Presumptive Mayor-to-be Adrian Fenty is in New York City today, reports the Post, in order to pow wow with Mayor Michael Bloomberg about how he went all authoritarian on New York’s public school system. Many aspects of what Bloomberg has done in an effort to turn things around for the city’s failing schools are intriguing, if not without controversy:

What Bloomberg and Klein will describe to Fenty is a massive overhaul in which they rolled out more than 170 small high schools with fewer than 450 students apiece. They streamlined the central administration, transforming 32 school districts into 10 regions and slashing $200 million from the budget, largely by eliminating administrative positions. They created a principals’ academy to train administrators, using $75 million in private donations, and established rigorous performance standards for educators.

We mention the controversy because, and the Post article further outlines, many parents and teachers in New York are up in arms over Bloomberg’s experiment with these “small high schools,” which stand accused of leaving other, large schools behind in their collective dust. A group of parents even went so far as to write Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa a concerned letter when he came to meet with Bloomberg on the same topic. Will Fenty get the same warning?

Of course, Fenty won the Democratic mayoral primary by a huge margin, after running a campaign as a radical reformer. And there is perhaps no issue of more concern to District voters than the state of our crumbling school system. If D.C.’s parents, teachers and taxpayers wanted a more cautious approach to school reform, they would have voted for Linda Cropp. It stands to reason we should expect to see some Bloomberg-style strong arming of the city’s public schools relatively quickly after Fenty wins the general election and takes office next year.

Obviously fake photo collage by DCist Jeff.