By Michael M. Grynbaum, The New York Times
Hoping that New Yorkers will think of “Romney” as a dirty word, a coalition of labor unions and liberal advocacy groups is beginning a campaign on Thursday to tie the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to defenders of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s education policies.
The coalition, New Yorkers for Great Public Schools, said it planned to highlight donors who supported both Mitt Romney and StudentsFirstNY, a political group formed as a counterweight to teachers’ unions that oppose much of Mr. Bloomberg’s education agenda.
The line of attack is somewhat selective — the StudentsFirstNY board includes several major Democratic donors, as well as several well-heeled Romney contributors — but the offensive, described in interviews this week, is a sign of the increasingly blunt gamesmanship in the continuing debate over the future of the city’s schools, a topic that is expected to be a key issue in the 2013 mayoral race.
Teachers’ unions, which are major backers of the group behind the new campaign, said they hoped to stymie some of Mr. Bloomberg’s more contentious plans, including the expanded use of teacher evaluations and charter schools. StudentsFirstNY, an offshoot of the national school-reform group founded by Michelle Rhee, the former schools chancellor of Washington, was created to push back against the unions.
As part of its new campaign, called “RomneyFirst,” the union coalition planned to call on political candidates to reject contributions from StudentsFirstNY, which donates to lawmakers who share its views.
The coalition is also set to release a report that discusses some connections between Mr. Romney and StudentsFirstNY; his senior foreign-policy adviser, Dan Senor, for instance, sits on the group’s board, along with several financiers who have contributed large sums to the candidate or “super PACs” that support him.
The report features an incendiary title, asserting that “Romney Donors and Republican Insiders” want to “control N.Y.C. Education.”
Told of the allegations on Wednesday, StudentsFirstNY fired off its own fierce response.
“Virtually every line in this report contains charges that range from absurd to dishonest,” Glen Weiner, the group’s deputy executive director, wrote in a statement.
“Clearly, the teachers’ union is so desperate to suppress a serious conversation about improving teacher quality and expanding school options for kids that it has set up a front group to threaten elected officials and concoct conspiracy theories,” Mr. Weiner wrote.
Officials at StudentsFirstNY described their group as bipartisan, and they noted that their board included former Mayor Edward I. Koch, a Democrat who is a staunch supporter of President Obama, and Douglas J. Band, a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton.
But Jonathan Westin, the organizing director at New York Communities for Change, which helped design the anti-Romney campaign, described StudentsFirstNY as “out of touch with the everyday New Yorker.”
“These are some of the wealthiest people in this country,” Mr. Westin said, who have “very ideologically conservative views.”
Organizers of the coalition were explicit that they hoped to create a public backlash against StudentsFirstNY. The coalition said it planned to use Facebook and Twitter to further the campaign, although no television or radio advertisements were planned.
Both sides agreed that the stakes for city schools in next year’s election would be high.
“The mayor’s race will be the watershed moment,” said Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, a statewide progressive education group that helped design the campaign. “Are we going to go even further with privatization and the testing agenda, or are we going to put the focus on teaching and learning in the classrooms?”
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