For New Yorkers this week there has been no shortage of confusion around whether public schools would be open or not. Though Gov. Cuomo seemed to think the situation was clear as day when he berated a reporter for daring to ask if the schools were closing..
Karol Markowicz works for the New York Post and is one of the few journalists I follow on Twitter. She is smart, even-tempered and not prone to outbursts. Her husband, however...
Markowicz not only lives in New York but she has school-age children, and so this one is personal to her.
While New York City schools have been operating under a hybrid model (in-school part of the week, remote learning the rest) parents constantly lived in uncertainty, not knowing whether schools might go all-remote the very next day, meaning someone would need to watch their kids. That's what the news conference was about yesterday.
Hey, no problem, I'm sure you don't really have to go in to work the next day, just drive your truck, replace an HVAC system, or run your restaurant over Zoom!
Oh, and the news conference parents who were eagerly awaiting an update so they could begin the process of totally upending their lives? It was over four hours late.
While waiting, the governor of New York had his own press conference, citing statistics that showed schools would be open and scolding a reporter who had the temerity to ask, telling him that he was "confused."
And then right afterwards Mayor Bill de Blasio closed the schools using a different statistic than the state.
And that statistic is phony.
It's science, people.
And by "science," I mean the "teachers union."
Sort of the same thing. They teach science, right?
"No, your child's school is controlled by the teachers union and they decide whether your kid gets an education or not."
And while the city allegedly had reached a "3% positivity rate," schools had not. Not even close.
"In his letter to principals informing them of school closures, Carranza noted that out of 120,000 teachers and students tested, only 0.19 percent were positive. The gumption of highlighting the low positivity rate in schools as you shut them down is galling."
0.19%.
In all of New York City, schools are the safest place for your kids. So let's send them out into the community instead where the "positivity" rate is 15 times greater!
And back to that 3% number. It is based on "3 percent of tests not population," that is, if 3% of the people getting tests, test positive, schools close. That leaves the metric at the mercy of whoever chooses to get a test, which tends to be people who suspect they are sick, rendering the number all but useless as an indicator of anything.
So, what should you do with your kids now that in-person learning is canceled?
You just need to stop thinking about this and listen to the experts.
