Bloomberg's State of the City address: an administration that has run out of education ideas -- even bad ones
The education proposals in Bloomberg’s State of the City address are being described as “ambitious” in the New York Times and GothamSchools. Not surprisingly, I see it differently.
First he claimed that “By almost any measure, students are doing better and our school system is heading in the right direction.” Of course that is not the case at all. By most reliable measures, achievement has stagnated and our students are falling further behind their peers in the other large cities.
Not surprisingly, Bloomberg focused in his speech on the controversial factor of teacher “quality.” The first education proposal he mentioned in the speech is to recruit better new teachers by repaying the college loans for those who graduated in the top quartile of their class, giving them an extra $5000 per year for up to five years of teaching. I’m not sure if this means even higher subsidies for TFA’ers without proper training or certification,