Barely Pretending To Teach

Online learning remains a cruel joke for far too many kids across the city, another failure of leadership by Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza.

It’s terrible for the nearly half of all families who’ve opted for remote-only classes, and for the 54 percent who chose “blended” classes and will do remote instruction at least half the time once (if ?) schools reopen.

On Sunday, The Post’s Susan Edelman reported that one Manhattan public school is creating large lecture-hall-sized remote-learning classes, with all the students from the grade in the same class.

It turns out the city’s contract with the teachers union permits online class sizes to be double the normal limit of 34 students — and doesn’t actually require educators to do any live remote instruction at all.

That’s right: The United Federation of Teachers, which for decades has insisted that class sizes need to be smaller, agreed to classes of 68 kids.

The decision to offer both all-remote and blended options left the Department of Education with a huge shortage of teachers. So the DOE skimped by saying there’s no guarantee that “blended” students will get even an hour of live instruction on their remote days.

It seems that nearly half of parents who’d preferred the blended option are shifting to all-remote in response. Count that as another win for the UFT, which doesn’t want

any teacher to have to do in-person teaching. The mess also leaves the city belatedly applying for state and federal waivers so it can violate class-size mandates.

Oh, and the DOE — having learned nothing from its troubles in the spring — is yet again scrambling to get devices to students who need them.

Some of the needy kids are new to the system, but others have been waiting on devices for months. And the DOE has given some children inoperable devices or ones with cracked screens.

For all of his noise about ending inequality and inequities in the system, Carranza stands exposed as all talk, no action.