New Plan Will 'Close COVID Achievement Gap' In NYC Schools: Mayor

NEW YORK CITY — An unprecedented spate of disruptions for New York City students this year will leave a "COVID achievement gap" that threatens to leave many behind, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

De Blasio on Thursday outlined a "2021 Student Achievement Plan" that leans heavily on new digital tools to help youngsters catch up academically, get individual help and move past the traumas inflicted by the coronavirus crisis.

"I don't doubt that the 2021 Student Achievement Plan will give us the foundation to make sure that that approach reaches every single child," de Blasio said

The plan outlined by de Blasio and Chancellor Richard Carranza is still skeletal but they promised the coming months will put meat on its bones.

Carranza outlined six steps on what he called "our path moving forward":

1. Getting a baseline of what ground we lost
2. Increasing high quality digital curriculum available for every single school
3. Launching a one-stop digital learning hub
4. Deepening professional development
5. Expanding "Parent University"
6. Confront the trauma and mental health crisis faced by our students

The first step will consist of low stakes testing to gauge where individual students stand in terms of learning, Carranza said.

From there, the city's schools will use digital approaches to track students' progress and individually tailor lesson plans, he said.

"We want students to move from being digital users to be digital learners," he said. "In order to do that, we need high-quality digital curricula."

Digital learning allows teachers to expand and extend what happens in the classroom, de Blasio said.

He said many details about the plan still need to be worked out. But he said it was important to start to address the disruption wrought by the coronavirus pandemic on the city's students.

Put yourself in the shoes of a third-grader who had his life turned upside-down when the coronavirus forced schools to shut down in March, de Blasio asked New Yorkers.

This hypothetical student — "Robby" — fell behind when schools went fully remote and he saw the virus exact a toll on families around him.

Robby isn't alone, de Blasio said, and all the students like him need help catching up in the next school year.

"It's nine months basically until the opening of school in September 2021, we wanted to start to present to parents and the whole New York City community how we're going to be bringing back our schools strong," he said. "We have a lot of details to resolve but we want people to see this process play out over months and months."