NYC Educator: De Blasio and Carranza Abandon the Hybrid Fantasy

NYC Educator: De Blasio and Carranza Abandon the Hybrid Fantasy

De Blasio and Carranza Abandon the Hybrid Fantasy

For weeks I've been marveling that the two grown men who ran education in the country's largest school district accepted a plan that relied on teachers who simply do not exist. If you break a class into two to five sections, who teaches the students who aren't in the building on any given day? Yet Chancellor Carranza would get up in front of news cameras and claim everyone would receive synchronous instruction each and every day. 

They explained how the fantasy worked. You and I would teach chemistry. We'd coordinate lessons and each of us would teach 12 kids a day. The other students from our classes, all 44 of them, would be with a hybrid remote teacher, who'd magically recreate our lesson online. Also, there'd be some kind of virtual something specialist who'd write and provide the lessons. The problem, obvious to everyone but de Blasio and Carranza, was that we then needed somewhere between 1.5 and 2 teachers where we used to need only one.

They put forth solutions. Everyone from Tweed with a license would teach. Supervisors would teach. They'd hire thousands of substitutes. Imagine a substitute, hired out of nowhere, with not experience. There's a long and hallowed DOE tradition that the least qualified person gets the most difficult tasks. They can't learn and you can't teach, so we put you together. It's poetry, a thing of beauty.

So who was gonna get those remote classes of 44? Of course it would be the new sub. That's one reason I argued we'd be teaching chemistry. I've got over thirty years experience and I can't teach day one of chemistry. How is a newbie we just dragged off the street gonna do it? How will that guy teach Chinese? In fact, how will a person with no experience teach anything to an obscenely huge class, on a computer, with no training whatsoever?

These were just a few of the issues with which our visionary chancellor had to contend. He was all smiles right up until recently. He had ideas. A Queens high school was told to eliminate all comp time jobs and make every supervisor teach two classes. They were grappling at straws and embracing ridiculous, unworkable solutions. And it just hung there, until days before opening, we learned they'd abandoned it on Twitter, of all places.

 Now I'm not what you'd call an organizational genius by any measure. But I  CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: De Blasio and Carranza Abandon the Hybrid Fantasy