Nearly two months into the school year, city teachers are no longer pretending kids will learn much this year — with some even doing other things besides teaching during online classes.
As The Post’s Susan Edelman reports, one student at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn says his teacher, Nyeesha Archer, gave her algebra lesson from a car. “How much of a lesson could it be?” he wondered. A month ago, another “taught” from a hammock, while interacting with his kids at the same time.
The teacher “probably figured half the class was sleeping anyway. That’s the thing about online school. Half the kids in the class are playing video games or asleep,” the high schooler said.
And why not? Under the Department of Education’s new “grading” system, no one can fail, no matter how little effort they make, as Karol Markowicz noted in Monday’s Post. Elementary school kids will get an “N” (needs improvement) and middle and high school kids an “NX” (course in progress) instead of a failing grade.
That makes it harder to evaluate teachers as well as kids. And while DOE spokeswoman Danielle Filson says teachers who don’t do their jobs are “subject to discipline,” the consequences all too often range from slaps on the wrist to nothing at all.
Meanwhile, city and state “educrats” have been moving at light speed to scrap other tools for seeing how much education is happening: They scrapped the January Regents exam, for instance. And, as The Post’s Selim Algar reports, the DOE is directing schools to consider factors besides grades (“equity,” “motivation”) to calculate class rank.
In short, you’ll be told the school year’s a success even if teachers are checked out — and kids routinely absent.
As Edelman reported last month, DOE officials briefly posted attendance data, then quickly yanked it, so who knows how many kids are in class? (The data put online-learning attendance at at least one school at as low as 18 percent.)
The pandemic is exposing the true priorities of the adults who control the public school system — and educating children is at the very bottom of the list.
