The DOE is hastily trying to give every student a laptop to participate in the Google classroom remote learning program. However, many students have not received a laptop to participate in the remote learning program. It was bad enough that the DOE, rather than spending the allotted time during professional development over the winter months to make sure every teacher was trained, wasted their time with the DOE's useless "flavor of the day" items that bored most teachers to death.
The result was that teachers and other staff were unnecessarily exposed to the coronavirus the next week as they were told to report for remote learning training, despite many schools already had staff sickened by the coronavirus. . Anecdotal evidence by teachers that only 50% of the students are participating in remote learning. Of course the better schools have a much higher percentage while the struggling schools have lower percentages of students participating ib remote learning. Hopefully, the percentages will increase over the following weeks as school teachers and administrators push parents to force their children to take remote learning seriously but there is no guarantee that it will happen.
The reasons for students not participating are many:
1. No laptop.
2. Lack of or inadequate internet service.
3. Too many students in one apartment
4. Parent indifference.
5, Student refusal to participate.
6. Family distractions.
I see that remote learning will only increase the academic achievement gap between high achieving schools and struggling schools.
Note: The New York City cronavirus infection rate has increased to 38,087 and the death rate to 914 , or a 2.4% mortality rate as of Monday morning. For New York State the coronavirus infection rate is 66,497 and the death rate is 1,218 or a mortality rate of 1.8%/