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In clashes with Cuomo, de Blasio taken to school on pre-K, charters Posted: 14 Mar 2014 05:23 PM PDT When New York Mayor Bill de Blasio steamrolled into office eleven weeks ago, he was hailed as the leader of the nation's long-denuded progressives, a towering liberal Democrat finally on a central stage, and carrying the hopes of an urban constituency two decades at the margins of pro-business, law-and-order rule. But less than three months in, a political reality check: New York's moderate and even fiscally-conservative governor, fellow Democrat Andrew Cuomo, has schooled the rookie mayor in the art of political power, using the new mayor's signature election issue of free universal pre-Kindergarten education for all the city's kids, paid for by the city's wealthy, as a ready-made foil for his own ideas on education – and perhaps his own ambitions on the national stage. In what appears to be a well-calculated political move, Governor Cuomo, who is hoping for his own landslide reelection mandate this November, has deftly shifted the debate from pre-K funding. Instead he is highlighting Mayor de Blasio's long resistance to the city's charter schools – independently-run public schools that rely on both state and private funding and are often outside the purview of the powerful teachers union, strong supporters of the mayor.

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