For whom the bells toll

About a third of the city’s 200,000 middle schoolers — those whose families said yes by late last year to in-person learning — will head back to classrooms starting on Feb. 25. While some may roll their eyes at yet another twist in the long and winding road that’s brought openings and closings and reopenings and reclosings this school year in New York City, this is something to cheer. Tens of thousands of kids will get connected to the learning and socialization they’ve been pointedly missing. In about half of the schools, student numbers are low enough that they’ll be able to attend five full days a week.

To make it happen, Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza got buy-in from the teachers union, which not long ago was wrongly agitating to shutter all schools if the citywide average positivity rate hit 9%, by promising to ramp up testing capacity so that middle-school kids will be tested just as elementary kids are: a random 20% of students and staff will get screened each week in each school. Wisely, the city is also staffing up the DOE’s COVID situation room and prioritizing middle-school educators for vaccines between now and the reopening date. Positivity rates in schools hover around a low, low 0.5%.

Now, the city should refine its hypersensitive trigger for shuttering individual schools. No matter its size, a school now closes for 10 days if two kids or staff in two separate classrooms test positive and contact tracers can’t determine where the cases originated. Instead of that rigid rule, put in place one that’s sensitive to school size.

Meanwhile, every last educator and educrat must look unflinchingly at the quality of the remote education kids are getting. The vast majority of city youngsters are still learning mostly or only online. By most accounts, technological and pedagogical failings are pervasive. For starters, give all kids K-8 basic English and math state achievement tests no later than this coming fall. Ignorance is the opposite of bliss.