Is this the beginning of the end? Or of the beginning?

Peter Meyer / January 28, 2011

Reuters is reporting that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is set to lay off 15,000 teachers in New York City in anticipation of State deficit crunches.

Fifteen thousand teachers!? That is probably more teachers than employed in some of our states.

Granted, this is?only two twenty percent* of the 75,000 teacher workforce in Gotham's one-million student system, but the raw numbers are awe-inspiring. Fifteen thousand teachers laid off!? That's a whole city's worth of unemployed teachers.? I can see the tents now. ?Teachervilles?

The number came from a local?radio interview the Mayor gave.

The scuttlebutt is ? I don't know if it's true or not ? is that the education budget will be cut statewide and New York City's share of that would be a $1 billion cut.

One billion dollars. That's another awe-inspiring number. ?More than some country's GDP, I'm sure.

Much of this, of course, is posturing, with the Mayor painting as unrosy a picture as possible in order to win sympathy for schools in advance of the state's budget negotiations.

Okay, go for it Mayor Mike.? But still, 15,000 teachers? ?Does 10,000 sound better?? Five?

Is the Coney Island rollercoaster still working?

?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow

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*Thanks to an astute reader, I have corrected my decimal point error!

» Continued

Is this the beginning of the end? Or of the beginning?