



Mr Bloomberg has not been as brave with schools as Mr Giuliani was with crime. Oddly given his belief in competition, the former media mogul shunned the most radical option—vouchers that allow parents to shop around beyond the public-schools system for their children's education. On the other hand, even supporters of school choice, like this newspaper, have to admit it is proving hard to sell. (This week voters in Utah rejected a proposed voucher scheme, thought to be the 11th time in succession that voters have said no to something similar.) Nor has Mr Bloomberg made a big push to introduce large numbers of independent charter schools as exist, say, in Los Angeles.

Against this, Mr Bloomberg has provided an example of what a mayor with control of schools can do even without embracing such controversial ideas. He has avoided inflammatory political terms—“merit pay” and “vouchers” are red rags to teachers' unions. Instead, by using the carrot of pay rises to extract performance concessions from principals and teachers, and by persuading philanthropists such as Bill Gates to pay for innovations that might be hard to sell to the public if the public had to pay for them, he has put in place a system based on transparency, accountability and competition that he hopes will achieve much the same effect.

Will it? A lot will depend on whether Mr Bloomberg's actions continue to match his tough talk. Unless bad schools are indeed closed, his scheme will be as much good as a blackboard with no chalk. But there are some parallels with Mr Giuliani's crime reforms. For the New York Police Department's giant CompStat database, which provided useful insight into crime patterns, read a new schools information system for students, parents, teachers and schools administrators designed by IBM. For the concept of making precinct police captains personally accountable for reducing crime, read the grading of schools and firing of failing principals. And so on.

Will it last?

New York's reforms are encouraging other cities to consider giving the mayor control of schools. That is a good idea, if only because school boards, the current alternative, are usually packed with patronage dispensing cronies of the unions. Voters now know who to blame in New York if the schools are bad. But mayoral control alone is no guarantee of success. For one thing, it can all too easily be reversed: it is by no means certain that the next mayor of New York will be granted the same powers as the present one, or will use those powers to sack bad teachers. The best hope is that Mr Bloomberg's new schools system will work so well that no future mayor would dream of changing it—just as no mayor nowadays would dare to tamper with Mr Giuliani's policies on crime.