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Education United States

NYC Fails Controversial Remote Learning Snow Day 'Test,' Public Schools Chancellor Says (nbcnews.com) 60

New York City's public schools chancellor said the city did not pass Tuesday's remote learning "test" due to technical issues. From a report: "As I said, this was a test. I don't think that we passed this test," David Banks said during a news briefing, adding that he felt "disappointed, frustrated and angry" as a result of the technical issues. NYC Public Schools did a lot of work to prepare for the remote learning day, Banks said, but shortly before 8 a.m. they were notified that parents and students were having difficulty signing onto remote learning.

This is the first time NYC Public Schools has implemented remote learning on a snow day since introducing the no snow day policy in 2022. The district serves 1.1 million students in more than 1,800 schools. Banks blamed the technical issues on IBM, which helps facilitate the city's remote learning program. "IBM was not ready for primetime," Banks said, adding that the company was overwhelmed with the surge of people signing on for school. IBM has since expanded their capacity and a total of 850,000 students and teachers are currently online, Banks said. "We'll work harder to do better next time," he said, adding that there will be a deeper analysis into what went wrong.

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NYC Fails Controversial Remote Learning Snow Day 'Test,' Public Schools Chancellor Says

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  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @02:23PM (#64237096)

    IBM is not ready to do more then suck up contract funds.

    Most of the techs who know what they have been doing have been layed off due to age and the over seas reps are not that good.

    • This is what happens when you buy IBM in the 2020s. There's countless other e-learning platforms out there bound to work better and be cheaper, but IBM has its tendrils deep in NY politics since its' headquartered in NY State. So, they got themselves a deal and then found out because of their stagnant company, they couldn't fulfill the contract with reliable services.

      Nobody buys new IBM products in the 2020s, they just pay for legacy ones. Whoever decided to use IBM in the NYC Ed Dept should be fired,

      • This is NY, everyone from the governor to NYC city council members has ties to significant corruption.

        Somehow the free market figured it out how to do this a few years ago when there was a true crisis, 4 years later and everyone and NYS needs to spend close to a billion annually on a âoenewâ solution?

  • We already know that the entire concept of remote learning doesn't work very well, and its not because of internet technical issues. So why bother?

    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Because it's still better than nothing, and apparently it's only as a fallback if it's impossible to get to school.

      • by rta ( 559125 )

        Building and maintaining this kind of surge capacity for like 3 days a year of snow-days seems pretty ridiculous to me.

        • You shouldn't need to maintain significant capacity if done properly. Love or hate The Cloud, it's certainly given us the ability to rapidly scale applications with demand. The NYC public school system doesn't need to have a room full of servers sitting around ready to handle a million students if the solution is designed in a sensible way. It obviously seems that IBM didn't do this properly.

          I suppose I'm making the assumption that they didn't need to go out and buy every student a device capable of conn

      • Is it better than "nothing" though? How many snow days does NYC have? Shouldn't the kids have a chance to go sledding, build snow forts, have an epic snowball battle?

        They used to just build it into the schedule that there would be a small number of surprise skip days. Is that really so terrible? It's not like remote learning addresses the daycare issue - parents need to have a plan for the home day whether their kid is outside getting exercise or inside staring at a screen.

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      We already know that the entire concept of remote learning doesn't work very well, and its not because of internet technical issues.

      Wait, what? A horde of slashdot commenters have been emphatic that remote work not only works very well, it is superior to working in person. So how could it be that remote learning doesn't also work very well?

      • It's not that remote learning doesn't work, it's that the IBM software to allow remote learning didn't work! You're not going to do much learning on an error screen.
      • Wait, what? A horde of slashdot commenters have been emphatic that remote work not only works very well, it is superior to working in person. So how could it be that remote learning doesn't also work very well?

        *sigh*

        Because LEARNING and WORKING are two different tasks.

        Learning is when a person does not understand what to do and is tasked with acquiring knowledge. Work is when a person does understand what to do and is tasked with implementing that knowledge. The latter is far easier to do remotely than the former, because the outcome of work is self-evident, but the outcome of learning is not.

        • by XXongo ( 3986865 )
          I see. So as long as you aren't supposed to learn anything, remote work is fine.

          Basically, rote jobs, then.

          • I see. So as long as you aren't supposed to learn anything, remote work is fine.
            Basically, rote jobs, then.

