NYC Educator: NYC Hybrid Model Designed to Fail

NYC Educator: NYC Hybrid Model Designed to Fail

NYC Hybrid Model Designed to Fail

So says City Council member Mark Treyger in a great piece in New York Intelligencer. Why is it designed to fail? Treyger came to the same conclusions I did when I first saw this. Where are the magical co-teachers coming from? How can we send subs and Tweedies out to teach subjects they may or may not be familiar with? How will schools find the bodies to do this, and shouldn't we be looking for something better than bodies as teachers?



UFT endorsed this program, and I think it was specifically because of the need for extra teachers. Right now de Blasio is still talking about laying off tens of thousands of city workers, including 9,000 UFT members. It's certainly better to see the city hiring thousands of teachers than firing them. Maybe, if we allow ourselves to dream, we could imagine those extra teachers hanging around and reducing class sizes. That's the impossible dream, but there it is.

In reality, of course, de Blasio hasn't hired nearly enough teachers. If I recall correctly, one year we averted Bloomberg layoffs but he let our numbers dwindle via attrition, and we're thus down thousands of teachers. This is why classes of 34 are now more the rule than the exception. Of course in the years before the apocalypse crippled our budget, de Blasio never bothered to hire back those teachers. Had he done so, the hybrid model he now advocates might have a snowball's chance in hell. As things stand, such a statement would be overly optimistic.

And now, the very first school in Queens has closed due to COVID. If that's not a harbinger of things to come, I CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: NYC Hybrid Model Designed to Fail