How many NYC parents chose “blended learning”?

This is easy.

There are 1.1 million students in New York City.

The mayor and Chancellor want blended learning (hybrid) to take place in September. The Mayor has been boasting about it. The Chancellor has been boasting about. The Mayor and Chancellor have been pushing hard. There is not a strong, centrally organized resistance*.

.Which means the Mayor and the Chancellor have been able to rig things.

June Survey Results

Does the chart look unfamiliar? Yes – I have easy access to 6 – 12 data. The k – 12 data I believe is even more wary.

You probably know, the Mayor and Chancellor dishonestly added the first three categories to claim a very high rate wanted to go back. They included “A little comfortable” – how is that honest?

We could also add the bottom three, and claim that the vast majority have questions.

Or we could do what most math-y people do, and make Very comfortable = 3, Mostly comfortable = 2, A little comfortable = 1, and Not at all comfortable = 0, and take the average. The citywide 6 – 12 average was 1.64. My school’s average was 1.79.

Why do I write “was”? Because these surveys were filled out in June. People are more nervous today.

Every Family Selected Hybrid!

Well, that’s obviously false. Some want remote. But the Mayor and the Chancellor rigged the results. By making hybrid the “default” they could claim a high number of parents are choosing hybrid.

Why didn’t they report 100%? Because they knew you wouldn’t believe them.

Has anyone selected hybrid?

Yes. 109,000 families have selected hybrid. That is about 10% of the total.

We could add to them the other million parents – that’s kind of what de Blasio and Carranza did – claiming that the default was a choice. But that’s not honest.

When do parents select remote?

Any time they want. So far 212,000 have chosen remote. That’s almost 20%.

What about the 70% of parents who have not yet spoken?

We do not know what they will do. The Mayor and Chancellor have dishonestly claimed they are choosing hybrid. They have not made a choice. We can’t say that they are choosing remote either.

Here’s part of an email I received the other day:

And FYI, from a parent’s perspective (albeit elementary school child), we chose hybrid for now, because at any time we can switch to remote, but only at specified times can you move from remote to hybrid. We’ll be … making our decision most likely in early September.

How did they get just 30% return on a survey?

It was not a survey. There was not a deadline.

The DoE kept changing what they said it was. Safer that way to make any claim they wanted to after the fact.

This was an opt-in to blended learning.

Opt-in to remote learning can happen at any time.

So how will we know what the actual number of families opting for remote is?

Keep looking for updates. The number will rise every week. The biggest jump will happen at the start of September, right before school.

That is, if the Mayor and Chancellor’s really dumb plan to try to open is still in play. With some luck and hard work we have switched to full-remote well before then.

(* The UFT president also wants blended learning to take place in September – at least that is what he said in a message to members, and has not retracted or contradicted that. However the UFT president has been expressing doubts based on safety. This needs to be the subject of a longer post.)