Mayor Bloomberg has had a particularly uneasy relationship with public school parents ever since the whole Cathie Black fiasco happened—you have to be pretty mad at Bloomberg to sue him (and not the city) for $100 million dollars over the screwup. And comments Bloomberg made during his weekly radio appearance yesterday aren't going to help mend any fences.
Responding to a question about why parents are fighting the city's efforts to close 22 struggling schools, most of which are in poor, immigrant and minority neighborhoods, the mayor said: “Unfortunately there are some parents who just come from—they never had a formal education, and they don’t understand the value of education...the old Norman Rockwell family is gone. Some of these kids don't have parents. There's nobody to stand up for them."
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio called the comments “profoundly disrespectful” and said in a statement, "As a public school parent I believe that the mayor should admit he made a mistake and apologize." And parents were even angrier: "“How dare he say we don’t know what we’re talking about! How dare he assume that because we’re poor or black or Latino or homeless or all of the above, that we’re uneducated, that we don’t know what’s best for our kids!” public school parent Zakiyah Ansari told the Times.
Ansari, a parent organizer with the Alliance for Quality Education, is part of the massive lawsuit filed by the NAACP and the teachers union this week to block the closing of 22 struggling schools. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that only 20 percent of public school parents approved of the job Mayor Bloomberg was doing running the schools.
