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Monday, July 13, 2020

NYC Educator: De Blasio to UFT, CSA, DC37, and 1.1 Million Schoolchildren: Drop Dead

NYC Educator: De Blasio to UFT, CSA, DC37, and 1.1 Million Schoolchildren: Drop Dead

De Blasio to UFT, CSA, DC37, and 1.1 Million Schoolchildren: Drop Dead




It's really hard to outdo the outrageous lack of planning that went into the DOE's hybrid instruction plan. Nonetheless, Bill de Blasio and Richard Carranza have once again outdone themselves. I was interviewed for this piece in NY 1, suggesting that equity and excellence is yet another carefully orchestrated DOE mirage. I'm in one of the so-called outlier schools, and we'd need five cohorts rather than two or three to meet their recommendations.

That's pretty goshdarn inconvenient for City Hall. How can they defend a system that ignores the largest school in Queens? How can they face up to the fact that they've neglected us for so many years? Can they go any lower than meeting minimum standards, already so porous you can drive a Mac truck through them? Of course they can.

Our school has been fighting overcrowding for over a decade. In fact, we had an agreement with Tweed to lower enrollment. When I became chapter leader, I ran around like a madman making sure our outrageous overcrowding got press coverage. I wrote in the Daily News, and we were covered multiple times in the NY Post. We even got a feature in the NY Times. By the time we were covered on television, Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg had to acknowledge us.

UFT arranged a meeting at Tweed along with CSA and our School Leadership Team. We agreed to multiple measures to lower enrollment. We went down from 4600 to 4000, and were on our way to go below 200% capacity for the first time in years. Bill de Blasio failed to observe our agreement, and we're now somewhere around 4500, back to square one. Thanks a lot.

How does the DOE deal with an issue like that now that they're hyping a hybrid plan? Evidently, they want to make minimum CONTINUE READING: 
NYC Educator: De Blasio to UFT, CSA, DC37, and 1.1 Million Schoolchildren: Drop Dead