Layoffs of 4,000 teachers a better choice than minor increase in tax rate for wealthier New Yorkers?

Other city officials have spoken out against the layoffs as well, including City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Comptroller John Liu, and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.

However, when Remapping Debate contacted these officials to ask whether they thought a small tax increase on high-income households would be preferable to teacher layoffs, Quinn’s spokesperson declined to comment, stating that the Speaker “would not negotiate the budget in the media”; Liu’s spokesperson said that the Comptroller was “still reviewing the budget” and had no comment; and de Blasio’s spokesperson did not provide a response.

While criticisms generally focused on the direct consequences that firing teachers will have on the city’s children, others pointed to how potentially wasteful the decision could be from an investment point of view.

“If you spend millions of dollars to recruit teachers, and then you spend millions of dollars to train them to do the things you need them to do, and then you go on to fire them — then you’ve lost all that money,” O’Donnell said.

Cynthia Cho, a spokesperson for Teach For America, which provides the city with hundreds of teachers to fill slots at low-income schools, said that the program invests a substantial amount of time and money training new teachers, including an especially intensive five-week summer training program. If those teachers in New York City schools were laid off, and if the program could not find spots for them in other districts, that time and money would be wasted.

“It’s a very bad business model,” O’Donnell added. “The city has spent this money to train them, and now they have to take those skills and go elsewhere.”

For a Mayor who prides himself on making good “business” decisions, Parrott said, this seems like a strikingly bad one. In addition to the investment in training and recruitment that would be wasted, the Mayor’s decision is “creating fear and uncertainty where it need not be created, where the city has other options,” he went on.

“The Mayor’s decision has made it more difficult for the city to recruit talented new teachers in the future, because why would anyone want to make themselves part of a game of political football,” Parrott added.