National Public Radio on Bloomberg LP, Non-Disclosure Agreements and Secrecy

Bloomberg News Killed Investigation, Fired Reporter, Then Sought To Silence His Wife

NPR,April 14, 20205:05 AM ET

Heard on Morning Edition

Michael Bloomberg's short-lived presidential bid reignited a long-simmering dispute over the widespread use of nondisclosure agreements at American corporations — especially at his own.

His namesake company, Bloomberg LP, has used nondisclosure agreements broadly to conceal allegations and silence complaints from employees of sexual harassment or a hostile work environment, as published reports have documented.

The story of one Bloomberg reporter and his wife showcases the widespread use of such legal restraints at the company — and how far their reach can extend.

Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.

"They assumed that because I was the wife of their employee, I was the wife," the author and journalist Leta Hong Fincher tells NPR. "I was just an appendage of their employee. I was not a human being."

Fincher is married to the journalist Mike Forsythe, a former Beijing correspondent for Bloomberg News who now works at The New York Times. In 2012, Forsythe was part of a Bloomberg team behind an award-winning investigation into the accumulation of wealth by China's ruling classes.

The Chinese ambassador warned Bloomberg executives against publishing the investigation. But Bloomberg News published the story anyway. Afterward, Forsythe received what he and Fincher considered death threats relayed through other journalists. He and Fincher moved their family to Hong Kong, believing it to be safer.

Even so, the reporting team pursued the next chapter, focusing on Chinese leaders' ties to the country's richest man, Wang Jianlin. Among those in the reporters' sights: the family of new Chinese President Xi Jinping. The story gained steam throughout 2013.

In emails sent back to Bloomberg's journalists in China seen by Fincher, senior news editors in New York City expressed excitement.

And then: radio silence from headquarters. That story never ran.

"Mike and some of the other reporters and editors who had been working on this story just were asking for answers about ... why was this story killed?" Fincher says.
Winkler fears China will "shut us down"

Finally, in late October 2013, Bloomberg's famously intense founding editor-in-chief, Matthew Winkler, weighed in, via a private conference call. In attendance: senior news executives in New York and the China-based investigative team. NPR has obtained audio of Winkler's remarks on the call.

"It is for sure going to, you know, invite the Communist Party to, you know, completely shut us down and kick us out of the country," Winkler said. "So, I just don't see that as a story that is justified."

He expressed great apprehension because of the potential consequences of publishing another investigation. In this case, it was one that would itemize the links between top Chinese Communist Party leaders and the country's wealthiest man.

Winkler returned to those fears repeatedly. "The inference is going to be interpreted by the government there as we are judging them," Winkler said. "And they will probably kick us out of the country. They'll probably shut us down, is my guess."

Winkler suggested reporters could find a uniquely "Bloomberg" way to cover the wealth of Chinese ruling elites. But he added a caution about covering the regime.

"It has to be done with a strategic framework and a tactical method that is ... smart enough to allow us to continue and not run afoul of the Nazis who are in front of us and behind us everywhere," Winkler said, according to the audio reviewed by NPR and verified by others. "And that's who they are. And we should have no illusions about it."

At the time, two Bloomberg editors told NPR the story didn't run because it needed additional reporting. Winkler publicly said much the same. But these audio recordings reveal otherwise. They also show how much newsroom leaders were worried about losing lucrative business in China.

After the first investigative project ran in 2012, the Chinese authorities had searched Bloomberg's news bureaus, delayed visas for reporters and ordered state-owned companies not to sign new leases for Bloomberg's primary product: its terminals.

The terminals are the lucrative basis of Mike Bloomberg's personal fortune — recently estimated at more than $50 billion, making him one of the richest people in the world. Subscribers pay $20,000 annually for each terminal, which provides specialized financial data and analysis.

If Bloomberg makes its money on terminals, it gains prestige and greater name recognition from its news division. Many of its stories, predominantly on business and finance, appear first on the terminal.

At the time the story was being pursued, China was seen as a growing market and a strategic priority, according to three former Bloomberg executives.

Winkler alluded to that in his remarks. "There's a way to use the information you have in such a way that enables us to report, but not kill ourselves in the process and wipe out everything we've tried to build there," he told the reporting team. Bloomberg News and Winkler declined to comment for this story.
Mayor Bloomberg and his newsroom

As this debate played out inside Bloomberg News, Mike Bloomberg was the mayor of New York City. Officially, he had relinquished control of the company. In reality, his former executives say, Bloomberg was in frequent contact and shared his aspirations for growth in China.

