De Blasio and his advisers are still figuring out how much rent to charge well-funded charter schools, his transition team told me. “It would depend on the resources of the charter school or charter network,” he told WNYC, in early October. “Some are clearly very, very well resourced and have incredible wealthy backers. Others don’t. So my simple point was that programs that can afford to pay rent should be paying rent.” (In an October debate with the Republican candidate Joseph Lhota, he put it more bluntly: “I simply wouldn’t favor charters the way Mayor Bloomberg did because, in the end, our city rises or falls on our traditional public schools.”)
My impression of DeBlasio was that he went around collecting every plausible complaint from every interest group that was mad at Bloomberg and promised whatever they wanted. There didn’t really seem to be a coherent theory or any depth whatsoever to his policy prescriptions.
Already working hard to confirm this impression.