Right, because what our failing education system needs is less teachers. Bloomberg wants to “weed out the bad ones,” with no intention of replacing them. 

Here are problems:

1. My guess is the motivation behind this is to cut money from education to allocate to other departments. But, you would spend more money rebuilding every school in all five boroughs to accommodate 50-student classrooms than you would save by employing 50% less teachers.
2. The turnaround for teachers would be so great that you’d never hold on to teachers, because teachers have way less incentive to continue teaching.
3. Are you an idiot? Who does this help? Are you that stupid that you really don’t think it’s important for students to get a good education? And on top of that, you think there is any possible way for anyone to get a good education with 49 other students in their class? The most a teacher could even hope to accomplish would be to keep the peace, which even that would be unreasonable. There wouldn’t be any time at all to actually teach.

Here’s what we actually need to do:

• Eliminate tenure. Or at least, tenure as it is now. Make it harder to achieve tenure, and create a system in which tenure is reevaluated every few years. That way, teachers are more inclined to continue working hard, and actually have incentive to do their jobs well. 
• Instead of the new Core Curriculum (a ridiculous national standard, as if every district in every state should be teaching exactly the same way on the same timeline) and its new evaluation tactics, which make it nearly impossible for a teacher to score “excelling,” thereby putting their job in jeopardy if they are a new teacher, we need to provide support for new teachers. Don’t just evaluate them and tell them to change, help them. Provide guidance and support.

It’s so painful to live in a society where only a marginal portion of our government spending goes toward education. Where the main focus of what’s left of the failing school system is to feed information in without any concern as to whether or not students understand or even retain what they’re being taught. There’s an unbalanced emphasis on the subjects, history and social studies have basically become obsolete, art and English and languages have been given up on, and math and science are the only things that are pushed anymore. This is education. Education. I can’t even put into words why this is important. I shouldn’t have to. It shouldn’t even be an argument, it’s education. How is this not a given? Why isn’t this more important to people?