At a press conference after The New York Times first wrote about the internal fight over the decision not to publish, Bloomberg denied the story had been killed.

"Nobody thinks we are wusses and not willing to stand up and write stories that are of interest to the public and that are factually correct," Bloomberg said at a City Hall press conference.

Two months after those remarks, Bloomberg's term as mayor ended and he returned to the company he founded. In January 2014, Bloomberg held a town hall for his global newsroom. NPR also obtained portions of that audio. Asked about the China controversy, Bloomberg sounded a new note.

"If a country gives you the license to do something with certain restrictions, you have two choices," Bloomberg told his staff. "You either accept the license and do it that way, or you don't do business there."

Bloomberg said the newsroom should be proud of its coverage of China. He also said there were a few "bad apples" at any large institution. Some journalists at Bloomberg News took that to be aimed at the China team. Through a corporate spokesman, Bloomberg LP and its founder, the former mayor, declined to comment for this story.

The following month, Bloomberg LP Board Chairman Peter Grauer told the Asia Society's Hong Kong chapter that the company had about 50 journalists in China primarily to write about the local business and economic environment there. "Every once in a while, we wander a little bit away from that and write stories that we probably ... should have rethought," he said.

In late 2013, Bloomberg News suspended Forsythe, accusing him of leaking word of the controversy to other news outlets. The company would later fire him. He soon landed at The New York Times.

Forsythe declined to comment for this story. In leaving the company, he signed a nondisclosure agreement that bars him from speaking publicly about his time at Bloomberg News. Others from the China investigative team would leave the company in the years that followed, each having first signed an agreement not to disparage the company. In at least one case, a journalist signed the nondisparagement deal in part to prevent the loss of a month's pay.

Lawyers for Bloomberg News pressured someone else to sign a nondisclosure agreement: Forsythe's wife, Fincher.

They threatened to force Forsythe and Fincher to pay back the tens of thousands of dollars spent to move their family to Hong Kong after the death threats. Bloomberg also threatened to sue to make the couple pay the company's legal costs, pushing the dollar amount well into the six figures.

"There was no reason why I should have to sign a nondisclosure agreement," Fincher tells NPR, "because I didn't possess any damaging material about the company."

NPR reached out to the general counsel of a rival media company, a top executive who has overseen contracts at two major television networks, and also a leading workplace attorney to determine whether they had ever heard of a company demanding a nondisclosure agreement from the spouse of an employee. Each separately said they had not.

Fincher recalls being summoned to the high-rise offices of Bloomberg's Hong Kong legal team. Her husband was there too, with his own lawyers.

She recalls staring at a giant projection of Bloomberg's outside lawyer from New York City on a video screen. He rejected her assurances that she did not pose any threat, demanding a formal nondisclosure agreement by asking, "What about all the evidence that's in her head?"

Fincher is a former correspondent for CNBC and Voice of America. At the time, she was finishing up her doctorate at a Chinese university. She bristled at what the company's lawyers were suggesting.

"They assumed that my husband would be able to silence me," Fincher says. "He didn't want to do that. That's not the kind of relationship that we have."

Fincher tells NPR she walked out of the conference room, took the elevator to the lobby, left the building and never returned. Bloomberg LP continued to press her.

Last month, a Bloomberg corporate spokeswoman told The New York Times that Forsythe stole "Bloomberg L.P. intellectual property and gave it to his wife." The spokeswoman, Natalie Harland, said that Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg News never pressured anyone to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

Legal documents reviewed by NPR contradict that claim, showing Bloomberg LP's muscular efforts to obtain a nondisclosure contract from Fincher. In letters to Fincher's Hong Kong lawyers, Bloomberg LP's attorneys insisted that she sign an agreement that includes, among other items, a promise she would never criticize the company or its officers. Bloomberg's lawyers also explicitly stated they reserved the right to sue her in court.

Fincher ultimately ended up hiring a pair of elite Hong Kong lawyers who had previously represented a famous American whistleblower: Edward Snowden. And Bloomberg LP relented and let it go.

