Mayor Bloomberg and the Department of Education have been talking constantly about the department's budget of late, insisting that they must end the "Last In, First Out" rule (perhaps you've noticed the ads occasionally running on Gothamist?) and putting out scary budget projection after scary budget projection in which they say that unless they get more aid they will have to do things like fire six percent of the city's teachers. So isn't it a little odd that the department is planning to spend more than half-a-billion dollars on technology improvements next year while simultaneously cutting $1.3 billion from its construction budget for the next three years?

As Manhattan Beep Scot Stringer wrote to Cathy Black last week, the numbers being bandied about by the DOE are “particularly large in the context of a fiscal crisis which the mayor reports is so dire that he may eliminate some 6,000 teaching positions.”

Now, to be fair, the state capital that is behind much of the technology funding is specifically not to be used for teachers salaries. But it can use those funds for construction costs. And considering the department has announced plans to cut its construction budget from $2 billion over the next three years to $642 million you'd think they could use the cash. Remember, the city is already lined up to spend $708 million just changing the lights in city schools over the next decade! Not to mention the fact that 3,200 children were put on wait lists for kindergarten this year.

So what is the DOE planning on using that tech money for exactly? Didn't they already put a computer in every classroom? Bandwidth, baby! Now that more and more schools are actually starting to use the computers and smart boards and whatnot that they've been installing over the years they are increasingly finding that their networks can't keep up. And that's not all. Other tech projects in the works include something called iLearn NYC (a $50 million online course management project) and expanding a program called the Innovation Zone, or iZone, in which the department has been testing out tech-intensive teaching methods in 80 schools. The mayor's office wants the program to be expanded to 400 schools by the end of Bloomberg's third term.

Now we recognize that being technologically up-to-date is important for children (or at least is important for their parents), but in our minds no technology matters as much as having a good teacher and a school for them to teach in.