Following some video hijinks involving Ed Koch and turtle-esque jiggling, Mayor Bloomberg got down to business delivering his 11th annual "State Of The City" speech in the Bronx today. Besides serving as a kind of summary of his achievements in office as well as a glimpse at what he'd like his legacy to be, Bloomberg's speech most notably touched on a plan to shake up the school system by offering monetary incentives to high-performing teachers while booting the worst ones: "We need to be able to identify those ineffective teachers and give them the support they need to grow," he said. "And if that doesn’t work, we need to be able to move them out."
The mayor said he plans to give all city teachers who are rated as “highly effective” two years in a row a $20,000 boost, in an effort to retain the best teachers. He also proposed paying college graduates in the “top tier” up to $25,000 toward their student loans: “The burden of paying back college loans can sometimes lead top-level students to cross teaching off their list of possible careers. But we need their talents in our classrooms,” the mayor told attendees at the speech, held at the Morris High School campus.
This new plan lines up pretty closely with contentious statements the mayor had made in December: "If I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones." He later explained his major point was that spending money to keep talented teachers was worth it.
The mayor has been locked in a fight with the United Federation of Teachers over the new teacher evaluation system, a fight which put nearly $60 million in federal funding at risk. But he believes the city can keep the funds by forming school-based committees to judge teachers in those under-performing schools on merit. The committees could choose to replace up to half of the schools’ faculties if they wish, he said.
Among his other announcements: Bloomberg supports Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's push to boost the state’s minimum wage. He proposed plans to bring more affordable housing to the Lower East Side through new development near Delancey Street. He plans a new package of incentives to attract film and digital media companies to Grand Central Terminal area. He also promised to add more protected bike lanes, step up traffic enforcement, and enact the bike share program this summer.
