Educators4NYCEducator Policy Statement

As you know, Mayor Bloomberg has announced his plans to reduce the teaching force by 12%. Many people are saying, oh, this means higher class sizes, and will thus be a disaster. Others are saying it's incredibly stupid to cut teachers while sitting on what is now a 3.2 billion dollar surplus.

We at Educators4NYC Educator choose not to wallow in negativity, but rather to seek new reforms. For example, Mayor Bloomberg will be saving over 300 million by laying off thousands of teachers. We see this as an opportunity for innovation. NYC is a city of innovation. For example, we're now not only using value-added methods, but fighting to make the results public, despite the fact that the actual results can be worse than meaningless.

We've also created a merit pay program that failed to substantively improve anything. We've devoted a lot of time and money to this plan, and as reformers, the important thing is that we tried. And, of course, there were the incredible test score gains that proved to be nothing but an illusion.

What's the point? The point, of course, is that it's daring and noble for NYC to fearlessly try new things. That's why we at Educators4NYCEducator are now upping the stakes. We'd like Mayor Bloomberg to take a mere 100 million of the savings and donate it to the Educators4NYCEducator Foundation. Our numbers have increased considerably since last week, with 4 or 5 commenters agreeing to sign our pledge and grab a share of the loot promise to uphold our guiding principles. Will this be an improvement to education? Who knows? But it's been amply demonstrated that Tweed will pretty much try anything, and that evidence whether or not it would succeed was neither here nor there.

So please sign up in the comments section. As soon as Mayor Bloomberg signs off on our proposal, Miss Eyre and I will be sending your checks. And don't worry about follow up--Miss Eyre and I both pledge to stop going to work once we get the money an agreement from Tweed so that we can devote ourselves full time to shameless self-promotion the principles that guide us all. And please tell your friends we'd like to buy them off encourage their participation in our noble quest!

And don't forget, we need to keep pressure on the union to poll members on whether or not they'd like the city to give us 100 million bucks. It's always good to have a scapegoat principled argument with which to win over the public!