyle Hotel.

With his passing, an era in New York City history goes with him.

I am one of the many New Yorkers, who, like William Safire, can say that Jerry taught me all that I know about publishing and politics.

But not all that he knew.

Jerry Finkelstein, a great New Yorker, RIP.

Tom Allon is the President of Manhattan Media and a 2013 candidate for Mayor of New York City.

“I think our school system is largely stalled right now,” asserted New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, one of the forum’s three undeclared Democratic candidates along with City Comptroller John Liu and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. “We need a very serious reset.”

De Blasio focused on the importance of early childhood education throughout the discussion, an issue which all potential candidates supported. He called for universal pre-kindergarten programs and expanded extracurricular activities across the city, arguing “that’s the kind of investment we need to make, or we’re not serious about turning the corner with our school system.”

Liu emphasized the necessity of preparing students to not only enter college, but to graduate from it as well. To keep students on track, he proposed hiring more guidance counselors and reducing the current system’s heavy focus on standardized testing—another issue that the potential candidates uniformly agreed needs to be addressed—as well as cultivating better communication with students’ families, whose voices, he argued, are too rarely considered.

“We need to engage the public more in terms of what the schools need, what communities need, what families and parents need,” he said.

Quinn, who is considered an ally of current Mayor Michael Bloomberg, agreed that the current administration still has many shortcomings that need to be overcome. She supported an evaluation system that would weed out bad educators, and argued that reducing testing would grant teachers more freedom and creativity in their lesson plans. “For a child who might not learn in the traditional way,” she said, “having that level of attention on standardized testing significantly reduces or eliminates the moments where that child’s mind might get passion or a spark might get set off.”

She noted, “Clearly progress has been made, but not enough.”

Tom Allon, CEO of the forum’s sponsor Manhattan Media and a declared Republican candidate, advocated what he called a “medical model” of teacher training to ensure that they have proper experience before taking over a classroom. Through a tier-track system and mandatory three-year in-class training period, the city would boost its low teacher retention numbers, he asserted.
“What [the Bloomberg administration] has missed is the fundamental problem of education,” said Allon, “which is that we’re just not properly training teachers before they get into the classroom, and we’re not giving them proper instructions once they get into the classroom.”

The only declared Democratic candidate, former city comptroller and 2009 mayoral candidate Bill Thompson, focused his criticism on chronic school closures, the root of a tension between public and charter schools. He spoke of the particular difficulties of the recently popular “co-location” of public and charter schools in the same buildings, where public schools are often inferior in resources and appearances. “The children feel as if they’re second-class citizens,” he argued, which creates disruptive rifts in what is supposed to be a mutually beneficial approach to learning.
Thompson agreed that early childhood education is essential, and that teachers need more professional development opportunities and support. “Education is collaborative,” he said. “The schools that do better are the schools that have individuals who work together with one teacher to help improve another teacher.”

The forum, held at Fordham University, was the first joint appearance of the five mayoral hopefuls since the presidential election earlier this month, and also since Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, a presumed mayoral candidate, announced that he would run for city comptroller instead. The forum was considered an unofficial and symbolic start to the 2013 race, which will conclude next November.

Photo by ericrichardson, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

By Paul Bisceglio

Bill Bratton served as New York City’s Police Commissioner from 1994 to 1996, when he was forced because of disagreements with former Mayor Rudy Giuliani over credit for the city’s decrease in crime. Now, he is interested in returning to the position.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Bratton has met with mayoral hopefuls Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, former Comptroller Bill Thompson, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and media executive Tom Allon to talk about the job.

“I’ll be quite frank, if that position were to be offered, I’d have to seriously consider it,” Bratton told WSJ. “I fully intend, at some point in time, to return to the public sector.”

The city’s current Police Commissioner, Raymond Kelly, is expected to step down when Mayor Michael Bloomberg leaves office in December 2013, though Kelly has not announced officially whether he would consider serving under Bloomberg’s successor.