            No, but thank you for demonstrating inability to learn over the Internet.

            Though in your case I suspect it may be willful ignorance rather than a genuine attempt to learn followed by failure. I suspect that you might be equally incapable of learning which jobs can be done remotely and which can't even if it were explained to you in person.

            • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

              I see. So as long as you aren't supposed to learn anything, remote work is fine. Basically, rote jobs, then.

              No, but thank you for demonstrating inability to learn over the Internet.

              Your exact words as to why working is good remotely but learning isn't: "Because LEARNING and WORKING are two different tasks.'

      • Remote work is not encumbered with terrible edu-software. Nerds have been putting together the pieces for remote work for decades, and those pieces are designed to allow work. Maybe you have to deal with Teams or Slack and the occasional Zoom call, but for the most part, you can do work at home.

        Contrast this with edu-software, which is always a goddamn UI nightmare right from the bat, and hobbled by the fact that most parents don't know how to operate computers, most teachers barely know how to operate comp

        • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

          ... and hobbled by the fact that most parents don't know how to operate computers,

          Fortunately they suddenly acquire the know-how the moment the kids are out the door and they have to start work.

          • Everyone who has ever done their time in IT support knows how thoroughly untrue that statement is.

          • You don't need to know how to use a computer to type up a quarterly report with two fingers and then join a Zoom meeting with your microphone turned up too loud.

            Interesting that that's the only part you chose to respond to, btw. You're clearly not committed enough to your devil's advocate trolling here.

    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      Nonsense. All we know is that recent ad-hoc approaches to remote learning, teachers with little to no training trying to fumble their way through zoom and garbage like Google Classroom, don't work as well as classroom instruction for k-12.

      Why bother? Because the potential benefits are incalculable. We've seen what it can do for adult learners and we've learned a lot over the past 25 years about what works and what doesn't. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but we reached parity with classroo

    • Because we can't let children play anymore. Every snow day is a day not spent wasted at a desk being condescended to by midwits. The children must learn to behave, consume, and develop an affinity for the licensed corporate mascots that are deployed as "teaching aids".

    • So NYC can house immigrants in the public schools. Sure, go ahead and make me a troll. However, the NYC school system is already struggling, and to make space for the new arrivals, the only choice might be to remotely school some children. https://www.wfaa.com/article/n... [wfaa.com]
  • Here west of Boston, it was barely 2 inches. 'cept for the past three days there was a drumbeat of zOMG foot of snow! and everything got closed and canceled. Except in the places that waited until 4am or so to make the weather call.

    Back in the 90s, weather calls used to be made even later, around 5 or 6am. You had to wake up and turn on the radio to hear if school was out. Because people didn't trust forecasts too far ahead *and* because there was still the broad attitude that "the show must go" on re: scho

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      I remember those days. Back then we were not afraid to stand at a school bus stop, waiting for the bus to arrive, and doing that without a mask on our faces.
      • Ah yes, the good ol' days. When being a worthless plague rat who deserves to choke on their own bodily fluids was a good thing.

        That was sarcasm, in case the anti-vax plague rats whoosh on it.

        • Yes. I remember those days. Back when the mission was more important than any individual, and the correct response to a national emergency was to tell the people to summon their courage and get on with their work, not indulge their cowardice and make up reasons why sending kids to school is anti-intellectual.

          My side may have its yahoos, but your side landed firmly on "school is bad" and "be afraid" as the planks in its platform. A pox on your house.

      • Pfft. I had to walk three miles to and from school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways.
    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Here west of Boston, it was barely 2 inches. 'cept for the past three days there was a drumbeat of zOMG foot of snow! and everything got closed and canceled. Except in the places that waited until 4am or so to make the weather call.

      Back in the 90s, weather calls used to be made even later, around 5 or 6am. You had to wake up and turn on the radio to hear if school was out. Because people didn't trust forecasts too far ahead *and* because there was still the broad attitude that "the show must go" on re: scho

      • Yes, and everyone's immune systems atrophied to the point where my barely noticeable little kid sniffles knocked a deadicatede wfher flat on her back for weeks the day after she had a face to face conversation with me for 20 minutes.

        And the waves of out-of-season RSV that sent both my infant into the emergency room and newborn across the street into the ICU a year later.

