Bloomberg used secrecy in hiring new school chief to replace Joel Klein. [View All]

Here’s how her selection went down, the new chancellor confides to Ms. Adams:

Couple of weeks ago on a Monday the mayor called. We know each other a long time. I didn’t know what he wanted.

He only told me this was a personal call and he wanted to meet. I couldn’t exactly say, “Sorry, Mr. Mayor, but I’m busy,” but the fact is I had back-to-back meetings at Hearst, so I said I couldn’t today but could tomorrow.

He said, “How’s 7 a.m. tomorrow?” I said, ‘Fine.’ We met in his foundation offices. The offer came out of left field, and my stomach did a flip-flop. The opportunity made me feel fantastic. It’s a great thing when, at a certain stage in life, you can be able to deal up … not down.

To a degree unusual even for an administration that relishes keeping its deliberations as private as possible, hardly anyone knew of Mr. Klein’s departure or Ms. Black’s arrival until minutes before the official announcement. While such posts are typically filled after highly publicized national searches that can last months or even a year, there is little evidence that anyone else was seriously vetted or considered — and few of the usual suspects, including members of the mayor’s inner circle, were even consulted.

Inexplicable as it may have seemed to outsiders, the secrecy around the search for someone to run the schools crystallized two tenets of the Bloomberg era: the mayor’s faith in the ability of business leaders to fix the ills of government, and his keen dislike of drawn-out public debates that might derail his agenda.

And, in what has become a Bloomberg hallmark, the mayor relied on someone he knew through business and social networks, someone squarely in his comfort zone of wealthy and socially prominent Upper East Side residents, someone with whom he has shared many friends and colleagues, dinners and drinks.

Bloomberg's lesson for schoolchildren

In 2004, for instance, he had his way on testing by firing and replacing three members of the dissenting members of his appointed Panel for Educational Policy, which replaced publicly-elected Boards. Then his crowing could be heard all the way across the river in Jersey:

"This is what mayoral control is all about," Mr. Bloomberg said last night. "In the olden days, we had a board that was answerable to nobody. And the Legislature said it was just not working, and they gave the mayor control. Mayoral control means mayoral control, thank you very much. They are my representatives, and they are going to vote for things that I believe in."

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he searched for the best possible schools chancellor before picking Cathleen P. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines. But so far, we haven’t heard the names of any others who were in contention. Indeed, The Times has been unable to turn up any evidence that the mayor considered anyone besides Ms. Black, a complete outsider to the world of education, to replace Joel I. Klein.

So, on Thursday, City Room started a search of its own, asking readers — were you interviewed for the job? The post gathered quite a few comments, some kind of witty though most likely not true — “I was interviewed. However my job as a fork lift operator in a cargo facility is more personally gratifying,” said a reader who goes by Patrick — and others neither witty nor plausible.

We don’t really think Patrick was interviewed. Ms. Black told Cindy Adams in The New York Post that she wasn’t either: Mayor Bloomberg just offered her the job, stone cold. But surely someone was approached by the mayor or his team about taking control of the nation’s largest public school system, without actually being handed the reins.

Layoffs are coming. Firings are coming. More school closings are coming. More charter schools are coming. More turf battles between charters and traditional public schools are coming. More chaos and destabilization of the system is coming. Thanks to Obama and RttT, more standardized tests in every subject at every level are coming. More top-down management and standardized curricula are coming.

It doesn't matter who Bloomberg chooses to replace Klein. This will be the policy. Sure, it would be nice to have someone with education experience to replace Klein, but does anyone really think that whomever Bloomberg chooses to replace Klein, even a so-called educator, wouldn't be on the same privatization policy page as Bloomberg and wouldn't carry out those same policies that Klein has carried out?

Yes, it would have been nice to have a more public process to fill the chancellor's position. But as Adam Lisberg points out in today's Daily News, the third term Bloomberg thinks he knows better than everybody else about governance. And after state lawmakers in Albany reauthorized mayoral control of the system without putting any real checks on the mayor's power, there is little that can be done to mitigate the damage Bloomberg wants to do to the system.

He has total control. The problem, then, is not Cathie Black or whoever inhabits the chancellor's chair. The problem is mayoral control.