Andrew Wolf describes the latest nonsense as school starts in New York City:
A fetish was made about the delivery of books and materials for the first day of classes. “For too many years,” said the mayor, “we heard stories about books not being in classrooms in time for the first day of school. I am proud to say that we made good on our promise in January, and here they are, ready for Monday’s classes.” Yes, most books and materials were delivered on time. But most of these were books for classroom libraries to encourage independent reading–nice to have in place the first day of school, but hardly the centerpiece of the first couple of week’s classroom activity.
The cost of this new efficiency, however, was that scores of back-office people who normally processed new employees were dispatched to the schools to count the books and make sure they were distributed to classrooms. Because of this diversion of resources, 5,000 new teachers didn’t get their first regular paychecks this past Monday, 10 times the number than were similarly inconvenienced last year. New teacher retention is one of the key problems in schools across the nation, particularly here in New York City; one quarter of this year’s crop can be expected to leave by next September.This won’t help. [NY Sun]