Crime & Safety

Walcott to Mayoral Candidates: Reversing Bloomberg's Education Policies Would be a Tragedy

In a salvo, the chancellor said the NYC school system was at risk of falling into disarray in the hands of a new mayor.

This article was written by C. Zawadi Morris.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott criticized the Democratic candidates in this year's mayoral race, saying that after 11 years of reform, city schools had finally reached a “new day” and that any efforts to erode such improvements were misguided, The New York Times reported.

Although the Republican candidates for mayor have more or less embraced Bloomberg’s approach to school reform, the Democratic candidates for mayor all have promised publicly to reverse some of the mayor’s key policies, including closing low-performing schools and providing space to charter schools.  

“I don’t like to involve myself in politics,” Walcott said at an education conference on Saturday.   

But still, he did not hesitate to weighed in his concern for the city’s efforts so far in attempting to overhaul the previous badly failing public education system: “Halting the momentum of this extraordinary transformation would be a tragedy.”   

While his calls for preserving the authority of principals and eradicating nepotism were met with applause, laughter broke out in some corners when he added he was not looking to be a kingmaker.


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