Educating for Democracy: Mayor Bloomberg's Market Solutions
In a recent speech, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg advanced the following solution to the problems of public education. It reveals, once more, how far from "getting it" public officials are in understanding what education is all about.According to the mayor:
"Education is very much, I've always thought, just like the 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."
If he followed the analogy that education is "just like the real estate business," then the mayor