        And all the other perfectly predictable and predicted horseshit that I and millions like me had to deal with that the masks and quarantine

  • Fails test

    Immediately throws IBM under the bus.

    The jokes practically write themselves.

    • IBM was probably thrown under an electric bus that slowly rolled to a halt due to poor battery performance in cold weather. /sarcasm
    • by JeffSh ( 71237 )

      line 1 of contractor responsibility, take all the blame for the shitty middle management that doesnt do any actual work

    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      Well, it's IBM and it's 2024 so it probably is IBM's incompetence. If this were 1995 IBM would have been a good choice, but today unless you have a mainframe that needs service they're not worth bothering with.

  • There are aspects of capacity planning that were seemingly ignored. You can have a system that can accommodate 1 million users, obviously across multiple nodes, but if you forget that all of those users may login at the same time you've failed. The initial wave forces you to dedicate more resources initially than you need during a steady-state. Who else remembers the "NetBIOS waves" we used to encounter when we first connected corporate LANs across all locations with centralized Windows NT domains? We knew

    • I am not sure which was worse - "NetBIOS waves" or Netware Services broadcast storms.

      I worked on networks that had both protocols ... 'the Good Old Days" !! HAHA

      After 4000 or so users you would start to see serious scaling problems with both network protocols (Netware might have been worse) even in networks broken up by routers (OSI Layer 3, for those that remember that).

    • This issue has been solved a long time ago though. We no longer need to rely on a single server, there is no reason every DB canâ(TM)t have a copy with a few million records. 100MB or even 10GB is peanuts even in a constrained Docker on Raspberry Pi.

  • by beelsebob ( 529313 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @02:53PM (#64237148)

    Mucking around in the snow is just part of childhood. Learning about it is just as important of one more day being stuck inside annoying mum, dad, and teacher.

    Christ, here at least, the last time it snowed enough to play in it, but not enough to close the schools, the teachers just took the kids outside to have a *cough* outdoor learning day *cough* (mess about) anyway.

    • Letting kids have a day off is not a bad idea. But another major part of this is just how hard it is to pivot. I'm a school teacher. Pivoting to a remote lesson with 24 hours notice is a massive amount of work. Give a teacher a three or four days to prep for a remote day and we'll slide it in naturally. Tell someone less than 24 hours before that the next day is going to be remote, and it is unlikely to go well.
      • Weather forecasts just aren't that good. Oh, sure - it's easy to predict with remarkable accuracy how big a storm will be and how much snow will fall. But where it will actually happen can be off by hundreds of miles from just the previous night's guess.

        Why would a test be an artificially easy scenario?

        • by JoeRobe ( 207552 )

          It's funny that you mention accuracy. Up here in MA, my area was predicted to get 6-10" as of Monday morning's forecast (for Tuesday). The forecasters were seemingly quite confident, enough so that most schools in my area declared a snow day by Monday afternoon. Monday evening rolled around and the forecast dropped to 1-3". As of this afternoon, my back yard has maybe 1" of snow.

          This was a wasted snow day. That said, snow days a special for kids - a surprise gift that they should be able to enjoy. Le

      • > Pivoting to a remote lesson with 24 hours notice

        24???

        When I was in exile where that wretched evil white stuff made house calls, we were lucky to get a whole hour notice to to send the kids in!

        And the first time Iowa State called off classes when I was there, it was not for snow, but for the temperature: apparently, the concern was that sans mothers, the kids would leave the dorms without hats and mittens, and get frostbite!

        We also had days cancelled and cut short for ice: there was a cutoff point wher

    • Yeah, maybe. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. We always had to do make-up days at the end of the year. It was never any fun, especially since we were in Virginia and the schools weren't air conditioned back then. Generally there were only 2 or 3 make-up days so it wasn't that bad. One epic year had a week of makeup days--the OG President's Day storm of 1978, not the later one you get if you google that.

  • Say what you will about them, Chromebooks really excel for remote learning. You just bring 'em home, punch in your home wifi password and they work exactly as they do at school.
    • Say what you will about them, Chromebooks really excel for remote learning.

      Assuming that the curriculum is already set up for a primarily-Google-Classroom paradigm, on a subject that lends itself to self-pacing, with lessons already integrated into the online environment, where the intent for the current topic required neither group participation (beyond what IRC-with-attachments could provide) nor tangible objects...then yes, Google Classroom is great for remote learning.

