Frustrated as we are by Mayor de Blasio’s slow pace in reopening schools, we have to give him some credit for making more progress than his peers in cities like Chicago.
He announced Monday that middle schools will reopen for the students who opt in to classroom instruction starting Feb. 25. Of the city’s 196,000 middle-schoolers, 60,000 will be back in the classrooms at least part time. That’s only 30 percent, in part because so many parents are frustrated by the open-again/closed-again reality even for schools that do “reopen,” and so opt for the certainty of remote-only — or find alternative schools.
Students of all ages thought they were out of the woods last fall, only to be sent back to the virtual classroom in November for no good reason. No matter that the science indicates the virus rarely affects children and that teachers should be safe with modest precautions because kids (pre-teens, at least) also don’t transmit COVID in any significant degree.
But at least Hizzoner let elementary students out of their Zoom prisons in December and now is following up.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in America after NYC, is in the hands of a stubborn superintendent who wants all children vaccinated before they resume in-person classes. And never mind that no vaccine is yet authorized for those under 16.
One LA city councilman is pushing for a lawsuit against the school board to demand a reopening plan, modeled on a similar case in San Francisco, whose mayor supports a bid to sue the district for refusing to open while the district’s low-income, black and Hispanic students struggle.
Chicago, the No. 3 US district, is held hostage by the teachers’ union, whose threats to strike not only scrapped plans to expand reopening but also sent home students who had returned to classrooms. In Las Vegas, the Clark County district (No. 5) only moved to start reopening after a spate of student suicides set off alarm bells.
New York’s better performance is rooted in more than de Blasio’s wishes: Mayor Mike Bloomberg fought and schemed for the mayoral-control law that lets parents hold one man accountable for the schools, and he and Rudy Giuliani also fought the teachers’ union hard enough that it (unlike Chicago’s) is less willing to defy a basically friendly mayor.
Yet private, Catholic and charter schools are all doing far, far better for New York’s children. That’s the real competition for de Blasio’s system.