More than a year later, the Times would publish Forsythe's expose about billionaire Wang Jianlin and the close relatives of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Several people who know Forsythe, including Fincher, say it took that long to publish because he had to painstakingly re-report the elements of the story he had previously documented with the Bloomberg team.

Fincher wrote about the incident recently for The Intercept, spurred by Mike Bloomberg's exchange with Elizabeth Warren over nondisclosure agreements at Bloomberg LP at a Democratic debate in February. (Fincher was a supporter of Warren's presidential bid.)

Bloomberg's brief candidacy never really recovered. He pledged to release three women who complained about his own conduct at the company from contractual requirements that they not speak publicly, though some laid-off staffers from his campaign have told reporters they, too, were forced to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Fincher asks her own lingering question: What else at Bloomberg News is being hidden if such contracts exist that require such secrecy?

Comments on NYC Department of Education CEO Dennis Walcott's Threats To All People Who Want To Change Bloomberg's Ed Deform Policies

It's always interesting to read the pandering by journalists given space in our nations newspapers to praise the disastrous education deform of the last 12 years put into place by Mike Bloomberg and his sidekick, Dennis Walcott. It is up to us, the general public, to say "I dont believe you" and, "no thanks".

Betsy Combier

In New York’s Schools Chief, a Knack for Quiet Conciliation

LINK

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER, JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ and FERNANDA SANTOS

This article was reported by David M. Halbfinger, Javier C. Hernandez and Fernanda Santos and written by Mr. Halbfinger.

They called him “Dirt” — and said it with affection. Playing in a recreational football league in the 1970s, his teammates recall, Dennis M. Walcott was a walking laundry-detergent commercial, constantly making tackles.

During one game, as he pulled himself to his feet after sacking the quarterback, an opponent sucker-punched him in the jaw. The benches cleared, and Mr. Walcott’s buddies — the only all-black team in a nearly all-white league on Staten Island — looked to him for a signal. But he shook it off.

“We weren’t there to fight,” he said. “It could have been a race war.”

After early work mentoring children in Queens and a searing stint in Harlem finding homes for crack babies — he even adopted two children of an addict — Mr. Walcott rose to the presidency of the New York Urban League, one of the city’s premier civil rights groups. But in the racial turmoil of the Giuliani years, Mr. Walcott refrained from getting arrested alongside scores of politicians and other black leaders in demonstrations against police brutality. He chose to advise the embattled police commissioner behind the scenes, trusting that his subdued approach would be more likely to win results.

All along, his trademark has been forbearance, and in his new role as New York City’s schools chancellor, Mr. Walcott will test whether the nation’s full-tilt approach to urban education reform is ready for a different kind of leader. But for the past nine years as a deputy mayor whose main responsibility was to oversee the Department of Education, he has left only the faintest of fingerprints during a time of momentous changes to the schools.

In a lengthy interview, Mr. Walcott struggled to name any achievements for which he had been the driving force, finally citing the creation of an early-literacy program for children in public housing and a mayoral Office of Adult Education.

In a City Hall populated with visionary strategists, managerial wizards and publicity magnets, Mr. Walcott was none of these. Working between a strong-willed mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, and a tenacious chancellor, Joel I. Klein, he seemed more comfortable in a role as deputy mayor for mollification: mediating disputes, calming tensions and endlessly listening.

That, of course, may be precisely what is needed at this moment: Mr. Walcott is taking over the nation’s largest school system after a disastrous experiment with Cathleen P. Black, at a time of low mayoral approval ratings and with teacher layoffs and other retrenchments in the offing.

But Mr. Walcott, 59, concedes that despite his years in City Hall, there is little record on which to judge whether he is the right person to defend, advance and improve upon Mr. Bloomberg’s education agenda of test-based accountability, welcoming charter schools and closing failing ones.

“People will question spine,” Mr. Walcott said. “I’m very confident about decision-making and toughness. It will be my actions they have to take a look at over the next two and a half years to determine whether there is spine or not.”

In Two Worlds

Backyard baseball with a tree stump for home plate. Trombone in the school orchestra. Biking down the street under the watchful eyes of friendly neighbors.

