What is my particular brand of racism?
Nah, not the Democratic Trump, but more the example of how you cannot forget that you still have to run a city.
Which is a real thing. His problem is *not *that he saw the closure as disproportionately harmful to disadvantaged populations, it was he had no answers to that challenge other than keeping the schools open.
NYC almost perforce would have been a focus of the outbreak, by the sheer human density and the fact it’s a world crossroads like no other. Its leaders should have been prepared. But then again so should have those everywhere.
The schools could have (and are now, I believe) found ways to feed needy kids without putting all of them and their families at the high risk that a school environment forces. De Blasio really screwed up on that and deserves plenty of criticism, from what I’ve read.
Correct
That doesn’t sound all that easy to do, actually. And I don’t remember any health organization calling for closure of schools that didn’t have active cases, at least in early March.
There were a lot of issues and unknowns at the time. A couple of his voiced concerns were:
What do we do with all of these kids whose parents are at work? Do we leave them unsupervised? This was before Cuomo shut everything down.
How do we feed them? There are like a million kids in NYC public schools. I think about 1/2 receive lunch and other food. It’s not that simple to feed them all without a plan.
Was he late? I think so, but I don’t think his reasons not to didn’t have merit. I just wish these guys could plan and collaborate better.
Imho, as long as most businesses were running, the schools shouldn’t have been closed. Calling for school closures wasn’t crazy but it was reflexive and politically more palatable than shutting down shopping malls. Early March reports from WHO in South Korea suggested children had mild symptoms and weren’t very contagious.
DeBlasio isn’t a Democratic version of Trump. He’s his own unique form of idiot.
Problem is, with an asymptomatic virus like Covid-19, by the time you have an active-symptom case, it’s far, far too late. That one student or teacher may have infected dozens or hundreds of others already.
De Blasio almost seems to have imagined that the virus cares about things like skin color, as if the fact that minority kids needed school and lunches would make the virus compassionately shy away from infecting them. :smack:
Good way to phrase it.
“Wow” is all I got to say about that.
So integrated public schools are a bad thing?
I for one was glad when DiBlasio’s presidential campaign rapidly imploded.
That was down right funny. What a self-deluded idiot. Did he think he had a chance?
Sorta like how Trump forgot to run a country due to his focus on the stock market. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if the stock market had defied gravity for another week and hadn’t crashed on the 12th. I doubt Trump would have declared a national emergency on the 13th. Where would we be now?
Dozens of other jurisdictions around the country had already addressed how to feed kids during the school closure. He didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
It depends on how you achieve it.
If you achieve it by forcing 6 year old to attend school across town then yes, it’s a bad thing.
If you achieve it by creating social mobility so that neighborhoods become more integrated organically, then that is a great thing.
If you achieve it in magnet schools by tilting the playing field so that more black kids get in and fewer asian kids get in, then that is a bad thing.
If you achieve it by improving the K-8 experience so that black kids get a better education and produce more kids qualified for those magnet schools, then its a good thing.
He was the only one on stage I would not have voted for. I hate Harris intensely but i would have voted for her, she wouldn’t have flushed the country down the toilet in her first 100 days.
OK, I may have been wrong in my initial assessment. But there are similarities.
Detachment from reality;
Pandering to the racist instincts in his constituency;
Hiring really bad underlings;
Corruption;
Got elected through a combination of luck and the implosion of better candidates
Hey, just so everyone knows, the OP has very strong views on how Asian-Americans are treated by the New York City school system.
Clearly this thread is some hybrid of grinding that particular axe again and pretending it has something to do with pandemics. It makes no sense to me, either.
This is ad hominem. The OP merely linked to an article that explains, in considerable detail, why de Blasio fumbled the NYC virus response.
That article would have been just as valid had any other Doper posted it. The identity of the Doper doing the posting has nothing to do with the competence or incompetence of de Blasio.