Maybe the mayor should be sent to summer school for math.
Mayor Bill de Blasio used faulty arithmetic during his much-hyped 100-days-in-office speech last week, declaring that 43 percent of “mid-career” teachers “resigned” from the city public-school system last year — when the actual percentage was in the single digits, sources said.
In his speech, the mayor highlighted the need to retain current teachers.
“We know that the best way to build on what we’ve already started is to continue to bring in the highest-quality teachers. It’s not enough to just recruit them. It’s not enough to just sign them up for a year. We have to keep them,” de Blasio said.
“And in this area, sadly, the city of New York’s been going backwards in recent years. In 2008, only 15 percent of mid-career teachers resigned. By 2013, five years later, that number had tripled to 43 percent. Devoted, capable teachers leaving the profession or leaving the work of our schools for other school systems. We have to turn that around.”
But that’s not true, education advocates said, noting that having that many veteran teachers leaving in one year would destabilize the schools, sources said.
Even the teachers union said only 6.4 percent of educators left the system last year. Only about 3 percent of mid-career vets retired or quit.
“The data the mayor is referring to is mistaken. That’s not a data point I’ve ever seen,” said Dan Weisberg, head of the New Teacher Project and former labor director of public schools for the Bloomberg administration.
So, how did that whopper of a fib get into the mayor’s address?
Here’s one explanation.
The United Federation of Teachers — which is currently negotiating with the de Blasio administration for a new contract — issued an analysis in January on the teacher-retention rate titled “Hiring Picks Up, But More Veterans Quit.”
But the UFT study said a total of 5,358 out of 84,000 educators — including teachers, guidance counselors, school psychologists and social workers — left the public school system during the 2012-13 school year.
That’s an exodus rate of 6.4 percent of the education work force, the union study based on city data said.
But what the UFT report did was provide a breakdown of the small universe of those who “resigned” over the past five years — excluding other reasons for departures, such as retirements or terminations.
Last year, there were a total of 2,130 resignations of educators out of 84,000. That’s an exodus rate of just 2.5 percent.
Of that small total, 907 — or 43 percent — were mid-career educators with six to 15 years of experience. That’s up from the 496 mid-career vets who resigned in 2008, or 15 percent of the quitters.
A de Blasio spokesman defended the mayor’s remarks without addressing criticism of his numbers.
“As the mayor said,” City Hall spokesman Wiley Norvell said, “when nearly half the people leaving our school system are among the most experienced teachers, we have a real problem to address.”