“Students were able to log into their virtual class classroom quickly and get right into their school day,” schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels claimed Monday as he pretended remote classes are a fine snow-day make-do — a lie from start to finish.
In reality, it was a struggle even to connect for about one in five kids: The city ordered roughly 500,000 students to attend online classes, but about 100,000 couldn’t get the tech to work.
Worse is the pretense that “remote learning” comes anywhere close to replacing in-person classes.
COVID proved it doesn’t: With much of the nation gone remote amid the pandemic, reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress plummeted.
And state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli reported that New York’s drops were twice the national rate.
In his first month on the job, Mayor Zohran Mamdani fell for the con; let’s hope he wises up before the next snow day, and just orders Samuels to schedule a make-up day.
Even then, the United Federation of Teachers might sue, pointing to the contract it signed with the Eric Adams administration as requiring the city to order remote “classes” (which also allow “educators” to do less work, always a UFT priority).
Yet the UFT’s 2023 contract simply says that “the digital classroom shall only be required” in certain cases, including “snow days/emergency closures” — which plainly doesn’t mean that the city must order a remote day, but only limits when it can do so.
In fact, it never should, since (again) the practice is a disaster.
A National Institutes of Health paper on why remote learning doesn’t work cited “academic, motivational, and socio-emotional factors”; “educators, parents, and students reported disorganization, increased academic demands, and motivational and behavioral changes.”
It’s hard enough to get kids to pay attention, absorb material and ask questions in school classrooms. Online can make it nearly impossible.
And parents have to baby-sit younger kids the whole way; more than one mom wondered if 8:30 is too early to start drinking.
We hope the mayor wises up to this con, which robs children of a traditional joyand of a day of real learning — the makeup day that would be required to comply with the state law ordering at least 176 days of instruction (plus four “professional” days, when teachers get paid without actually teaching).
By the way, most charter schools opt for weeks more than the state minimum, another reason their students learn more than the city’s regular public schools, where nearly half the kids failed math and English proficiency exams last spring.
If Mamdani cares for the future of the city’s schoolchildren, he won’t fall for the “Remote works fine” lie again.
And he should tell Chancellor Samuels that his duty is to the kids, not to a teachers union that wants its members to get credit for working a day without having to deliver any education.