Bratton has been Police Commissioner in Boston and Los Angeles in addition to New York, and was even considered for the position as head of Scotland Yard. He currently works as chairman of Kroll, an international intelligence and information management company.

“Bill Bratton is recognized as one of the finest and most respected people in law enforcement in the country and around the world,” Thompson’s campaign said in a statement. “He did an exemplary job as police commissioner of New York City and Los Angeles and his innovative strategies produced a significant reduction in crime.”

Some mayoral candidates have told WSJ that they are speaking with numerous law-enforcement professionals about the position, including John Timoney, who has served as Commissioner of Philadelphia’s and Miami’s police forces, and Garry McCarthy, Chicago’s Police Commissioner.

Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told WSJ that Bratton is greatly admired, but there is a “strong case” to bring in an outsider with a “fresh set of eyes.”

“No knock on Kelly, no knock on Bratton,” he said, “but there’s more than a couple of people who can run the police department and run it well.”

via Wiki Commons

2013 Mayoral Race

Anthony Weiner’s wife is reportedly urging him to give a tell-all interview, amid rumors that he’s considering a run for mayor or public advocate.

John Liu raised $600K despite his fundraising scandal.

Tom Allon himself raised $250K.

Christine Quinn is already focused on fundraising for a possible general election.

Queens

One of the contenders for Assemblywoman Grace Meng’s seat runs prostitution ads in his Korean-language newspaper.

The state GOP infused cash into Councilman Eric Ulrich’s Senate bid.

State Senate

Democratic State Sen. Jeff Klein is surprisingly running with the support of the Bronx GOP.

Dean Skelos now has a war chest of more than $2 million.

Suffolk County GOP State Sen. Owen Johnson suddenly decided to retire.

David Valesky surprisingly has no GOP challenger.

To read more campaign coverage from City & State click here.

Photo by Andrew Schwartz

The six 2013 New York City mayoral candidates appeared together on stage for the first time this afternoon at a forum sponsored by City & State — and were largely in agreement that the Bloomberg administration had failed in its efforts to provide more city contracting opportunities to women and minority-owned businesses. The forum was part of a morning-long series of panels on MWBE (Minority and Women Business Enterprise) issues in New York City, which also included opening remarks by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Sitting side-by-side in a packed auditorium at New York University, the rivals often clapped for one another, though they did have some minor policy disagreements. In the forum’s most poignant moments, debate moderator David Chen, the City Hall bureau chief for the New York Times, prodded the various candidates to assign a letter grade to Bloomberg’s efforts to give more contracting opportunities to MWBEs. All the candidates agreed that Local Law 129, passed in 2005 to provide those businesses with more city contracts, had not been implemented particularly well, and had not gone far enough, but differed in the degree of their critiques.

Comptroller John Liu and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, historically strong critics of the mayor, both gave Bloomberg F’s.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn gave Bloomberg, a close ally, a “C or C-minus,” after some prompting from Chen for a specific grade.

Tom Allon, the president of Manhattan Media (which owns City & State) gave the mayor a B-minus for effort and a C-minus for the oversall results. Meanwhile, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, though critical of Bloomberg, refused to assign a grade, as did ex-Comptroller Bill Thompson, who simply said the administration’s MWBE efforts were “failing.”

To read the full article at City and State click here.

Christine Quinn tied the knot.

Tom Allon says the main goal of his candidacy is bringing back the Liberal Party.

State Senate

Senate Minority Leader John Sampson likely won’t be voted back as majority leader if the Senate Democrats take back the majority.

The race for Suzi Oppenheimer’s seat is getting nasty, even though it’s comprised of a bunch of “nice guys.”

Mark Grisanti is already out with is second TV ad. And he’s sending out mailers.

State Sen. Tim Kennedy won’t be getting the Conservative line after voting for gay marriage.

Eight senators are being targeted by campaign finance reform backers.

Manhattan

The Post profiled State Sen. Adriano Espaillat.

