No Matter How Bad Things Are, De Blasio Makes Them Worse
So it's harder to sit here in my little corner of the universe and focus on things like education, but I'm working tomorrow, even if the system as a whole may not be. You look at de Blasio's plan, shattered and torn, and wonder how things could possible get any worse.
But Bill de Blasio holds fast to his plan, no matter how ridiculous it is, and now says he's going to hire thousands of teachers to enable it. While we're waiting, the DOE seems to have approved unconscionable class sizes in some schools, in bizarre plans that make the original insane idea look relatively good. I'm really at a loss to explain how anyone thinks this is a good idea.
De Blasio's plan has been around for a while. Yet it's only now, days before we open schools in one form or another, that we're looking at hiring teachers to enable it. Can we find 4,500 teachers in a week? It's optimistic at best. Meanwhile, just in case a miracle doesn't happen, Carranza announced that no, in fact NYC students will not necessarily be receiving synchronous instruction every day as promised. It makes you wonder why the city embraced this plan in the first place.
So now, city students will go to physical school buildings a day or two each week. If they're extraordinarily lucky, they may go three days. They will sit masked and socially distanced, unable to substantially interact with one another. Teachers will have to enforce these unnatural conditions. If students don't run screaming in horror from this bad science fiction scenario, they'll do something or other in class. If all the stars are in alignment, they'll learn something aside from the terrifying conditions under which education takes place in 2020.
What about the three or four days when they aren't there? I'm really not clear on that. I suppose they could receive asynchronous instruction. That might be assignments. It CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: No Matter How Bad Things Are, De Blasio Makes Them Worse