It was “Leave It to Beaver,” but black, to hear Mr. Walcott describe his childhood in the Addisleigh Park section of southeast Queens, a destination for ambitious émigrés from Harlem and Brooklyn that was already dotted with celebrities like John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Dennis Malcolm Walcott was an only child, born in 1951 to Dennis C. and Eleanor Walcott. His father was an exterminator for the city’s Housing Authority who never finished high school, even-tempered and affable; his mother, a city social worker, the tough-minded family “enforcer.”

The couple wanted Dennis to succeed in a white world, so they sent him for three summers to Lincoln Farm Work Camp, in the Catskills, where teenagers labored on construction projects. The children of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were there, but nearly everyone else was white and wealthy, he said.

Mr. Walcott graduated from Francis Lewis High School and thought he might become a psychiatrist. He went to the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, a small seaside campus not too far from home. But neither of his parents saw him graduate. His father fell ill and died in 1971, at age 60. The next year, on spring break from his senior year, Mr. Walcott arrived home to find his mother, 48, dead on the living room floor. He did not want an autopsy, so the cause was never determined.

Her body was beneath a window looking out to the street. “The theory was that she was sitting on the chair, waiting for me to come in,” he said.

Mr. Walcott abruptly changed his diet, cutting out things he thought might bring on the diabetes that had stricken many of the men in his family. These days he avoids red meat and seldom eats anything but a salad for lunch. He once favored Old Grand-Dad and colas, but now rarely touches alcohol and does not smoke.

With a master’s in education, he found a job teaching kindergarten at a new church-run school in Queens. He was unenthusiastic about the work, a friend recalled. But he was moved by the longings of boys who had no fathers at home, and he created his own “Brother to Brother” program.

Mr. Walcott persuaded a television station to broadcast a free advertisement during “Soul Train,” he said, and the flood of interest from single mothers and male volunteers was more than he could handle. He ended the program.

In 1977, he married Denise St. Hill — they had met as young children and reconnected by chance at a party — just as he started working at a foster-care agency in Manhattan as part of a master’s program in social work. He later interned at the Greater New York Fund, the arm of the United Way that handed out grants to smaller nonprofits.

Friends and bosses marveled at his listening skills, calm and maturity. “He could always talk himself out of sticky situations or stay above the fray,” Nancy Gresham-Jones, a classmate and a co-worker, said.

The fund hired him full time, assigning him to work with recipient agencies to improve operations. One was Harlem-Dowling Children’s Services, the first black-run adoption agency in New York, whose finances were a mess after management changes and a bookkeeper’s conviction for embezzlement.

Mr. Walcott became its executive director in 1985, just in time for the crack epidemic. Staggering numbers of babies were being born with drug toxicity or H.I.V., or were being abandoned at birth. In one day alone, he found foster homes for 30 “boarder babies” left at Harlem Hospital.

He was a hands-on director: watching a child die of AIDS complications; helping a little girl born without a stomach; rushing to a woman’s home to talk her out of suicide. When a wealthy woman offered to do something nice one Christmas, Mr. Walcott said, he sent to her home two children who had never had a hot bath.

“Things like that were emotionally draining,” he said. “It was a trying period in time, and you’re right in the fulcrum of it.”

By the time he took over the New York Urban League in 1990, he had two daughters. But when he heard of a girl named Shatisha, 10, and her brother Timmy, 5, who needed a home, Mr. Walcott and his wife signed up to take them in as foster parents and soon adopted them. He later reconnected the two with their birth mother, who has been clean for a number of years.

A Challenging Decade

Mr. Walcott embraced the Urban League’s mission, even tattooing its logo, an apple with an equal sign, on his right arm. He worked particularly hard to expand city-financed programs aimed at reducing infant mortality, training welfare recipients for work and coaching parents to get involved in schools.

“Dennis moved the league into government contracts it never had before,” said Harvey Newman, then a board member. “I don’t know if it was a swimming success. But it changed the direction of the Urban League.” From 1993 to 1999, state records show, the league’s government financing grew by $2.2 million, or 54 percent.

In 1993, before he lost his re-election bid, Mayor David N. Dinkins appointed Mr. Walcott to the Board of Education, where he served for just over a year. Norman Steisel, a deputy mayor, recalled Mr. Walcott working on a model for mayoral control of the schools that would entail “extensive parental involvement,” but the plan went nowhere.

