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Bloomberg: I Would Cut The Number Of Teachers In Half
By
Garth Johnston
Published Dec 2, 2011
Modified Dec 2, 2011
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By
Garth Johnston
Published Dec 2, 2011
Modified Dec 2, 2011
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[Update below] Mayor Bloomberg was apparently full of interesting things to say while talking at MIT this week. Not only did he refer to the NYPD as "my own army" but he also apparently expressed a very, shall we say, interesting view on how he would fix the city's schools in a perfect world: "if I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones."
The man who once disastrously hired magazine executive Cathie Black to run the city's schools and has failed in his attempts at merit-based layoffs then went on to explain that "double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students." Of course, the response to our billionaire mayor from Boston's fantasy has been swift:
"When I heard the statement I was really shocked," Andrea Spencer, dean of the School of Education at Pace University, told CBS. "There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that half of the teachers in any system are ineffective. What there is evidence to support is the fact that larger classes really place detriments in the way of learning."
Or, as UFT president Michael Mulgrew put it, "So the mayor thinks this is a good idea, in high schools to have class size in high schools of 70 kids. Clearly the mayor has never taught."
Or maybe hizzoner is right and the best way to fix New York's truly troubled school system (which Bloomberg has been trying to do for two-and-a-half terms now) is to just fire half the teachers and stuff twice as many kids in each class. What do you think?
Update: The Mayor's office writes to chastise us for not including the full quote from Bloomberg's remarks which, they emphasize, are purely hypothetical. Plus, in this hypothetical world, he'd totally pay the remaining teachers double after he'd fired half of them. Here's the full quote:
Education is very much, I’ve always thought, just like the real estate business. Real estate business, there are three things that matter: location, location, location is the old joke. Well in education, it is: quality of teacher, quality of teacher, quality of teacher. And I would—if I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers. And double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students.
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Garth Johnston
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