Dear George,
O, how the muse of productivity dances o’er the land on its tippy-toes of make believe, spinning out the numbers that coalesce and thicken to become the mountain of useless data that buries incompetence.
Today, we are seeing the emergence of a new master choreographer in the person of Joe Klein, the chancellor of the NYC Board of Education. Joe, in his brilliance, decided to increase productivity by adding twenty minutes to the school day. He earmarked this time for tutoring at-risk students.
What a wonderful ploy! Let’s put it under the microscope so we may wallow in the genius behind this change.
What makes this a soft-shoe is that it will take at least fifteen minutes to move students to their point of instruction and get them settled down. This leaves a net instructional time of five minutes per day.
Now, good old Joe is always ready with his shovel to sling some image building. Using the gross figure of twenty minutes per day, Joe proudly proclaimed that this adds 7.5 days to the school year. (Actually, he said two days, but he based this on a 24-hour day. I adjusted the figure to reflect the actual school day.)
Fasten your seat belt, George it gets even better. To add these twenty minutes to the school day is costing the board $27 million. Let’s look at this using the net additional time of five minutes per day. This adds 2.5 days to the school year, at a cost to the taxpayer of $10.5 million per day. Who says New York City doesn’t spend enough on its students?
Make this man our treasury secretary. He grasps the essence of productivity, which is the wanton spending of funds to produce little or nothing.
Hell! Give him the Medal of Freedom.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
8:57:07 PM 
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