NYSUT BACKS NO APPR FOR THIS SCHOOL YEAR; UPDATED WITH SOME CUOMO CRITICISM

From the NYSUT weekly Leader Update:

NYSUT backs plan to waive 2020 APPR
The union supports State Education Department’s recommendation to waive 2020 APPR evaluation for teachers. The department has called for an executive order to that effect, citing the disruption of the school year due to the COVID-19 closures.

I wonder why Governor Cuomo who has no problem with executive orders during the pandemic is not yet waiving the teacher evaluation law for this year.

What do any of you think he is waiting for?

Speaking of Cuomo, I saw this on Matt Stoller's Twitter this evening:

Lately, a lot of people have asked me why I've been so hard on Andrew Cuomo's response to COVID-19.

What about Trump?

What about de Blasio?

Well, they all failed. But only one is getting credit for success. It's quite confounding. Let's review the facts.

This is part of a piece from Slate:
A cursory look at a map shows that New York City’s coronavirus cases aren’t correlated with neighborhood density at all. Staten Island, the city’s least crowded borough, has the highest positive test rate of the five boroughs. Manhattan, the city’s densest borough, has its lowest.

Nor are deaths correlated with public transit use. The epidemic began in the city’s northern suburbs. The city’s per capita fatalities are identical to those in neighboring Nassau County, home of Levittown, a typical suburban county with a household income twice that of New York City.

True, New York City apartments are crowded. The share of housing units with more than one occupant per room is almost 10 percent. But that number is 13 percent in the city of Los Angeles. As a metro area, New York isn’t even in the top 15 U.S. cities for overcrowding. It’s not even the American city with the most apartments per capita (Miami) or immigrants (also Miami), to take two other characteristics that critics say might be associated with coronavirus infections.

New York City has a lot of restaurants per capita, places where people gather with strangers every night. But not as many as San Francisco, which, though it ranks second in the U.S. for both residential density and transit use, had just 20 COVID-19 deaths as of Friday.

If you expand your comparison internationally, New York City looks less exceptional still. It is not as dense or transit-dependent as, say, Paris (which has less than half of New York’s fatality rate) or Seoul, South Korea, where the pandemic has been all but controlled.

So what is it about New York City that made it a hot spot? Right now, it looks like the most exceptional thing about New York is its leaders’ belief that the city is unique. This presumption served first as a reassurance that New York would not follow Lombardy’s example, and later as the reason why it had.

Further down:

Tragically, what seems to have put New York on such a different trajectory from San Francisco was that its leaders were so late to shut down public life.

Research by the epidemiologists Britta and Nicholas Jewell suggests that 90 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the United States could have been prevented by enacting social distancing policies two weeks earlier than we did. Former CDC director Tom Frieden told City & State that if New York had shut things down earlier, it could have cut the death toll by as much as 80 percent. New York’s stay-at-home order began five days after California’s, and its schools were closed four days after Seattle’s. 

“History will be pretty critical of Cuomo and de Blasio for not taking the same decisive decisions that Mayor [London] Breed took in San Francisco,” said Dr. Michael Reid, an infectious disease specialist in San Francisco who is running that city’s contract tracing program.

History should also not be so kind to union leaders who did not have the guts to pull their people out of unsafe situations.