To the principals’ office

Today, thousands of New York City schoolkids who opted into hybrid learning return to classrooms. We wish them the best.

But — we’ve said it before and will say it again — the reopening has been a cavalcade of incompetence, with blame falling squarely at the feet of the mayor and schools chancellor. The extraordinary no-confidence vote taken over the weekend by the rarely rabble-rousing principals’ union, the CSA, outlined the failure with fresh clarity.

We cannot co-sign the CSA’s proposed remedy, takeover by the state Department of Education, itself a troubled bureaucracy. But we nod along to the long train of missteps, abuses and usurpations articulated.

The mayor and schools chancellor inked a school staffing agreement that created a shortage of thousands of teachers, “yet no announcements regarding additional staffing were made until the week after students were originally scheduled to return to buildings.”

The duo of dunces “have provided school leaders with late, inadequate and inconsistent guidance throughout the pandemic.”

They “pledged to New York City parents that students would receive live instruction on days where they were learning remotely, and then reversed course the day before remote learning began to help solve the staffing crisis they created.”

They “failed to meet their own deadline for providing much-demanded ventilation reports to each school community,” and “announced guidance on outdoor learning far too late for school leaders to craft and implement a meaningful plan for their school.”

They “have invested far too little in remote learning professional development despite the fact that most students will be learning remotely on most days.”

A parent of a kindergartner told this Editorial Board that two teachers who interacted with his daughter in her first week back struggled to use Zoom, saying it was their first-ever time on the platform.

How do you flunk the people in charge?