Oftentimes I actually end up agreeing with a lot of what Mayor Bloomberg wants for New York City, but the problem is the practicality of applying his wishes to an entire city. For example, his wish to ban extra large soft drinks is clearly something he wishes could be on a case by case basis. I’ll wager that he only has a problem with people who have no self control over how much they drink and are already in poor physical shape. But of course, there are too many people and it would be ridiculous and anti-American to regulate each person’s rights individually. Still, he strives for perfection in a city that is as full of variety as they come.
So, when reading his many opinions on the education system, he seemed to definitely have a goal of perfection to strive for. But is it possible? To this day, I mostly believe that every teacher who doesn’t teach well should be laid off, because it’s only fair that a developing child should get the best education. But I recognize there are problems in mine and Bloomberg’s similar “no nonsense” approach to picking teachers. A) It does not allow room for teacher improvement. A first-year teacher obviously won’t be perfect, but with time and practice they can become outstanding. Firing a teacher who happens to be imperfect because he/she is a newbie isn’t fair. B) If teaching became such a cutthroat, competitive field, less people would be interested in teaching at all, and that leads to crises as the one that occurred in the late 1970’s, when after the staff cuts, getting teachers to come back, or be interested at all, became a challenge. So we can’t scare off potential teachers, unless enough of them are willing to rise to the challenge of being a teacher amid such competition.
I am all for rooting out the bad teachers so the best remain, as cold and mean as that sounds. But the fact that class sizes would have to be doubled to accommodate the small number of truly outstanding teachers is unhealthy for both students and educators. And it says something about how many truly talented teachers there are in the field of education. If so many would be laid off for being inadequate, maybe we should reevaluate how to make our teachers good from the start. Maybe there should be stricter rules about when one can be a teacher? I say absolutely not to 40-kid classrooms, especially in the critical years of elementary education. I speak from experience: I reap the benefits of a small music theory class in college today. I know I would be in trouble if my class was more than 20 kids. In smaller classrooms, there is less chaos, the students are more respectful of each other and the teacher (it is too intimate to cause trouble in a small class), and less time is needed to teach the same amount of material. There’s an idea! Teachers can teach several small classes that take up less time in the day. It sounds radical, but I would be open to letting my own kid learn in that environment.
I heard a brilliant quote from a comedian recently, but I don’t remember who said it or exactly what it was. But it was something about how education literally keeps the world going– science, math, and technology smarts keep us safe in the world today- so cutting education funding is also cutting up life as we know it. The comedian went on to say that education should be what receives the most funding in the country. And the more I think about it, the more I agree! If being educated is all about finding solutions to problems and making life easier and the world a better place, education should be funded first! The greatness of human accomplishment will soon follow. That’s why it’s sad that there has to be a debate at all about which teachers should be cut – not promoted, or praised, or anything positive, but cut- and which parts of the education system will be funded, and which ones will be ignored. Fund education first. Teach them math and science and the arts, and teach them how to be decent human beings.
