Sunday, October 05, 2008

The DOE's "Education On The Cheap" Just Results In Hurting The Students


Tweed continues to starve the classrooms with their budget cuts while spending ungodly sums of money for highly-paid consultants, non-education managers, and programs that are best sent to the junk heap. Even before the 7.5% additional budget cuts have been determined by Tweed, the New York City Public Schools already suffer from tight budgets, inexperienced teachers, limited parental involvement, and large class sizes.

Under Kleinberg, the New York City Public Schools have the largest class sizes in New York State, an over reliance of inexperienced newbie teachers due to the "fair student funding" formula that penalizes principals if they hire experienced teachers, and a "one-size-fits-all" learning program that should be sent to the junk heap. Yet Tweed's media puppets see no wrong with this deteriorating system of educational neglect where more and more experienced teachers are leaving the system, only to be replaced by poorly-trained newbie teacher wanna-bees but most never will achieve the status of being a quality teacher. They even ignore the declining SAT scores and flat NAEP results and trumpet the bogus State test scores that everybody knows have been dumbed-down.

Tweed has manufactured the ATR crises and the overcrowded "rubber rooms", most of them over 40 years of age,which has resulted in 2,200 teachers not in the classroom or a waste of $123 million dollars for this school year. Instead of having a hiring freeze to place these experienced teachers in the classroom, the ATR crises is expected to get worse as Kleinberg will not agree to this reasonable cost-cutting measure that would help the students. Further, the DOE has already reneged on reviewing the charges that land teachers in the "rubber room". My previous post mentioned the study done in one of these "rubber rooms" and the dismal results.

Tweed's "education on the cheap" program continues as the goal of the Kleinberg administration is to fire their way to a successful school district, which of course results in the opposite effect. Lower standards, poor morale, and even manipulation of statistics. The final product is that "children last" will continue until the Kleinberg administration is removed.

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