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People with an interest in the city’s school system are beginning to throw their support behind prospective candidates for the 2013 mayoral race, according to Friday’s campaign finance filings.

Campaign finance filings released on Friday showed that two top officials with Democrats for Education Reform, a major education lobbying group, donated exclusively to Scott Stringer, who defeated charter school operator Eva Moskowitz in the 2009 Manhattan Borough President primary with support from the city teachers union.

Joe Williams, executive director of DFER, gave a total of $1,500 to the Stringer campaign in two different donations. Elizabeth Ling, DFER’s New York State political director, gave $150, according to the filings. Stringer was the only candidate to whom Williams and Ling donated.

Ling, who serves on the board of one of Moskowitz’s Success Charter schools, said it was too early for DFER to endorse anyone just yet and that the group is “continuing to build relationships at all levels.” (more…)

The most recent entrant to the 2013 mayoral race is a media publishing executive with no prior experience in government and a promise to run as an independent, business-minded pragmatist on a strong education platform.

But Tom Allon is no circa-2011 Michael Bloomberg, who was similarly green to politics when he became mayor in 2002. Instead, Allon, who operates a network of local newspapers that include politics-heavy City Hall and The Capital, is more of a community media mogul and his education proposals are more of a reaction — for better or worse — to the last nine years of Bloomberg’s leadership.

In an hour-long conversation at his small, cluttered corner office at Manhattan Media, Allon detailed his still-evolving education platform.

“I think Mayor Bloomberg has been an outstanding game-changer in education,” he said. “In the same way that Rudy Giuliani made this a safer city, I think that this mayor has pushed the needle dramatically and made education a priority. And for that he should be applauded.”

Winning mayoral control, lifting the charter school cap, and hiring Joel Klein to lead the city’s school system were among Bloomberg’s best accomplishments, in Allon’s opinion. Maintaining these policies, he said, are crucial to carrying that momentum into the next administration.

“You can’t neglect something and have it wither for 50, 70 years, which is what our public education system has done, and then expect that one man in 10 or 12 years is going to correct all those ills,” Allon said.