Tag: teachers

Doomsday or is it Real. Cutting 21,000 Teachers

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Formats for political debates must change.

The state has a 10 billion dollar budget gap, and as a result, Mayor Bloomberg just on Friday laid out a doomsday scenario where he says the city may be forced to slash 21,000 teaching positions.

It needs to be repeated, 21,000 teaching positions. We are talking about people that educate our children. People that are the only role models for many kids.

What did we get from that one general election debate, answers on how to deal with this fiscal mess. No, comic relief of “the rent is too damn high.”

NYC Public School Spending: Way Up Compared With The U.S.

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In a prior post, I showed how far New York City lagged beyond the rest of New York State in public school spending in FY 2005, with a conservative cost of living adjustment applied to Downstate expenditures. Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau for Fiscal Years (FY) 1997 and 2004, however, we find that inflation-adjusted per-student current expenditures for the city’s schools increased 46.7% from the former year to the latter. And whereas the city’s per child current spending was 2.3% below the national average in FY1997, it was 19.2% above average in FY2004. The spreadsheet is attached, and I'd rather have you download that than read the rest of this post. Once you have, to compare your explanations to mine, my overview of the breakdown by type of spending follows.