#NYC DOE needs to quit chasing ideology and focus on opening schools this fall

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NYC Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza isn’t offering schools much guidance on likely social-distancing rules, online-class standards or anything else for the coming school year.
Hans Pennink

You already can see that the reopening of city schools this fall is shaping up as a complete disaster — because too many of the people in charge would rather focus on other cares.

City Department of Education officials seem more concerned with issues like “white privilege,” and not how to get kids back to learning in the classroom.

Families now have no clue what the school day (or week) will look like when the new year begins in just over two months. Which days, if any, will kids do remote-learning from home? Parents with jobs may need to scramble to find adult supervision.

One principal warns that students may be in school just a third of their time, as The Post’s Selim Algar reported. In-person art, music, science, tech and phys-ed “in the traditional sense” are out, Brooklyn’s PS 107 Principal Eve Litwack notes. As is pretty much all specialized learning, since folks must keep apart.

“At a certain point, this isn’t school anymore,” a mom at the school sighs. “Parents don’t know what to do.”

And the central bureaucracy is offering most schools no guidance on likely social-distancing rules, online-class standards or anything else. It’s as if everyone from Chancellor Richard Carranza on down has just checked out.

Or is busy with stuff like like Tuesday’s “Anti-Racist Community Meeting,” sponsored by DOE’s Early Childhood Division. Forget reading and ’rithmetic; it’s Racism 101 for . . . preschoolers. (And with teachers strictly segregated by race or ethnic group, too.)

Meanwhile, at a UFT delegate meeting last week, union officials warned that “it’s pretty clear we aren’t going back into buildings” unless the feds dump millions in aid on the city’s schools.

On Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio blithely insisted that “most” parents are “willing” to handle the uncertainty about the fall; only the “privileged” are looking to flee the system. Translation: The only parents who aren’t rushing to find other options are the ones who can’t afford anything else.

Everyone in “the other New York” will just have to put up with incompetence and chaos.