Why not Bloomberg?

In times of frustration, novelty is tempting. That is no reason for our country to grasp at a third party candidate like an attractive, non-fat chocolate. In other words, I am begging my fellow Americans not to fall for the potential third party candidacy of Mike Bloomberg.

First, he is in the process of disposing of New York City's public schools. We are testing and failing more tests than ever. Our class sizes remain the same or bigger, our services are outsourced to various for-profit companies. We may not succeed at educating our students, but we will make some publishers of standardized tests richer than ever. Meanwhile, we have turned our curricula into test prep.

Ask any teacher or student at a private school how much they prepare for a test or if an exam dictates what they would learn and they will be horrified by the question. I know because I asked a friend who teaches as at a prestigious school and she reprimanded me. Of course, I know better than to teach to a test. But, I don't work in a system which does. I work for a system which is attempting to pretend it gets results, as if student success can be measured in the same way as profit. Even profit doesn't tell a whole story. It tells you what you have, but not necessarily what you need and how equipped you are for future changes in a market. So too, student success on simple exam tasks doesn't predict their ability to apply what they have learned in a complex world. Of course, our students are not succeeding on these tests, so this is a moot point.

Yes, Mike Bloomberg rides the subways. Fortunately for him, he doesn't ride one of the many lines which has had service reduced like mine has because he doesn't live out in the outer boroughs of New York. Just as with schools, he has a simplistic solution to a problem whose depth he doesn't begin to understand.

In New York City, Mike Bloomberg has proven that he may say the right things, but provides perfunctory, superficial solutions to problems. On a national scale, this behavior might be devastating.