Sure it's old news, but you've got to get a chuckle out of the lawsuit brewing against Mike Bloomberg over the Cathy Black hiring. You can read about it here. A few comments about this sloppy abuse of power:
1. A few pundits have tried to give Bloomberg credit for realizing his mistake and moving expeditiously to correct it. I suppose its true that he could have compounded the error by digging in his heels, but I find it hard to award points for correcting an error that was obvious to all before it was made. How could her complete lack of knowledge about education -- even the basic nomenclature -- or her intemperate nature not have been a red flag? Could no one on Bloomberg's staff talk him out of it?
2. It bothers me that no one has really considered why Black was chosen in the first place. It seems that the press simply accepted the idea that, well, she and Bloomberg were close and she was supposedly skilled as a manager. But it had to be more than that. There were numerous people in the Department of Education, including Dennis Wolcott, who were known to be both close with Bloomberg on policy and talented managers. So why make a pick so likely to prove an embarrassment? I don't pretend to know. But I think the answer lies in Bloomberg's sympathies for the idea of privatizing public schools. Just look at what became of his past Chancellor Joel Klein. Perhaps he wanted to prove that any schlocky administrator from the private sector could be successful in education -- that's my crackpot theory anyway.
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