It was only last week when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared to be on a bit of a cold streak. It seemed as if his entire police force absolutely hated him, crime was surging upward, people were moving out of town so fast that U-Haul couldn’t keep up with all of the requests for trucks, and members of his own party were calling him the worst mayor in the city’s history. He was even going to have to furlough his entire staff for a week… including himself. But now that another week has gone by, things are probably starting to turn around, right?
Not so much. The hits just keep on coming and this time, the attacks are coming from the New York City Principals Union, a part of the larger umbrella of teachers unions. Hizzoner has apparently botched the plan to reopen the schools badly enough that they passed a unanimous vote of no confidence and are calling on him to relinquish mayoral control of the New York City school district and turn it over to the state Department of Education. Ouch.
New York City’s school principals union has issued a vote of no confidence in Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, calling on them to abdicate control of schools to the state in a brutal rebuke over their handling of the system’s coronavirus comeback.
The heads of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators “declared a unanimous vote of ‘No Confidence’ for Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza due to their failure to lead New York City through the safe and successful reopening of schools,” the 6,400-member group wrote in a Sunday letter.
“CSA calls on Mayor de Blasio to cede mayoral control of the Department of Education for the remainder of this health crisis and for Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza to seek the immediate intervention of the New York State Education Department,” the letter continued.
So how exactly did Bill de Blasio manage to botch the school reopening plan? It’s rather easy to lose track of all the things that have been going wrong, particularly when it came to protecting senior citizens in the city’s nursing homes and bungling the response to the riots. But as it turns out, there was supposed to be a plan in place to have students back in school by now, but it fell apart.
Bill’s original vision was to have students using a “blended model” wherein they would alternate between attending school in person two or three days per week while studying remotely on the other days. That didn’t wind up working very well at all. Not every family is set up to attempt remote learning, either because of technological shortcomings or a lack of experience in homeschooling. Participation for the at-home portion was spotty at best.
But more to the point, most of the parents out there were finally being allowed to return to work and they depend on being able to send their children off to school while they are on the job. A kid that’s home two or three days per week is the same as a kid that’s home all the time as far as most parents are concerned. They can’t go back to a full-time job two days per week just because they have a child at home. It was a solution to a problem that solved almost nothing and just seemed to make everyone angrier.
The other half of the plan wasn’t much better. Despite having months to plan and prepare, when they finally launched the remote learning tools, it was a total mess. Parents were frequently unable to log in at all, and when they did, they found little to no support in getting the children into the swing of learning in that fashion.
Families faced a slew of problems including trouble logging in, uncommunicative teachers and, now, the fear that their kids might not even get to take their online classes in real-time.
“I understand that it’s the first day but it seems like they had a lot of time to figure this out,” said one Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn mom who was unable to connect either of her two elementary-school children to their classes Wednesday morning.
The mom, who declined to be identified by name, said that she spent over an hour just trying to get in touch with the two teachers — and by the afternoon was still unable to resolve the issue.
When a senior Democrat loses the support of any of the educational system unions, you know things are bad. But I have some bad news for all of the teachers’ unions in Gotham. You have nobody but yourselves to blame. You’ve been flushing all of your dues money into electing these same groups of liberal Democrats for years. You’ve fought any Republican who dared to run for office and tried to shut down charter schools and school choice at every turn, enlisting people like de Blasio to back your play. Now you’ve got him. He was bought and paid for by your unions and you own the results of this experiment. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but elections have consequences. The guy you just took a vote of no confidence in is your guy. You wanted him and now you’ve got him. Enjoy.
