The United Federation of Teachers and a coalition of puppet groups and related hangers-on sued the city Department of Education last week, charging rampant classroom overcrowding.
On the merits, it’s an odd allegation against an organization that employs roughly one teacher for every 13 pupils.
But it does compute in the sense that the UFT considers the system first and foremost to be a jobs program — and regularly acts that way.
The suit charges that $760 million in state funds DOE received in the last three school years as part of the lengthy Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit failed to reduce class size in the way the city was obligated to.
The claim is nonsense on stilts.
For one, class-size reduction was one of six different programs for which CFE money was targeted.
Secondly, reaching the reduction targets would’ve required that the city get far more in state aid earmarked for that specific purpose than it got in any of the past three years. (In case nobody at the UFT has noticed, there’s a pretty severe recession on.)
Thus, Mayor Bloomberg was forced to impose 5 percent cuts at DOE.
But did class size rise because of that?
No.
And, despite the cuts, did the city lay off one teacher?
No, again.
So how do the UFT and its new president, Michael Mulgrew, reward the city’s painstaking efforts to hold classroom quality harmless?
With a thumb in the mayor’s eye.
Now, we appreciate that there’s a new leadership team at the UFT — thus the need to establish tough-guy bona fides vis-à -vis City Hall.
And we also understand that those same new leaders are experiencing some rank-and-file blowback for having failed to support Democratic mayoral candidate Bill Thompson last fall — another reason to snipe at Bloomberg.
But it really is disgraceful.
The city is basically broke, the UFT’s lush circumstances being a huge factor in that fiscal distress — but the union offers nothing in the way of help. On the contrary, it’s doing its best to make matters worse.
City Hall isn’t far from having to order teacher layoffs. So why is the UFT working so hard to hasten the arrival of that day?
Beats us.