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Wednesday, December 9, 2020

NYC Educator: Mayor Bozo Ready to Lower Standards Yet Again

NYC Educator: Mayor Bozo Ready to Lower Standards Yet Again
Mayor Bozo Ready to Lower Standards Yet Again



If you're a teacher, you constantly hear talks of standards. The standardized test is the Bible, the Holy Grail, and the Ten Commandments all rolled into one. If your student gets 64 on the NY State English Regents, she is unfit to graduate. However, her classmate who gets a 65 is college and career ready. That's because this instrument is so precise and absolutely reliable it cannot be mistaken, even if some who've studied it contend it's an unreliable piece of crap

On the other hand, who needs standards for a deadly disease? Mayor Bill de Blasio has been running a clown show ever since his pathetic bid for the presidency. He failed to close the schools when the pandemic had us in dead in its sights, and had the chancellor demand 108,000 signatures from epidemiologists before bending to what was obvious to the whole world, save City Hall and the White House. 

Then came September. We're opening. We aren't opening. We'll open next week. No, the week after that. No we don't have to test anyone for COVID. Well, if the UFT is going to strike, maybe we will do a little testing. We'll make it mandatory, but if students don't consent, we'll ignore it and hope for the best. And if Cuomo says we'll close at 5%, we'll do better. We'll close at 3%, because we have higher standards than the state.

But once the mayor followed through with that promise, it turned out that there was public sentiment against him. Evidently, some of the 35% of families who chose in person learning a day or two a week were upset. How dare this mayor deprive their children of the opportunity to sit socially distanced and masked far away from one another? How could they lose that opportunity?

And what a system it was. We had a hybrid. It was sometimes in person and sometimes on line. The way it worked was this--if one third of the students were in school, two-thirds were online. And because there weren't actually enough teachers to do this, he'd hire some more. You can teach 12 kids in the school, and I can teach 56 others online. But that wouldn't be so bad because there would be a virtual content specialist planning the CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Mayor Bozo Ready to Lower Standards Yet Again