- Oct 2022
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Now, if involved families want to reach out to a teacher, they have to rely on the school or hope an online staff directory is updated. And if teachers want to reach out to families and let them know how their students are doing in school, they need to look up their contact information and hope its up-to-date — or find alternate messaging platforms.
I completed high school about 15 years ago. Back then, most communication between parents and teachers was done by phone and mail. The default assumption by the NYCDOE that every problem needs an app or program is unexplained. Using phones and keeping contact directories up to date is something that had to be done not long ago.
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Some class time has also been lost to teachers sitting down with students to manually show them their grades, a teacher at the school added.
Throughout my time in middle school, high school, and college, grades for tests were handed out in class and teachers had office hours for students to discuss their grades or any other issues. It is unclear to me from this article what time is being lost. Teachers can hand out grades to students just as well as they did before, and I presume that students who have questions or need additional guidance should be able to contact their teachers.
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The Department of Education has been rolling out its own free grades, attendance and messaging applications, to replace banned third-party software that was involved in a data breach of more than 800,000 students last school year.
The NYCDOE was correct to sever its tie with third-party services, but why was the default response to build its own service? It was not long ago that there were no mobile applications for grades, attendance, and messaging.
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