This week’s lesson plan is on great numbers, class — we’re getting 3,700 more teachers!
But has anyone done the math?
In truth, this lesson is not about learning, students, budgets or results — it’s about union power.
And it’s about more — more teachers providing more bad instruction in more classrooms to more kids, more of the same.
Mayor Adams announced on Wednesday that the New York City Department of Education — the state’s largest single employer, with 76,000 teachers — will hire an additional 3,700 teachers and 100 assistant principals.
That’s just for starters. The initial hiring is merely a down payment toward a planned total increase of 17,700 teachers, costing about $1.9 billion annually — which Adams has said for years would be too costly.
This extravagant increase is mandated by the controversial maximum class size law that the state legislature passed and Gov. Hochul signed, ignoring parents’ protests and the DOE’s appalling record — all to pander to the teachers’ union.
What could possibly go wrong with this intoxicated hiring spree?
Especially when city and state fiscal problems loom, federal funding cuts are expected, and student population is declining.
Not to mention the national shortage of qualified teachers that’s making states everywhere dumb down requirements to fill vacancies — what could go wrong with increasing NYC’s teacher ranks by a whopping 23%?
Getting new teachers should be easy, as long as quality doesn’t matter.
After all, the median New York City teacher salary is over $100,000, before adding generous benefits, vacations, pensions and tenure after four years — plus, no penalty whatsoever if kids don’t learn. (Assistant principals get more, as does the Chancellor, the highest-paid city employee.)
But if Adams wants good teachers, he’ll have a big problem finding them.
Experienced teachers are quitting the city schools, and qualified candidates are going elsewhere, as widespread left-extremist indoctrination inflames hate in schools, left-infused pedagogies set back real academics, and “equity-driven” discipline policies give teachers unmanageable classrooms.
Let’s do some math — no easy task in a city whose public schools are leaving most children behind (about two-thirds to three-quarters of our kids are unable to read and do math at grade level).
Given 912,000 students, 144,000 total staff and 76,000 current teachers (before the new hiring kicks in), calculate the ratios of students to staff (without accounting for likely decreases in enrollment); showing work is optional.
Solution: ratios of approximately 12:1 students to existing faculty, 10:1 students to projected total faculty, and 6:1 students to staff.
Pretty ideal ratios already: one faculty member for every 12 students, and one staffer for every six!
Supporters of the class-size law, particularly the teachers’ unions, claim smaller sizes improve learning. But evidence doesn’t support that — and certainly doesn’t justify this exorbitant expense.
Research shows that quality of teachers trumps quantity of teachers for learning, by far.
And here in the city, many of our best schools have larger, not smaller, class sizes — which stands to reason: as families leave bad schools, making classes there smaller, they choose better schools, making classes there larger.
Poorer districts in the city actually already have smaller class sizes, and gain little from them. Reducing their class sizes further will have zero impact.
The city would do better by adding more highly desired charter schools.
Most of them don’t use union teachers and aren’t affected by the new smaller-class-size rules. Yet they outperform most district schools, at nearly $20,000 less per student while they’re at it. They do so by concentrating on the fundamentals, requiring results from students and teachers, and adhering to strict discipline — all things New York’s public schools don’t.
The NYC school system’s budget is an outrageous $41 billion — that’s a world-beating nearly $45,000 per student — for doing a scandalously awful job.
Instead of pouring water into a sieve, spending billions more to beef up the ranks of a perpetually failing system, we should advance school choice and teacher excellence for real improvement.
This hiring spree needs a redo. And this lesson plan gets an F.
Wai Wah Chin is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.