A City Council speaker who has never been a small business owner -- or a parent -- does not have the experience or the empathy to understand why the time has come for a Paid Sick Leave Bill in New York.

Speaker Christine Quinn says that because of...

School choice has been a positive development in public education in New York, but sometimes the city's Department of Education makes the wrong choice.

This is the case in a fierce education battle in East Harlem, where a community of parents is fighting for their school's...

There are some people who perfectly embody the spirit and style of their native land. Lyndon Johnson was the quintessential Texan, Benjamin Netanyahu is a true Israeli sabra (native) and where else could Spike Lee come from but a place called Brooklyn.

And then...

One of the unheralded heroes of the first two Bloomberg mayoral terms in New York City was Dan Doctoroff, a very smart man who thinks big and had the vision to try bold ideas in economic development.

He may not have succeeded in bringing the 2012 Olympics...

In the holiday season of Christmas and New Years, most of us will reflect on the year that's about to end and begin to make resolutions for the year ahead.

2012 ended on two very tragic notes in the northeast: the devastating storm, Sandy, and the horrific massacre...

Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.

The recent history of senseless mass murder in schools -- most shockingly in Newtown, Conn. -- has reiterated three simple lessons.

First, ban assault weapons along with the high-capacity magazines that feed them....

Mahatma Gandhi once said, "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way in which its animals are treated."

By this measure, 21st century New York City is failing this basic test of humanity.

Just take a walk along Central Park...

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn just exhibited another example of her blatant misuse of power in furtherance of her own ambitions.

Quinn's Tammany Hall-style of governing has threatened our democratic electoral process for 2013. That should worry all New Yorkers as they now begin to focus on who...

The last of the old-style publishing and political power brokers in New York City left us for the great cigar bar in the sky this week.

Jerry Finkelstein, a legendary newspaper publisher and political kingmaker, was my boss and one of my mentors for 15...

When you rob five young men of their youth, innocence and educational opportunity and put them and their families through hell for more than a decade, you owe them more than an apology -- you owe them restitution.

New York City has still not settled the case being...

The recent superstorm, Sandy, has devastated large parts of our city, and while we must continue to help those neighborhoods still in need, we also must begin to figure out how we move forward to avoid this large-scale suffering again.

First of all, our power grid...

One of the main reasons we saw violent crime recede dramatically in New York in the 1990s was because the city police adopted the "broken windows" theory of policing.

This revolutionary idea, advanced first by Harvard Professor James Q. Wilson, maintained that small symbols of crime...

If I were mayor of New York today -- as I hope to be a year from now -- I would corral the Nassau and Suffolk County executives and head up to Albany to sit down with Governor Andrew Cuomo to establish a Quad Regional Feasibility Study Commission charged with...

Perhaps the most important thing that those in public life can do is to teach the next generation that honesty and playing by the rules are vitally important.

That is why corruption and dishonesty in politics is more corrosive than we realize. If our elected leaders, whose job it...

I've always believed that the sign of a truly educated person is exhibited by their ability to synthesize seemingly unrelated events and come up with a perceptive insight.

Allow me to try and add one based on recent events in New York's education system.

My alma mater, Stuyvesant High...

I have been covering New York's political world for more than a quarter century and I can count on one hand the number of people I have met who are both honest and who view politics as more public service than personal aggrandizement.

One of these few is Assemblyman...

As we know, elected leaders spin numbers and statistics when they can to make themselves look good or to advance their causes.

But some numbers tell the real truth.

There are three numbers that emerged for New York City recently that should alarm all New Yorkers: 9.9 percent...

It was a simple game of stickball in a parking lot along the beautiful waterfront of Staten Island, but in this age of vitriolic politics it represented a whole lot more.

This past Sunday I had the good fortune to play in a game of stickball, New York's oldest street...

More than four decades ago, in 1968, New York City schoolteachers went out on strike.

I was 6 years old, entering the first grade, and my immigrant parents fretted each day those first two weeks of the strike.

They were Holocaust survivors, without college educations, who came to America in...

Politics, like many professions, has for too long been an old boys club, with bad behavior tolerated and misdeeds covered up.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in Albany, New York, where for decades mistresses, sexual harassment and all-around piggish behavior have been tolerated.

Now, we may have reached...