Bloomberg Mocks Parents Outraged Over His Mayoral Control

With mayoral control up for debate in Albany, it might be prudent for Bloomberg to show that he stays in tune with the parents that send their children to his unilaterally run schools. Yet after the Mayor decided to pull five year old children out of the city's daycare centers and place them in the larger public school system, parents were up in arms and held two separate demonstrations yesterday denouncing the change. With so little space available in the city's schools for these children, the move makes it even harder for parents to find their kids a space in their neighborhood school. So what was Mayor Bloomberg's reaction to the upset parents?

From The NY Daily News:

"They complained about a couple of hundred kids not being able to get into the schools that they wanted to get into," he said.

"I can tell you how to fix that: just lower the quality of the schools," he said. "Isn't it wonderful that kids want to get into schools?"

Told of the mayor's mocking, Sal Browne, a mother of two at Public School 116 in Murray Hill and toddler twins said, "That's the most absurd thing I have ever heard."

"This is not something to be shrugging off and joking about and saying this problem isn't really a problem," she said.

If the Mayor thinks that he can simply get away with this behavior and not pay a political price he'll be sorely mistaken. He can spend tens of millions of ads to numb the minds of this city but when you scorn a voter over the education of their child, there is no better way of helping your opponent than creating a cadre of pissed off parents.