Why the Public Schools Keep Failing
Nine months into the pandemic, the city teachers’ union is still pushing for maximum school closures while administrators remain both distant and disastrously incompetent.
Mayor de Blasio now says schools should remain open for the rest of the year. Yet United Federation of Teachers chief Michael Mulgrew this week urged the city to adopt the state’s outdated 9 percent community-infection rate to trigger school closings.
Yes, this is the same Mike Mulgrew who recently backed off his demand for complete closures when a neighborhood crosses the 3 percent line, after that proved a huge public-relations black eye.
Thing is, a UFT faction called the Solidarity Caucus wants to end in-person learning entirely. Per Gothamist, the group and the larger MORE-UFT caucus want schools to go all-remote until the virus passes and vaccinations are more widespread.
City public schools now require weekly testing of students and staff plus face coverings, and closing buildings when the need arises. Middle and high schools are all-remote, with quality learning an ever-moreremote possibility with each passing day.
Yet for union hard-liners, it’s not enough. These “educators” want elementary students and kids with disabilities to suffer, too.
School administrators, meanwhile, can’t even keep track of which kids are enrolled. As The Post’s Susan Edelman reports, the DOE turned one a parochial high schooler into a phantom public-school student. The boy’s mother, Margaret Tomasi, told The Post that her son never enrolled at Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill HS; he’s an honor student at Xaverian HS. But she found it impossible to reach any administrators to correct the mix-up.
Meanwhile, the school had sent the family two report cards giving the lad identical incomplete-but-passing grades. In comments, an algebra teacher even cited his “progress” in three areas. Since grades and attendance cannot be used against any student, Tomasi likely would have moved on to the next grade — without ever taking a class.
It’s no wonder enrollment is plummeting as parents seek schools that don’t use COVID as an excuse to give up. Private, parochial or charter, virtually all those schools are free of both the UFT and the DOE — two institutions that put the children’s needs at the bottom of the priority list.