Breaking Up All-Star Faculties In NYC

Even though he's only controlled the school system for four years, NYC Mayor Bloomberg keeps rolling out the changes -- the most notable of the latest (Bloomberg Seeks Further Changes) include dismantling his "regional" superintendents structure to go to a more local, distributed model and making an effort to weight student funding so that any discrepancies in how much money each school gets per child are based on educational needs (special ed, low-income, ELL) not faculty salaries.

It's interesting to see the echoes here of mid of Chicago in the late 1990s, where Mayor Daley and Paul Vallas tried to do too much, too fast in the first years after their schools takeover. It's also important to highlight the resistance that will come when Bloomberg starts breaking up the all-star faculties at more affluent schools -- to "break the lock that many schools in middle-class neighborhoods have had on highly paid veteran teachers," according to David Herszenhorn (Big Risks for the Mayor).