Remedial education for de Blasio

Bill de Blasio is gaslighting the city’s parents. There he was Friday morning, abruptly telling us that the city’s public school buildings may be closing and we should have “an alternative plan for beginning as early as Monday, for whatever will help them get through this month.”

While parents with kids in school buildings work on those “alternative plans” this weekend, parents whose children have stayed remote until now (or just logged off altogether) have until Sunday to decide whether or not to re-enroll them in classrooms for the rest of the year.

“What none of us could have anticipated,” the mayor told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, “is that this signup period overlapped with a sudden surge around the country and now hitting us” so that school buildings may close literally the day after parents have to decide whether to put their kids back in them.

Actually, pretty much every parent, teacher and administrator I’ve talked with anticipated it. So I wrote a column two weeks ago anticipating it, and I’ve never been so unhappy to have been right.

The mayor spent the summer touting an “astounding” survey he insisted showed that “75% of our New York City public school parents want to send their kids back to school in September.” We found out in

October that was as bogus as it sounded, as the city eventually admitted that just one in four students has shown up for even a single in-person class.

So in part to try and boost in-person enrollment and keep the public system from being further exposed as one of last resort, his schools chancellor changed the rules in the middle of the school year to replace the quarterly re-enrollment windows parents had been promised with a one-time-only deadline this Sunday.

Speaking of shady numbers, we still don’t know how many students are enrolling in this new system, let alone how many will actually show up if and when classrooms are open again, with the mayor saying Friday that it’s “a meaningful number for sure.” For sure.

At the same time that they’re trying to push kids who don’t necessarily need to be in the classroom back in, the mayor and his schools chancellor are about to boot out the kids who do urgently need to be there.

That’s because de Blasio insists that he has to stick by his self-imposed threshold to shut the school buildings if the city’s rolling positivity rate hits hits 3%, which it appears we’re about to, even though the rate in the schools is 0.17%.

“We set a plan out there. We said to everyone in school communities, ’believe in this and trust this.’ Everyone came forward. It was in effect a social contract and it worked and people trusted in it and people were safe. And we’ve got to keep that faith because we will be bringing the schools back. And when we bring the schools back, if they do go down, when we bring them back, people are going to have to believe in that situation as well.”

Here’s what I believe: When de Blasio gave his word to public school parents and kids, that was no binding social contract so far as he was concerned.

But when the chronically underprepared mayor, who wasted months counting on federal funding that never came, gave his word to the teachers union to secure their 11thhour support for reopening school buildings even without that money and as other big cities chose to start the year remotely, that was a binding contract.

And that’s why public pre-Ks in community spaces, whose workers aren’t UFT members, will stay open even if we cross 3%. The mayor says — in one of his pet phrases to explain why his rhetoric yesterday doesn’t apply today — that’s “a different reality,” and that the 3% threshold “is something the city decided; it’s not part of any collective bargaining agreement.”

Sure.

This isn’t public health. This is smokefilled backroom politics.

De Blasio says he’ll shut down the schools, even as bars and restaurants remain open (closures under the governor’s control, rather than the mayor’s, which is its own can of worms) because “part of maintaining trust is remaining consistent.”

I’d laugh but there’s nothing funny about this. And, by the way, no reason to trust de Blasio when he says parents need to make those “alternative plans” for “this month,” rather than indefinitely.

“This is really hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived through every day and hour of the decision-making process during COVID,” the mayor said, “but the one thing we learned a long time ago with this disease and the ramifications (is that) everything changes all the time.”

So the key, according to de Blasio, is accepting that “everything changes” and trusting his decisions to “remain consistent,” or not, amid “different realities.”

He’s gaslighting us.