Saturday, August 15, 2020

NYC Educator: De Blasio's Three Prongs of Wrongs

NYC Educator: De Blasio's Three Prongs of Wrongs

De Blasio's Three Prongs of Wrongs




It'ts not easy getting something so wrong that there's no way out. But Mayor Bill de Blasio is special. He's managed to do three things in such an utterly inept fashion that there's evidently no coming back.  

Error number one was the most egregious, because that's the one that enabled errors two and three. The first thing de Blasio did was, rather than decide what the best thing was he could do for city schools and city kids, he simply come to the conclusion that he needed to open the buildings. 

Maybe he was upset in being forced to close them back in March. Waiting too long to do that is the thing that will forever overshadow his past accomplishments, including pre-K. This summer, whatever the reasons, de Blasio came to a conclusion and worked his way back to rationalize it. That's backward and I rate it ineffective.


Error number two is arithmetic. I don't know which million-dollar consultant the mayor (who's now contemplating mass layoffs) wasted his money on. Whoever it is charged too much. The plan is worth less than nothing.

It's not really tough to poke holes in. Let's say we all teach English and there are five of us in the department. Let's say we teach 25 classes. Under de Blasio's plan, whoever teaches live doesn't teach online. However, whoever teaches live only meets ten students at a time. High school teachers know well that class size is 34, so what happens to the other 24 students?

They, of course, are learning online, somehow. Our department now has 50 classes rather than 25, but we still have only five teachers. Bill de Blasio thinks we can have a half-hour conversation with whoever in the morning and get that person up to speed. There are two issues with this. The first, and the most important, is that this person simply does not exist. That's the hurdle you have to get over in order to get to the second CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: De Blasio's Three Prongs of Wrongs