New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks said Wednesday that he will soon have more information about the city’s recent remote learning failure and how the city aims to do better next time.

“I’m just glad it’s not snowing again today,” Banks said Wednesday at an unrelated press conference. “For the press who has been trying to come and ask me a million different questions, we’re going to set up something in the next couple of days so we can be responsive after we finish doing our overall analysis.”

What You Need To Know

  • City public schools shifted to a remote day of learning Tuesday due to snow, but it did not go smoothly
  • Parents and students faced major technical difficulties accessing remote learning applications
  • The city placed the blame on IBM, the technology company the city partners with for virtual schooling
  • New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks said Wednesday that he will soon have more information about the failure

Banks was in Queens Wednesday to announce the creation of a new school, funded with a $25 million gift from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nonprofit, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and being created in partnership with Northwell Health.

The Northwell School of Health Sciences will open in the fall of next year, and prepare students for health care careers by giving them opportunities to graduate directly into the workforce.

But at the press conference Wednesday, questions were still swirling about Tuesday’s virtual learning disaster, which the city has blamed on a capacity failure by IBM, the technology company it is working with to authenticate log-ins.

“The challenge is going to be to figure out how to stress test it, where we have everybody in the entire school system log on at the same time. We didn’t do that,” Banks said.

Banks said that by the end of Tuesday, about 1 million students and teachers ultimately logged on for virtual school. Attendance for the day was reported to be 80%.

Banks wants to meet with his team and have more accurate information before speaking at length about the technology problems.

“We’re still debriefing and figuring out what happened. Once I know that and we’re clear about what our next steps will be, then we’ll be sure to let everybody know,” Banks said.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents nearly 200,000 city public school educators, said he believed the failure would not happen again.

“The chancellor, I spoke to him all day yesterday. He was very frustrated. He was very angry. He thought everyone was prepared. At the end, by [noon], the system was fully working, and I want to thank all the teachers and parents for staying engaged. Because when you have 970,000 people logged on, that means everyone stayed engaged, so that was a testament to their resiliency,” Mulgrew said.