QUESTION
What are the challenges in rapidly hiring teachers for NYC schools?
1:35:18
·
3 min
The challenge in rapidly hiring teachers for NYC schools lies in the potential budget reallocations and unintended consequences.
- Hiring early is beneficial, but additional recruitment faces fiscal and spatial limitations.
- Achieving class size reduction requires more teachers, additional classrooms, or reducing student enrollment per class.
- The Department of Education is concerned about diverting funds from flexible budget items, like contracts for excellence funding, towards hiring.
- Such reallocation could limit funding for other programs, such as multilingual learner initiatives.
- The strategic approach aims to avoid hastily imposing decisions that could lead to unintentional negative impacts on educational programs.
Shekar Krishnan
1:35:18
Now, what about just thematically?
1:35:20
Like, if you if the longer you wait to hire teachers, isn't gonna get harder and harder to get the thousands of teachers that are needed?
1:35:27
How I mean, the longer we wait to roll this out, the longer it will the more difficult it will be.
Dan Weisberg
1:35:35
So it's always good policy to hire sooner rather than later and to hire early in year, early in the spring versus in the summer and so forth.
1:35:41
So, yes, the premise of your question is absolutely correct.
1:35:44
You wanna hire early.
1:35:46
Let me let me be clear because I I wanna I wanna address this.
1:35:49
You're raising something which I think is is is important.
1:35:51
We're hearing a lot of from various stakeholders got you know, why aren't you guys?
1:35:56
We we hear you that you're at 20% this year.
1:35:59
You'll be at about 40% next year.
1:36:01
Why aren't you rushing to just implement anyway, you know, ahead of schedule essentially.
1:36:06
Why can't you get to 60% next year, for example?
1:36:10
The the issue is I go back to how you can reduce class size.
1:36:15
You can hire more teachers if you have the space.
1:36:18
You can build more classrooms if you have the funding to do that.
1:36:22
Or you can limit.
1:36:24
You can reduce the number of kids in in a school that that is above the the the cap.
1:36:29
All of those things are gonna be difficult and painful to do in different ways, particularly if we don't have additional funding from the state in order to support this.
1:36:40
So the reason we wouldn't rush headlong to do the to hire why not hire 5000 tea extra teachers next year?
1:36:48
That'd be great.
1:36:49
It would be.
1:36:49
If we had 5000 extra teachers, Doctor Kirkland could do amazing things with that.
1:36:54
The question is, we would have to be moving money from somewhere else.
1:36:57
And let me give you a very tangible example, which council member I know you'll appreciate.
1:37:01
Among the things that Emma and her team are looking at, and she mentioned this in her testimony for next year, there's a certain category of funding that goes to school, of course, contracts for excellence funding.
1:37:14
That it is relatively flexible funding and principles use that for various purposes.
1:37:19
They use it for, you know, PD to to increase teacher quality.
1:37:23
They use it for other programming.
1:37:26
Multilingual learners is one of the sources of funding, which we agree is not enough, but it's one one of the measures we could do even for next year when we're gonna be, you know, relatively close to to the 40%, is to say to principals and superintendents, you're no longer able to spend that money on other things.
1:37:44
You must spend that money on hiring additional teachers for class size reduction.
1:37:49
Now again, is that a bad thing?
1:37:51
Maybe not in a particular school, but what it means is we're saying the principles, you may think that the best use of money is for a multilingual learner program, you can't do that anymore.
1:38:02
We're telling you from tweet top down that you must spend this money in particular way.
1:38:07
Why are we rushing headlong to do that?
1:38:09
Because we know that's gonna produce some unintended consequence.
1:38:12
We'll get to the 4 it'll get us to the 40%.
1:38:15
But it's gonna override the judgment of the people we want making those judgments, which is Doctor Kirkland and his principals and their teams, the SLTs, and and so forth.
Shekar Krishnan
1:38:25
So understanding that too and appreciate that context.