After a long snow drought, New Yorkers on Tuesday got a reminder about how quickly the fresh white stuff becomes slippery and gross — and how quickly grand political rhetoric becomes slippery and gross, too.
Every part of the public school’s slushy “remote learning” debacle was an indictment of the shrinking system and a mildly traumatic flashback for parents, kids and school staff to the lost pandemic year.
“We feel really good about this,” Schools Chancellor David Banks said on Monday. “It’s one of the good things that, in fact, emerged from the pandemic, was our preparedness to be ready for moments like this.”
But on Tuesday morning, students and teachers logging in were sent to a “Service unavailable” page. Not good!
That apparently counts as a teachable moment for parents, according to Mayor Adams, who hasn’t said much about pandemic learning loss generally but was all about it at Monday’s press conference with Banks where he declared that “we need to minimize how many days our children are just sitting at home making snowmen.”
It takes a special sort of parent to think kids make snowmen while sitting at home.
Employing the cranky uncle-knows-best register he used back in the day to instruct parents to search their kids’ dolls for hidden drugs, Adams went on to say that those “not willing to navigate a computer for your child” were “a sad commentary”:
“Clicking on, figuring out how to navigate that, using it as a teaching moment on how to get it online and how to get it up, showing our children that difficulties come and we overcome that, that is what it’s all about.
“So, you can’t tell me that Mommy took me to school with her arthritic knees in a snow day and you are frustrated by [logging] onto a computer. That’s not acceptable to me. Our children must learn. They fell behind. We need to catch up. That is what we need to be focusing on.”
That’s what it’s all about, huh?
Parents who spent the pandemic dealing with endless log-ins and system errors before the city’s COVID vaccine registration page shut them out on the day in-person school finally resumed aren’t going to dance to that hokey pokey.
Neither are the kids who went sledding in parks on Tuesday after logging in to get checked off as present on what they called “a phony Zoom day.”
The real reason the city didn’t have a snow day is that it can’t lose even one school day without risking a violation of New York State’s legal requirement of at least 180 of them.
The city only clears that low bar by counting a couple of teacher training days as school days. In real life, if your kid can’t go to school it’s not a school day.
As Errol Louis laid out in a classic Daily News column nearly a decade ago, one reason for this mess is the addition of different groups’ celebrations as public school holidays — shortchanging all the parents and students citywide who don’t observe, say, Yom Kippur or Eid al-Fitr or the Lunar New Year.
It’s an expansion that started with the Hebrew High Holidays, back when Jewish women made up a vastly outsized share of public school teachers.
That’s ancient history now, yet New York City keeps adding new holidays, most recently Diwali, along with proclamations from politicians about how doing so is a moral triumph for the whole city.
This isn’t complicated. Lawmakers should save the political recognition of different religious and ethnic communities for alternate-side parking suspensions.
Give every public school student a few excused days for family observances. Don’t schedule big tests or events on the days of major holidays. Use asynchronous “remote learning” so that kids have a way to catch up on their own time with lessons they miss.
Adams, an inveterate tech booster who took his first paycheck as mayor in cryptocurrency, was mocked during the campaign for fantasizing about how, “By using the new technology of remote learning, you don’t need children to be in a school building with a number of teachers. It’s just the opposite. You could have one great teacher… teach three to four hundred students who are struggling in math.”
Later, he claimed he’d meant 30 or 40 students even though he’d talked about hundreds on other occasions, and said:
“I fought to end remote learning and put children back in schools. I’m a believer in that.”
Amen!
And when the weather doesn’t allow for that, have a snow day.
Siegel (harry@thecity.nyc) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
Adams’ snow day hokey pokey is slippery & gross
8
3
18.02.2024
After a long snow drought, New Yorkers on Tuesday got a reminder about how quickly the fresh white stuff becomes slippery and gross — and how quickly grand political rhetoric becomes slippery and gross, too.
Every part of the public school’s slushy “remote learning” debacle was an indictment of the shrinking system and a mildly traumatic flashback for parents, kids and school staff to the lost pandemic year.
“We feel really good about this,” Schools Chancellor David Banks said on Monday. “It’s one of the good things that, in fact, emerged from the pandemic, was our preparedness to be ready for moments like this.”
But on Tuesday morning, students and teachers logging in were sent to a “Service unavailable” page. Not good!
That apparently counts as a teachable moment for parents, according to Mayor Adams, who hasn’t said much about pandemic learning loss generally but was all about it at Monday’s press conference with Banks where he declared that “we need to minimize how many days our children are just sitting at home making snowmen.”
It takes a special sort of parent to think kids make snowmen while sitting at........
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