Mayor Bloomberg's Having A Tough Week And It's Only Wednesday

Mayor Bloomberg is having a tough week. First his congestion pricing plan gets shot down (thanks, Sheldon Silver--may you get stuck in traffic and be late for all of your meetings.) The city then lost big bucks in federal aid that other cities are eying as New York continues to have clogged streets, be choked by fumes, and have crappy subways that the MTA claims it's too poor to fix. And now Albany has shot down his attempt at education reform. Now, I'm not a big believer in tying teacher tenure to test scores, since there are too many variables--for instance, the first year is really rough as a teacher figures out how to wrangle those upstart kids into their seats, or ability levels vary from year to year, and let's face it, it would really suck to not get tenure just because you have a batch of stupid kids--but at least he's churning out some ideas to fix our city's problems, and education is a big one. If one fourth of New York's school kids won't graduate and we have a number of schools making the national failure list, something needs to change. Buck up, Bloomberg. So your legacy may not be lasting in the form of laws and reforms--but maybe New York will remember you as a mayor of ideas that were frustrated by the backwardness of Albany politics after you've left office, and let's face it, being a man ahead of your time is still way better than being Giuliani.