Mayor Bloomberg: I Would Cut The Number Of Teachers In Half

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 to just design the system and say ex cathedra this is what we’re going to do you would cut the number of teachers in half and 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.”

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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