The only reason I include this article from today's NYT is this part:

The president of the city teachers’ union, Randi Weingarten, and a large cast of Democratic politicians, including the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, held a news conference outside P.S. 89 in TriBeCa to call yet again for smaller classes.

“We’re all excited about the first day of school,” said Robert Jackson, the chairman of the Council’s Education Committee. “But teachers are not excited about having 34 kids in a class.”

As pages 5-7 of the presentation at http://www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Classsize&teacherpay.pdf show, smaller class size is NOT the solution for students (though it's great for the teachers unions).

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September 6, 2006

Day 1 in the Corridors of Learning for 1.1 Million Public School Students

By ELISSA GOOTMAN and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/nyregion/06school.html

As New York City’s nearly 1.1 million public-school students returned to class yesterday, Judi Aronson whizzed from school to school in her silver Toyota Camry, checking her BlackBerry at red lights.

Over 34 years, she has been a teacher, a principal and, most recently, a superintendent. Yesterday she assumed a critical new role outside the traditional hierarchy of the school system, neither bossing nor being bossed around. “It’s a very, very different relationship,” she mused, as she drove to the first stop of the day: Public School 105, on 59th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues in Brooklyn.

She is one of 15 “network leaders,” central to Chancellor Joel I. Klein’s effort to grant greater authority and independence to 321 principals, more than a fifth of those in the system. Her job is to support 22 of those principals in whatever ways they want.

Her first message from one of them arrived at 4:37 a.m. — not a crisis but an early hello. “I have to tell him to get some sleep,” Ms. Aronson said.