New York City public schools just can’t quit remote learning, no matter how much of an educational and logistical disaster it’s proven to be again and again.
Witness the latest debacle: Schools trying to guilt trip parents into forcing their kids to log on during an upcoming day off.
Why should schoolkids be wasting time logging into Zoom instead of playing outside on a beautiful early June day, you ask?
Because last time the schools tried to go full remote, during a February snow day, the system crashed.
So now — the moronic argument runs — the onus is on kids to help the schools test out their online tech to make sure that the next time it works properly.
In other words, Chancellor David Banks and his merry band of administrative lackeys are saying before the fact: If we screw up again, it’s not on us. It’s the children who are wrong!
Yet more proof that the perverse logic governing New York’s public school system is hostile to the tots, kids and teens it’s supposed to be educating.
But it makes perfect sense to our mindless educrats (and service providers like IBM, with massive public-sector dollar signs in their eyes).
All the data we have shows again and again that Zoom school is disastrous.
The horrible decline in standardized test scores, notably concentrated among black and Latino students, that New York saw as the direct result of pandemic remote “learning” is proof enough of that.
Sure, there’s a place for the internet in schools.
As a repository of homework assignments, say, and practice tests.
Or for enrichment seminars attended by advanced high school students taking special subjects.
But broadly, and above all for younger kids, it’s worse than useless.
The demented insistence of Banks and others that snow days — a treasured childhood tradition — be sacrificed so kids can be forced to watch YouTube videos is as evil as it is useless.
Not least because it comes in the service of hitting the legally mandated minimum number of school days per year — without actually teaching on remote days.
Why not cut back on the city’s ever-expanding slate of holidays instead? Or fight to cut some union-mandated teacher days off?
Or even — gasp! — add a week at the year’s end?
These common-sense solutions would actually meet the instructional needs of kids (and doubtless be welcomed by parents as well).
But whether the fixation on remote is due to overly cozy relationships with the companies that provide the tech or the city’s customary spinelessness vis-a-vis the teachers unions, one thing’s for sure.
Remote school is a sick joke. And it’s not families who are to blame.