NYC Educator: De Blasio Kills Multiple Birds With One Stone, Sabotaging Teachers, Students, and Organized Religion

NYC Educator: De Blasio Kills Multiple Birds With One Stone, Sabotaging Teachers, Students, and Organized Religion

De Blasio Kills Multiple Birds With One Stone, Sabotaging Teachers, Students, and Organized Religion

Let's be clear. Though we may have been a little rough on the mayor this week, the epidemic is not his fault. All he did was neglect it and allow it to spread like wildfire. And it's not his fault there are issues with Zoom. All he did was withdraw it with no notice whatsoever, leaving tens of thousands of teachers up the creek without even a virtual paddle.

Now you might think that the DOE just sat around and envisioned ways to exacerbate an already horrible situation. I was LAB-BESIS coordinator at my school for one very long year, and that was precisely the impression I got whenever I had to deal with DOE. I quit that job first chance I got.

This week it's like we're all playing a board game and Bill de Blasio not only sends us all back to square one, but also announces from now on we're all playing a new game altogether. You damn well better be able to start tomorrow AM. Also, the rules lay out only what you CANNOT do, which is use the tool most of us have depended on since this all began.

I shouldn't be surprised at acts of outright spite or gross incompetence anymore. I should simply sit in a lotus position, chant a mantra, and expect it to happen. After all, I work for the DOE, which was molded into a largely malignant force under Michael Bloomberg.

When de Blasio came in, I thought things would turn around. I expected a sea change, but he simply left the Bloomberg machine in place. If you're a chapter leader, you know that Bloomberg's "legal" department still advises principals to break the contract whenever they goshdarn feel like it. When the current chancellor took the baby step of firing a few people, he was accused of racism. Yet he should've fired a few hundred people, fumigated Tweed, and started over.

I've been doing online lessons for about two weeks, scrambling to keep up with myself, with little idea what, if anything, my students were getting from this. I still lack the confidence to give an assessment of any kind, be it a test, a project or a writing piece. I will get over that. Call me cynical, but I will not trust the results. I've long ago decided I could not stop cheating in homework, but with in-class assessments I could really see what was going on. No more of that.

Now that's not the fault of Bill de Blasio. As I said earlier, all he did was drag his feet and make a deadly epidemic much worse than it needed to be. Sure, thousands of people will die as a result of his gross negligence and ineptitude, but had he closed the schools when he should have, students would still be able to cheat when using remote learning. So CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: De Blasio Kills Multiple Birds With One Stone, Sabotaging Teachers, Students, and Organized Religion