Never Trust A Politician Running On Test Scores

That third term will make him the Rod Paige of the Northeast:

New York State education officials acknowledged on Monday that their standardized exams had become easier to pass over the last four years and said they would recalibrate the scoring for tests taken this spring, which is almost certain to mean thousands more students will fail.

. . .

Large jumps in the passing rates, which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg trumpeted in his re-election campaign last year, led to criticism that the tests had become too easy.

That’s a pretty tame fourth paragraph there. I’m sure you got about twenty of these sent to your house:

If I Can Make It There, I’ll Make It Anywhere

At least in a “little town” it doesn’t take a Freedom of Information request to uncover the nepotism:

Of course, it is not unusual for young people with connections to win choice internships in all kinds of workplaces. But the records offer a glimpse inside the social and power circles of the Bloomberg administration, which has accommodated dozens of young people with connections to the mayor’s friends, business associates and government appointees for the prestigious, if unpaid, slots.

Take Jacob Doctoroff, whose father, Daniel L. Doctoroff, was deputy mayor and is now the president of Bloomberg L.P. He had an internship in 2002. He was in the eighth grade.

“It was either that or going to summer camp,” Jacob Doctoroff said in an interview. Now at Yale, he recalled enjoying his stint at the mayor’s office of management information systems. “I truthfully couldn’t tell you how I got the internship,” he said. “But you’d be working with a bunch of 35- to 45-year-olds, and you didn’t have a sense that you were in an internship program.”

This Man Never Cared For Leroy Comrie’s Quixotic Exhortations To Stop Using Certain Colloquial Terms

And apparently the Queens Tribune’s editorial guidelines don’t prohibit writing it out either:

The Department of Education has initiated an investigation into the Family District Advocate of District 29 after a recording of him using the “N Word” and other derogatory statements at a PA organizational meeting surfaced.

Ron Barfield was recorded on May 27 at a parent association executive board meeting at PS 134 in Hollis, using the word “nigger” on a number of occasions. The meeting was held to craft bylaws per Chancellor Joel Klein’s regulations.

Audio at the link . . .

Think Of It As The Corner Sweat Lodge

And may they never ever finally finish putting in escalators in the stations:

Now it seems that New Yorkers have yet another point of pride — as if we needed another reason to be smug. Forget being the walking city: just by cooling their heels on the subway, New Yorkers fare better in staving off obesity than those who do the same in their cars.

You Can Pin A Lot Of Stuff On Bloomberg If You Put Your Mind To It

The Times’ Jim Dwyer goes for gold:

Woven into the narrative, but largely unremarked on, is a shadow world: the private fund-raising that is now part of many public school budgets. Accountability for individuals who have made terrible mistakes is, if not simple, then reasonably straightforward. But figuring out the equities of private fund-raising in public schools would require the invention of an ethical supercomputer. Relentless fund-raising, nonetheless, is surely part of the chain of events that led to Nicole’s death.