Mayor Bloomberg's Real Plan Is To Fire The Experienced Teachers The DOE Does Not Want Or Like & Replace Them With "Newbie Teachers".

Defenders of Mayor Bloomberg's plan to layoff teachers based upon a DOE list of teachers they wanted fired but failed in that attempt were very disappointed when Governor Andrew Cuomo and The Assembly put and end to the Mayor's attack on "last in, first out" (LIFO). The defenders of the Bloomberg Bill cast it as reform but what it really is far more sinister.

The Bloomberg Bill does not simply layoff experienced teachers based upon some nebulous and subjective criteria but includes this seemingly innocuous language below:

"When schools remove positions for any reason, absent a citywide layoff condition, the sole basis for such decisions will not be employee length of service."

If you carefully read into this statement you will realize that if implemented, it would allow the Mayor and Chancellor the right to fire whatever teacher they pleased and even if there was no financial emergency for teacher layoffs, they can still fire the teachers they don't want or like and hire "newbie teachers". For example School "X" is scheduled to lose 3 teaching positions. All of the three were selected by Tweed for firing based upon the theirs and the Principal's recommendation (salary, ageism, discrimination, favoritism, etc). The three experienced teachers are laid off as of June 28, 2011. During the summer the City quietly tells the Principal that the three positions have been returned to the school and that she can hire whomever she wants. Knowing that she is constrained by the Tweed imposed "fair student funding" formula she hires three "newbie teachers" rather than rehire the experienced teachers she let go. As for the three experienced teachers? They are effectively fired! Worse, once the above statement is implemented, the Mayor and Chancellor could use it year after year to get rid of experienced teachers.

Bloomberg's bill is simply an end run around the unions collective bargaining rights and New York State's Civil Service Law. Most interesting about Mayor Bloomberg's attack on teachers is that he wants to eliminate 4,666 teachers while only proposing to layoff 823 other City employees. That is 85% of the total layoffs. Furthermore, he only assumes 1,500 teachers leaving the system when the average in the last two years averaged 2,500. While the low balling? The answer is very simple. He can still fire the 4,666 teachers and save even more money (and sharply increase class size) and let Tweed do with the windfall as they see fit, like hiring more consultants or non-educators that have no direct application to the classroom and the children.

It is a pity that the general public cannot see through what Mayor Bloomberg is doing to destroy the NYC Public School System but as as long as he has the News media in his back pocket, we must depend on our union and the allies in the New York State Assembly to protect our "due process rights" Because nobody else will.