I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor. - Chris Christie, "An Open Letter to the Teachers of NJ" October, 2009

Thursday, December 1, 2011

America's Worst Mayor

Oh, dear:
Some New Yorkers may have wondered what Mayor Michael Bloomberg was smoking when he proclaimed he has his "own army” and admitted he "smoked up" in college during an unscripted speech at MIT Tuesday.
During that speech, Bloomberg let down his guard on a wide range of topics – including his own drug and alcohol use in the 1960s.
“I don’t know where you went to school, but we were too smoked up and drunk to carry a gun,” Bloomberg said, after describing a conversation with an Oklahoma lawmaker about legislation banning guns on college campuses.
The “smoked up” comment came after Bloomberg described how powerful his job is.
“Where else would I run an organization with 330,000 employees? I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh-biggest army in the world,” Bloomberg said.
"My own army." I wonder how the brave men and women who risk their lives every day to protect the people and property of the greatest city on the world feel about being referred to as Mayor Mike's own private militia.

Of course, Mayor Mike can't be blamed for his youthful indiscretions; it's clearly the fault of his teachers! If only we had a system in place back when Mayor Mike was toking up and doing beer bongs that based teacher pay on Mayor Mike's performance on standardized tests. Yeah, that would have been just so great...

But Mayor Mike's biggest bombs had to be dropped on teachers:
But the mayor's below the Beltway shots weren't reserved for just Washington — he also slapped the dunce cap on the country's teachers. 
“We don’t hire the people who are at the top of their class anymore," he told the audience at the elite Massachusetts school. 
“In America, they come from the bottom 20 percent and not of the best schools."
Hey, way to pump up the NYC teacher corps, Mike! And it's so practical to think the teachers of America are all going to come from top-50 colleges when we have over 3 million teachers in this country.

Wait - Mayor Mike knows how to solve that problem!
In a perfect world, he said he would cut the number of teachers in half and double their compensation, in an effort to improve the quality of instruction. 
“Double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students,” he said, adding that teachers unions' pushes for smaller classes around the country have driven down salaries.
Bull. What's driven down salaries is historically low taxation for the insanely wealthy like... Mayor Mike!

But I'm sure the best and the brightest at MIT, where Mayor Mike was speaking, are enthralled at the thought of teaching 40 kindergarteners for $78,000 - twice the average starting salary of a teacher. Yes, 40 five year olds, crammed in a class with an Ivy League poli-sci major - but the money is so awesome! What could go wrong? I'm sure there are more than enough of these creme de la creme undergrads ready to sign on to teach in these conditions in Camden and Detroit and South Central and the Bronx and...

Did I ever mention on this blog that people like Mayor Mike are clowns without the slightest idea of what the hell they are talking about? That they can't even do their own jobs, yet they tell teachers in the nastiest of tones how to do theirs?

I did? Good.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you Jersey Jazzman for all your work and efforts to get the truth out. Bloomberg is an arrogant putz so full of himself that it's beyond ridiculous. In his first term, when there was a transit strike, he used especially vicious, inflammatory and demeaning language to attack the striking transit workers, it was really overkill on his part. Then, a few years later, when all those building cranes were collapsing in NYC, killing people and demolishing buildings, Bloomberg was very blase and dismissive of the whole catastrophe. In so many words, he said that the crane operators knew what they were getting into when they signed on for their jobs, they knew how dangerous the job was, so tough luck. Huh? It wasn't just crane operators who were killed, it was also ordinary citizens. Buildings and businesses were destroyed by those crane collapses but Bloomberg tried to gloss over and minimize the tragedies since they were a bad reflection on his administration ( lack of oversight, proper regulation and enforcement of building crane operations).

czarejs said...

Forget 40 5 year olds.....40 9th graders or even 40 12th graders would just not be possible.

Ms. Serdy said...

I suppose they could make all the classrooms larger and turn the HS rooms into auditoriums to hold all those large bodies. Then they can experience impersonal and detached teaching in preparation for their first college seminar! Of course this construction would be necessary to bring the rooms up to fire code, most rooms by law only allow 26 people.

Duke said...

It's all so stupid. Another fool who gets to talk about schools simply because he's wealthy.

Thanks everyone.