De Blasio speech repeats pre-K plan but offers few new details

In his first major post-election speech, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio argued Monday that his wide electoral victory amounts to a mandate to curb inequality by expanding the city’s pre-Kindergarten and after-school programs through a tax hike on the wealthy.

But beyond announcing the formation of an “early-education working group” to hash out the details of the expansion, which he said he wants to begin rolling out next school year, de Blasio offered few new details about his central campaign pledge.

Instead, he repeated his plan and said that it is gaining support from lawmakers in Albany, who must approve it – even as former mayor David Dinkins suggested to de Blasio, his one-time aide, that he reconsider the income-tax hike.

“I have offered a game-changing investment in early-childhood education and after-school,” de Blasio said in his keynote speech at a summit on children hosted by the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “Nothing less will do.”

In a press conference after the speech, De Blasio declined to name candidates he is considering for schools chancellor, but said he may have more information “in a couple more days down the road.” He also did not name the members of the working group.

Some observers quickly pointed out that de Blasio, who will take office in January – midway through the school year – left many questions about his signature proposal unanswered.

Pedro Noguera, an education professor at New York University, said de Blasio had yet to detail where he would find space to provide full-day preschool to nearly 50,000 more four-year-olds or how he would train enough educators to teach them.

“I would have liked to have heard more,” Noguera said, though he added that these are “big, complex issues” that take time to resolve.

Key state legislators – including the senate co-leader, Democrat Jeffrey Klein – have recently endorsed de Blasio’s plan to raise the income tax of city residents earning more than $500,000 a year, but Senate Republicans and Governor Cuomo will be harder to convince, analysts say.

Cuomo “doesn’t want to go into an election year as a Democrat who raised taxes,” said Michael Benjamin, a political consultant and former Democratic assemblyman. He said insiders have suggested that Cuomo may try to find a different revenue stream for the plan before November’s state elections, after which he might reconsider a tax bump.

But de Blasio told reporters his tax plan is the best and fastest way to fund the school programs and said “more and more people who matter” are backing it.

He said he aimed to “win this tax fight by April 1” – the start of the state’s fiscal year – and then begin running the expanded programs later in 2014. He acknowledged that preschool space is limited, but said possible solutions include grouping multiple programs into existing pre-K centers or converting other buildings for that use, including former Catholic schools.

He also hailed a new Bloomberg administration pilot program that pairs middle schools with nonprofits to extend the school day by nearly three hours as a model after-school program. And he plugged community schools, which enlist private partners to offer an array of on-site services for students and families – a model favored by the city teachers union, which de Blasio has said he wants to expand from the current 16 schools to 100 schools.

Immediately after de Blasio made his remarks Monday afternoon, in which he had praised Dinkins, his former boss, the forum’s moderator invited Dinkins to ask de Blasio a question. Dinkins used the opportunity to suggest that the mayor-elect push for a so-called commuter tax on people who work in the city but live outside it, which he said might face less resistance in Albany.

“See whether or not this might be more easily done than to put a tax on the wealthy to take care of the rest of us,” Dinkins proposed.

But de Blasio balked at the idea, responding that his tax on high earners “is the right path and an attainable path.”