Bloomberg's interview with the Spanish-language daily Hoy on August 3 about how education reform will be his legacy is another example of how the mayor is attempting to reach out to Latino voters (Bloomberg cites the improving test scores across the city and discusses some other issues, including his opinion that undocumented immigrants in the US should be given some sort of legal status).
As I said last week in this post, education is the most important issue to Latino voters in the upcoming mayoral election in New York. And according to this op-ed in El Diario from Lilian Rodriguez-Lopez of the Hispanic Federation (in Spanish only), Bloomberg seems to be making some headway in convincing Latino voters that he is doing a good job on issues that matter to them. A recent poll shows that 51 percent of Latinos had a positive opinion of Bloomberg, an increase of 17 points since 2004, when almost 70 percent of Latinos gave him bad marks. It's hard to know how much of Bloomberg's recent success among Latino voters is the result of his education reforms. Bloomberg needs to do a lot more (like supporting the Education Equity Act, for one, and there are a number of other complaints) to improve the quality of education for Latino kids in the city, but he is certainly doing a good job of communicating to the voters. It'll be interesting to see if this issue plays a big role in the outcome of the election.
I haven't seen this being reported in any English-language papers, but I'll keep you posted.
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