One of Mr. Walcott’s greatest victories as an advocate was his most fleeting one: a federal court ruling that briefly blocked a subway fare increase in 1995. Represented by a lawyer named Eric T. Schneiderman, now the state’s attorney general, the Urban League and the Straphangers Campaign argued that minorities were being hit harder than suburban whites, whose commuter fares were not rising as sharply.

The decision was overturned the next day. But Gene Russianoff, the Straphangers leader, said he believed it created a political problem for Gov. George E. Pataki that was solved a year later by the introduction of the unlimited-ride MetroCard.

As relations between Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s Police Department and minority communities deteriorated, Mr. Walcott retained his access to senior administration aides by rarely criticizing the mayor publicly, and never in harsh terms.

“That was a very activist period of time,” he said. “We had the Korean boycott; we had Crown Heights. My goal was to walk the line.”

Mr. Walcott helped Howard Safir, the police commissioner, come up with a strategy to push officers to use a kinder demeanor with the public, with sting operations intended to weed out surly officers. The slogan he helped devise — “Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect” — remains emblazoned on patrol cars, Mr. Walcott noted with some pride. “Yeah, that was me,” he said.

Yet his restraint earned Mr. Walcott catcalls from other civil rights leaders who said it was doing little good. “The inside road is a hard row to hoe,” said Michael Meyers, the president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. “But at the same time, you’ve got to show me that you’re being effective.”

Mr. Walcott said his refusal to get arrested after the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo was one of the toughest decisions he ever made. It also raised questions about whether the Urban League’s reliance on government money for 75 percent of its budget had compromised his independence.

Mr. Walcott denied this. But he acknowledged trying to “protect the league,” and said that taking a more “strident” public stance could have caused “unnecessary pressure or strain on the organization.” Then again, he suggested, perhaps he was being held to an unfair standard.

“I provided services to communities and tried to deal with empowerment and equality, which was part of the mission of the Urban League,” he said. “But defining myself as a civil rights leader — I wouldn’t quite say that. I was in charge of a not-for-profit.”

The City Peacekeeper

In January 2002, Mr. Walcott arrived in City Hall as an odd man out: he was one of few minorities and barely knew Mr. Bloomberg. He wore his differences with pride, sometimes calling himself the “working-class deputy mayor.”

His chief responsibility was limited in part by Mr. Klein’s hands-on style and close relationship with the mayor. So Mr. Walcott became something of a go-between: an ambassador to far-flung corners of the city, a pair of eyes in the department for Mr. Bloomberg and a guardian of Mr. Klein, whose pugnacious style he defended repeatedly in City Hall. Mr. Walcott described his role as being “the glue between two very smart people who have very strong viewpoints.”

He popped in regularly at the department to eavesdrop on meetings or simply to chat. He saw his mission not as coming up with ideas or challenging Mr. Klein, but as working around the edges — reminding officials to call a Harlem politician before proposing a new charter school or pushing for more town hall meetings.

“His style was never to say, ‘No, we’re not going to let you do this,’ ” said Garth Harries, an education official from 2003 to 2009. “It was more like probing and testing to make sure we had done the work and understood the implications of what we were doing.”

When the department was considering closing the Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx, Mr. Walcott expressed concerns about community opposition. As a result, the department preserved a popular automotive program at the school and phased out other programs.

But when the department faced one of its most contentious decisions, whether to release teacher performance data to the public, Mr. Walcott was conflicted, expressing concerns about denigrating teachers.

Some have interpreted his restraint as excessive deference, even cowardice. Jill Levy, a former president of the principals’ union, grew frustrated with his reluctance to speak up in meetings and to weigh in on issues. “He never disagreed,” she said. “I didn’t see any overt leadership.”

But Dina Paul-Parks, a former aide, said Mr. Walcott was often misjudged. “Dennis is so laid-back that sometimes people tend to think that he is a bit of a wallflower,” she said. “He actually has very, very strong opinions and feels passionately about these issues.”

Still, Mr. Walcott’s knack for peacemaking and consensus-building in tense moments made him indispensable to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein, who each had a habit of alienating other political players.

It was Mr. Walcott, not the blunter Mr. Klein, who was called upon to explain — gently but unapologetically — to parents and community leaders why their schools were being closed for poor performance. So, too, when the fury reached City Hall without warning from the Education Department, it was Mr. Walcott who briefed the mayor, covering for Mr. Klein.

