Stephen Yang
“Stockholm Syndrome,” the term for the bizarre development where hostages start taking the side of the hostage-takers, came to mind the other day when Mayor Eric Adams joined with teachers-union boss Mike Mulgrew to cheer the hiring of 3,700 new teachers to “give schools the ability to create smaller classes.”
This follows years when Adams rightly opposed the outrageous United Federation of Teachers-backed state class-size law, for the excellent reason that it imposes huge costs on the city without any prospect of actually improving education.
Yet there was the mayor, Mulgrew beside him, bragging that he’s giving the already-bloated city Department of Education hundreds of millions more bucks for hiring, with more (waste) to come in the years ahead.
Enrollment in the city schools has been dropping, and this law (which applies only to the city) is the UFT’s scheme for ensuring that the ranks of city teachers (its dues-paying members) don’t also decline.
And nothing more than that: The city’s worst-performing schools already have smaller class sizes; it’s the better ones, including gems like Stuyvesant HS and Brooklyn Tech, with lots of kids crowded into classes taught by solid teachers.
And hiring warm bodies to meet the law’s mindless mandates only ensures that more kids get “taught” by “educators” who don’t know what they’re doing.
The Legislature passed this law purely to appease the UFT: If lawmakers really believed in the logic behind it, why make the mandate NYC-only?
The city already spends an insane $41.2 billion — a full third of its budget — on a school system where truancy is up and test scores have fallen to the lowest levels in 30 years; thanks to this law, it now must spend even more, to no benefit except the UFT’s.
Actually improving public education is about weeding out (or re-educating) bad teachers and closing down (or restructuring) bad schools — and, of course, about opening more good schools.
But the UFT fights tooth and nail to prevent the opening of new charter schools, whose record of success and academic excellence embarrasses the union by showing there’s a better way.
We understand why Mayor Adams opted to brag about complying with the class-size law: He has no choice but to obey; he might as well try to get some political benefit out of it.
Sadly, none of his major Democratic challengers shows much promise of standing up to the UFT, either.
But the fact remains: The “smaller classes” push is all about serving the union’s interests, not the kids’ — and pretending otherwise is playing along with the political goons.
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