NYCLU Letter to the Daily News: Read the Report Next Time

Though the New York Civil Liberties Union takes no position on whether to continue “mayoral control” of the schools, we think it’s vital that the city community take a hard look at what’s working and what’s not. Too often reasonable critiques like ours are met with knee-jerk responses from the mayor and his supporters — like your editorial ( “Control Freaks,” May 15) which the editorial writer admitted was penned without even reading the balanced and well-researched report we published.

Parents, legislators and everyone outside of Tweed Hall have been kept from gathering enough information to know the real impacts of mayoral control. In that regard, Mayor Bloomberg is not helping. We applaud the mayor for making education a top priority, but he and his Department of Education resist transparency at every turn. One example is their repeated refusal to comply with basic public records requests by both advocates and education reporters citywide.

We need all the facts to make the right decisions for our kids. For the Daily News, taking 10 minutes to read a report on the subject would have been a good start.

Donna Lieberman,
NYCLU Executive Director