Wow, that's a lot of money. And Mayor Bloomberg is sending it to 50 low-performing middle schools. That's 100,000 per school, enough to hire two new teachers for each (as long as you keep them only one year).
He acted as the City Council released a report detailing problems in the city’s middle schools, including teacher retention difficulties and large class sizes, and issued a number of recommendations to address them. The council report noted that the percentage of eighth graders who perform at grade level is just 45.6 in math and just 41.8 percent in reading. Those were sharp drops from elementary school.
So Mayor Bloomberg appeared with a number of important city officials to report this incentive, including UFT President Randi Weingarten. There will be more advanced-level courses in these schools, as many as 100K each can buy, I suppose.
But the mayor shied away from adopting the most far-ranging changes recommended in the reports, like significantly reducing class sizes, creating a special middle school academy to train teachers about early adolescence, and removing police officers from city schools to create a more welcoming atmosphere.
Unfortunately, you can't significantly reduce class size at that price. And sadly, price is everything in Mayor Bloomberg's New York.
5 million bucks buys a lot of PR, though. While it goes a long way to sustain politicians, it will do far less for NYC's 1.1 million schoolkids. Had Mayor Bloomberg really wished to revolutionize education in this city, he wouldn't have reduced the CFE award by three-fourths through his monumental intransigence.
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