      For anything that requires an actual-teacher to actually-teach, it sucks. "Tell me and I'll forget, show me an

    • by narcc ( 412956 )

      They're easy to admin, but that's about it. Google Classroom is absolutely awful, as is integration with the third-party services schools use for things like annotating PDFs (how students write on scanned worksheets). Basic features like submitting assignments is also needlessly complicated as it seems to be more about training students to use Google's services than anything else.

  • It wasn't tested at load or scale, it's not a hard question to answer. The bigger issue is why wasn't it tested at scale and load? Simulated user login is fairly simply, and doing network load testing is fairly simple, so basically multiple people dropped the ball. The issue with dropping the ball, is you're playing T-ball, and you still struck out!

    Don't confuse simple with easy, because while doing the load and scale test is simple, it still requires knowledge, skill and ability, making it difficult t
    • Doesn't IBM make automated performance testing tools under their Rational product line? Why aren't they eating their own dog food?

      • They might, I'm not sure, but the school board(s) can run the tests. If you really want to be sure about the results, develop an in house test platform, using GO or Rust (or anything else you like), and have fun. You don't need a ton of horsepower, but if you want to crank the dial to 11, rent some ultra-high performance cloud hardware and let the test platform loose.
      • by hawk ( 1151 )

        > Why aren't they eating their own dog food?

        because they're IBM, and that was a Digital Equipment Corp thing.

    • Because those things cost money and the first thing NY politicians do with a budget is to see how much they can cut to benefit themselves.

  • by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @04:30PM (#64237362) Homepage

    I used to live in the country north of Toronto. Bussed to school. We had 3 to 5 snow days a year, when it would drift up to our waist.

    Hasn't been a snow day in maybe 15 years now. Today, there is no snow whatsoever on the ground. Hasn't been for weeks. I have never seen anything remotely like this in my 1/2 century in the area. Normally we still have a little bit of dirty corn snow in the ditches and such well into April. It's all gone. Every flake. Since January.

    Seems like they're fixing the wrong problem.

  • So did IBM absolutely fuck up the deployment despite having hard numbers on max capacity requirements or did NY Public Schools, like every client, be stupid and cheap and underfund the capacity they needed?

    One can make a compelling case for either scenario but neither explanation pulls out ahead.
    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      Most likely both. Probably the school district shorted the IT department on money (because almost all of them do), and the contractors that IBM sent to work on the system were almost certainly incompetent to realize that fact or they would have written it up.

  • A lack of accountability. This is a recently former NYC schoolteacher's opinion (my relation). No one will lose their job over this, maybe a slap on the wrist.

  • by JakFrost ( 139885 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @05:38PM (#64237516)

    Every time I hear these three letters or the other three letters being used in any project along with other consultants from Infosys or WiPro or Deloitte then I pretty much know that the whole thing is going to be late while being overpriced and completely non-functional on the go live date.

    So many experiences with large corporate projects and deployments and so many of the same results. And then local folks have to be brought in to fix everything that's broken or start from the beginning and get rid of the entire setup that was implemented at a loss of millions of dollars.

    Those three letter agencies are now considered a vulgar 4-letter word in the IT industry anytime I hear of them or have to deal with them or clean up their messes.

    The best thing is when one of these consultants comes in to do a project then takes all of their deliverables and pushes them out to all of the already existing employees and then Badgers them about status reports so that his big project could take off. They don't want to do any of their work either. They want to push it on the local guys because the guys that get brought in to do the job in house have no experience with any of the software hardware that they are set up to implement because we find that a lot of times they consulting firms pad their resume and throw them into the project without having them trained or informed about what they are doing and they just come off as b******* artists in every meeting and con man when they try to explain their work.

    It's just gobbly-gook explanations when we ask the guys in-house about what the project is about and how to implement it. Whereas the guys in the original spec out meeting and architecture meeting are knowledgeable because they are remote. Highly paid consultants but the guys that are brought in to the actual work have no clue about anything they're doing. It's a bait-and-switch tactic a lot of times that is perpetrated on the leadership and mid-level management to sell the project and once the deal has been made and the contract has been signed you end up with no nothing workers that can't do anything.

"Yes, and I feel bad about rendering their useless carci into dogfood..." -- Badger comics

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