The mayor sent Mr. Walcott to soothe tensions after several crises, including the fatal police shooting of Sean Bell in 2006 — the same year that Mr. Walcott’s son, Timmy Craig-Walcott, was shot in the leg after getting off a bus one night in Queens.

Mr. Walcott’s skills proved critical in 2002, when Mr. Bloomberg wanted the State Legislature to give him control of city schools, and in 2009, when some legislators were demurring over whether to renew that control. Steven Sanders, who was chairman of the Assembly’s Education Committee in 2002, said Mr. Walcott approached the task with the discretion of an attorney guarding his client’s interests.

While Mr. Walcott and Mr. Bloomberg get along, they have never been particularly close, City Hall colleagues say. Mr. Bloomberg has invited him to Yankee games and to the inauguration of Barack Obama. Mr. Walcott devoted his vacation time in 2005 to the mayor’s re-election campaign.

But Mr. Walcott sometimes seemed to have trouble getting the mayor’s ear, telling colleagues he was “stalking” Mr. Bloomberg to sound him out on an issue when other officials had no trouble engaging the mayor in conversation.

Always, he was mindful of being the highest ranking African-American in the administration — even welling up with tears in an interview as he described how much he meant to younger minority staff members. At times, Mr. Walcott acted on that sensitivity, as when he cautioned against laying off cafeteria aides because it would disproportionately hit minority workers. But he disappointed some lower-level staff members who privately said they wished he had done more to help minorities land more senior jobs.

It was during the short tenure of Ms. Black that Mr. Walcott took a more commanding role. He was by her side, or behind a curtain, at tense public meetings, and rolled back her decision to take for the department half of any money saved by principals during the year. (The department is now taking back 30 percent.)

The appointment of Ms. Black was contentious, even inside City Hall. The mayor consulted with virtually no one in his administration before naming her, and Mr. Walcott declined to say whether his input had been sought.

But when Ms. Black seemed unable to grasp basic issues three months into her tenure, Mr. Walcott was part of a small circle of advisers who told Mr. Bloomberg that her chancellorship could not be salvaged, according to a person who spoke with the mayor.

True to form, Mr. Walcott refused to discuss what he told the mayor. “That’s between us,” he said.

Sharon Otterman, Mosi Secret and Rebecca White contributed reporting.

From Betsy Combier, below is the real story:

Walcott and 'Bloomy': We "know" what needs to be done - facts be damned - and you "better" do it our way, or get on the highway....

New York Schools Chief Warns Against Changes

by JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

LINK

MARK BONIFACIO/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

NYC Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott speaks at the Chancellor's Principal Conference at Brooklyn Technical High School.

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Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott took a rare shot at the mayoral candidates’ education proposals in a robust speech Saturday that shows Mayor Bloomberg wants to aggressively cement his school reform legacy.

Walcott sharply criticized the candidates for their plans to stop closing failing schools, saying, “the fate of our schools is hanging in the balance” during this “critical juncture.”

“Many of the candidates want the Department of Education to halt its policy of replacing failing schools with successful and innovative new schools,” Walcott told nearly 2,000 principals and school administrators at Brooklyn Technical High School.

RELATED: MAYORAL CANDIDATES VIE FOR TEACHERS’ UNION SUPPORT

“They would have us consign the students who attend them to an awful status quo, and send their students into the world without the benefit of a good education.”

The mild-mannered schools boss, who said he would not endorse any candidate, also blasted some running for office for closely aligning themselves with labor interests.

“I’ve heard endless proposals that would benefit the teachers’ union, but not our students,” he said. “What these promises have in common is that they would hurt children in the service of political interests.”

RELATED: AGAINST THE KIDS

Candidates Bill de Blasio, John Liu and Bill Thompson have said they would impose a moratorium on school closures and co-locations — and they didn’t shy away from using their own fighting words in response to Walcott’s speech.

“After nearly 12 years of boxing parents out of their kids’ education, the mayor and his commissioners have turned to scare tactics,” de Blasio said in a statement. “But the parents I talk to every day aren’t fearful of a new mayor — they can’t wait to finally have an ally in City Hall.”

Liu questioned why Walcott was defending the administration’s education reforms at this point in the campaigning process. “It would seem that our schools chancellor would have a lot on his plate other than delivering political speeches,” Liu told the News. “Why be so defensive when you’re so sure that everything is perfect?”