Charlie Rangel strong-armed State Sen. Bill Perkins for his endorsement.

El Barrio is backing Rangel.

Queens

Dan Halloran is undergoing brain surgery on a benign tumor.

Gatemouth examines links between Jeff Gottlieb and Robert Mittman.

Claire Shulman is robocalling for Grace Meng.

Liz Crowley got some coaching about stop and frisk from a union official.

Elsewhere

Maggie Brooks broke with congressional GOP leadership on the Violence Against Women Act.

Some of the worst policy ideas in history have been borne out of political payback by elected leaders.

We now are experiencing one of these on New York City’s East Side, where a long-forgotten political feud is rearing its ugly head and endangering the health and well-being of a ticked-off community.

Trash disposal and transfer is one of those municipal problems that makes most voters’ eyed glaze over—unless it affects them and their children.

Then it arouses much more ire and citizen involvement than almost any other issue.

Let me explain how this is playing out in one normally tranquil residential neighborhood that has many schools and one of the largest youth athletic facilities in New York City.
(Full disclosure: one of my children occasionally plays at this athletic facility.)

About eight years ago, New York City was debating how to equally share the burden of siting waste plants and transfer stations for garbage.

In the past, the good citizens of Staten Island, New York’s least populous and most neglected borough, had done more than their fair share, with the Fresh Kills landfill becoming the main dumping ground for New York City’s garbage.
But when it was closed down, our elected leaders were forced to look for alternatives in New York’s five boroughs. At the time, the first-term mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg, was facing withering criticism and a likely election challenge from then-Speaker of the City Council Gifford Miller, whose district encompassed the Yorkville neighborhood on Manhattan’s East Side, which included a closed-down marine transfer station.

Bloomberg and his administration, which has been overwhelmingly successful avoiding political feuds and generally does the right thing in policy decisions, decided that reopening the marine transfer station in his adversary’s district was a good idea (and, perhaps, a way to stick it to the feckless critic, Mr. Miller).

Well, Miller’s candidacy failed in 2005 and Bloomberg won easy re-election, but this misguided decision to site the waste transfer station in a heavily residential district did not go away, because to do so would be to admit that it was a political maneuver in the first place.

And now, seven years later, Miller’s successor as council speaker, Christine Quinn, is such a rubber stamp to the mayor that there is no one in power in New York who has been able to stop this bad idea.
But the community is fighting back and it may be able to affect change. Residents for Sane Trash Solutions has mobilized more than 10,000 area residents to fight City Hall. It is registering voters and it will be a force in the 2013 mayoral election.

(Disclaimer no. 2: I will be a candidate challenging Ms. Quinn in 2013 to succeed Mayor Mike Bloomberg.)
Spreading the trash problem around the five boroughs is a wise goal. Siting marine transfer stations in residential neighborhoods where many children congregate is awful public policy.

The mayor and Council Speaker Quinn should recognize this, admit this plan is folly and let the good citizens of Yorkville focus on their jobs and families, rather than spending all their time fighting a politically motivated, bad policy.

Trash talking is bad in sports and politics.

Speaker Quinn, Mayor Bloomberg: Please clean up your act on this one.

Tom Allon, CEO of Manhattan Media, which includes Our Town, is a 2013 Liberal and Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City.

The race for City Hall starts in the classroom

By Andrew J. Hawkins

Mayor Michael Bloomberg may not be running for reelection next year, but he will undoubtedly be playing a starring role in the race to replace him. The six Democrats expected to run next year are all supportive of the mayor’s efforts to take control of the school system, but differ with Bloomberg on most everything else—whether it’s school closures, co-locations with charter schools, relations with the teachers union or standardized test scores.

