Mayor is playing a dangerous game
for The Brooklyn Paper
First, the mayor said he’d have to lay off 21,000 teachers, a quarter of the city’s teachers. Then, three days later, he backtracked. He sounded almost disappointed when he said, “We’ll have to find another way” to deal with anticipated budget cuts. The next day, the governor released his budget proposal and declared, “There will be absolutely no need for layoffs.”
Gov. Cuomo is right: There is no need to lay off educators, even amidst ongoing fiscal challenges that the state faces. But for weeks and weeks Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Cathie Black have been running around telling everyone that layoffs are coming and therefore we need to abolish seniority rules that ensure layoffs happen in an impartial way.
The mayor’s real agenda has nothing to do with the necessity or lack thereof of layoffs and everything to do with City Hall’s determination to attack teachers. Instead of seeing layoffs as the disaster they would be for the city’s children and treating them as a last resort, the mayor and the chancellor have embraced them as an excuse to let principals fire whomever they want. But even