So if next year’s race is for the right to be the next education mayor, how do the candidates stack up? What are their qualifications, their accomplishments and their thoughts on some of the more controversial policies of the Bloomberg administration? David Bloomfield, a professor of education at CUNY and an expert on education policy in New York, was kind enough to offer his analysis of each candidate’s qualifications.
For their part, the Department of Education says that educational outcomes have never been better—and graduation rates and test scores never higher—than under Bloomberg.
“Our reforms have shown positive results for our students,” said Chancellor Dennis Walcott in an interview. “I’m a resident of New York City, and I’ll be paying close attention to what [the candidates] have to say.”

Tom Allon

Tom Allon

Manhattan Media CEO*

Education: Stuyvesant High School; B.A. in history from Cornell University; M.S., Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Qualifications: Taught journalism and American literature at Stuyvesant High School, 1986–87; briefly a member of the United Federation of Teachers.

Mayoral control: Allon supports mayoral control and charter schools, believing they give parents more options and serve as laboratories for education reform. He takes issue with the mayor’s emphasis on test scores and the administration’s turnaround program, where failing schools are closed and reopened as smaller schools. “We have merely shuffled the seats on the Titanic,” Allon says. If elected, he says he would seek to repair the stormy relationship between City Hall and the teachers union.

Accomplishments: Allon says his proudest accomplishment is helping to create two public high schools: Eleanor Roosevelt High School on the East Side and Frank McCourt High School on the West Side. “I worked with elected leaders in each neighborhood, used my consensus-
building powers, tenacity and political adeptness to get these two schools off the ground,” he says. But as a nonelected official, Allon can claim fewer accomplishments, naturally, than his potential rivals.

Education in 2013: Allon sees education as “the most important issue in the 2013 mayoral race. The rest is commentary.”

Bloomfield’s analysis: “Allon’s accomplishments, such as they are, disproportionately favor white students—Eleanor Roosevelt student enrollment, for example, is over 60 percent white and less than 20 percent black and Latino. Further, he urgently needs to broaden his scope beyond the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan.”

*Allon is CEO of Manhattan Media, which publishes this paper.

Bill de Blasio

Bill de Blasio

Public Advocate

Education: Russell and Peabody elementary schools; Cambridge Rindge & Latin School in Cambridge, Mass.; B.A. from New York University; Master of International Affairs from Columbia University.

Qualifications: School-board member, 1999–2001; member of City Council Education Committee, 2002–2009; Public Advocate, 2009–present.

Mayoral control: De Blasio supports mayoral control, but believes in more parent engagement, though he lacks specifics on what that would look like. “I can say without reservation, as a public school parent, that this administration has shut us out,” he says. “We have got to bring parents to the table and treat them like stakeholders if we hope to make more progress in our schools. Mayoral control shouldn’t mean you go it alone and stop listening.”

Accomplishments: While serving on his local school board, de Blasio helped cap class size at 20 students and redevelop John Jay High School. As a Council member, he supported legislation to improve school playgrounds, make child-care centers more transparent, webcast PTA meetings and keep autistic children with their peers. As public advocate, de Blasio has made the issues of school closures and co-locations with charter schools among his top priorities. He took some credit for helping prevent the closure of P.S. 114 in Canarsie, and helped preserve P.S. 4’s NEST program.

Education in 2013: De Blasio says he will likely emphasize parental engagement and a less data-driven environment at Tweed in his pitch to voters next year. “The department’s narrow focus on a rigid notion of accountability based on high-stakes testing is doing kids a massive disservice. Every student deserves a well-rounded education from early child-care straight through to college and career prep,” he says.

Bloomfield’s analysis: “De Blasio probably has the most grassroots education experience of any prospective candidate, not only as a public school parent but as a past community school-board member. His challenge will be to move from advocacy, where he has had the luxury of throwing darts at mayoral decisions, to operational authority, where he will have to take
action regarding greater rein for his Panel for Educational Policy appointees, hard choices on school closures and co-locations, and applying budgetary discipline to such issues as class size and special education.”

To read the rest of the mayoral candidate profiles (including John Liu and Christine Quinn) visit City & State by clicking here.