When New York Mayor Bill de Blasio last month said he’s requiring all city students, teachers, and staff to show up to school this fall in-person, no exceptions, he stunned longtime observers of the nation’s largest public school system.

“You would think that online learning was some new frontier for the New York City Department of Education that had never been tried before,” said Tom Liam Lynch, a former teacher who is editor-in-chief of the parent-focused city website .

The reality, he and others say, is that the city has spent millions of dollars and much of the last decade leading the way on innovations in the realm of remote, blended, and personalized learning. For de Blasio to push for 100 percent in-person schooling, Lynch and others say, is a significant turnaround.

At the moment, more than six in 10 New York City students are still learning from home, but de Blasio on May 23 said that will soon come to an end, telling MSNBC’s , “You can’t have a full recovery without full-strength schools, everyone back, sitting in those classrooms, kids learning again.”

The change will affect about 1 million students.

For Lynch, who also directs education policy for the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, the announcement seemed to ignore educators’ efforts to strengthen the city’s distance learning capabilities — work that could have given students a leg up during the worst of the pandemic.

In 2010, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools Chancellor Joel Klein, the city’s Innovation Zone, or iZone, debuted with a ton of fanfare. At its heart was an experimental effort called iLearn, a blended learning system that sought to personalize instruction by allowing students in selected schools to learn remotely in many cases — schools used the system for everything from “occasional online credit recovery to full-blown blended learning and flipped-classroom models,” .

It debuted with 81 schools, a number that soon doubled.

iZone also gave 50 middle- and high-school leaders an opportunity to redesign their schools. And it incubated a middle-school math program, known as School of One (now called Teach to One), that allowed students to work independently online from within their school. A digital display, reminiscent of an airport “arriving flights” screen, directed students to individualized lessons from dozens of providers.

Among School of One’s most significant innovations was a back-end data system that gave teachers real-time reports for each student, guiding upcoming assignments and directing them to small groups for help. “It’s a model that seems certain to make us question assumptions about how we organize classrooms and schools,” the journal noted in 2011.

iZone’s high-tech appeal was “the easiest to grasp — and ‘iZone’ had ‘i’ in front of the name,” said Steven Hodas, who led the program until 2014. “But that was really just part of a theory of action that was about fundamentally rethinking time, space, and place.”

Sea change under de Blasio

iZone was expected to grow to 400 schools, but the program underwent what can only be described as a meltdown in 2014, after federal innovation grants dried up and de Blasio, a Democrat, became mayor. New Chancellor Carmen Fariña disbanded the office that oversaw the program, and soon several directors and staffers, including Hodas, resigned.

Simultaneously, Fariña worked with the city’s teachers union, United Federation of Teachers, to bring in its own “innovation program,” dubbed Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence, or PROSE.

The result: iZone’s budget shrank from $47 million in 2013 to $3.2 million in 2017, reported. It went from a staff of 65 to just 14.

Today, clicking on iZone’s URL delivers a saying it doesn’t exist.

Research on remote schooling is mixed. A 2019 by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center found that graduation rates at virtual and blended-learning schools were far lower than the national 85 percent average for public schools.

While have said iZone and similar ideas are promising for big-city systems, no large-scale evaluations of iZone have emerged since 2014. One small 2017 study by a graduate student at New York’s St. John’s University found that students in iLearn “blended learning” programs statistically significant greater mean scores in Algebra I Regents exams than their peers in traditional schools.

A few of the efforts, such as the personalized system under School of One, are still operating in a handful of schools, but observers say the effort has diminished in importance in the face of de Blasio’s new priorities, such as community schools and universal pre-K.

As for PROSE, a by the advocacy group StudentsFirstNY found that schools in the program displayed “limited innovation,” as well as “lackluster improvement,” producing lower reading and math scores than others in the city. It also said the program suffered from poor transparency, noting that the city took 14 months to respond — incompletely, as it turns out — to a public records request.

For Lynch, a parent of a city middle-schooler, the shift that took place around 2014 helps explain why New York, like other districts, has struggled to meet kids’ needs over the past year.

“This is not just a story of another big school district [that] just scrambled and tried to figure out online learning as best they could,” he said. “This was a system that had actually, infrastructurally been set up for online learning — and to scale it. …Who made the call to essentially disempower and, if not defund that work, to really just relegate it to the periphery? Because that makes what happened last March even more inexcusable. And it makes this announcement even more unacceptable.”

Sarah Cohodes, an economics and education professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said what’s most striking about de Blasio’s announcement is that it follows the city’s “huge investment” in getting devices and Internet access into students’ hands over the past year, even announcing a virtual end to snow days. “In my imagination, that was happening in the context of having some sort of remote infrastructure that could be turned on or off for more or fewer kids depending on the circumstances. So I’m not sure exactly what they are expecting those days to be like,” she said.

Longtime education researcher said losing remote learning will take a toll: “The great thing about New York has been that many different things have been available — alternative schools and alternative pathways to graduation. And some of those have actually been helped along by the development of pretty good online materials.”

Asked whether any schools would be allowed to operate remotely in the fall, city schools officials referred to the city’s reopening announcement. In it, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew says the union welcomes “the return to in-person instruction for all students in September.” But even Mulgrew has pleaded for a remote option, last month that the city should create “a small but efficient remote alternative for parents who still feel they need it.”

De Blasio isn’t the only leader cutting off remote learning this fall. Across the Hudson River, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on May 17 that the state’s public schools would similarly return to in-person instruction. In Connecticut, officials have said they “ the need to mandate” remote learning in the fall.

‘I think it’s crazy’

Meanwhile, at least six states have created iZones of their own, according to .

“Around the country I’m hearing about more states, and more districts, that are really integrating innovation into their core strategy,” said Joel Rose, who founded and led School of One in its heyday. “They’re saying, ‘Look, remote learning didn’t work for everyone, but it did work for some kids.’ And the question is, ‘What can we learn from those experiences for when kids come back?’”

He noted that so-called , modeled after iZone principles, have taken root in Texas and are “growing quite a bit in popularity.”

Rose, who now runs , a nonprofit that is working to expand the School of One model nationwide, said the organization has seen “a significant uptick in demand for what we do” since the pandemic began.

Hill, who founded the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington-Bothell, said many students have realized during the pandemic that school “is a pretty tough place for them to be. And to kind of ignore all that, I think, is going to further weaken the support base of public education.”

After his Morning Joe announcement, de Blasio told a news briefing, “It’s time for everyone to come back, it’s time for us all to be together, time to do things the way they were meant to be done.” But iZone’s Hodas, now a senior fellow at CRPE, took issue with the idea that online learning is somehow inferior.

“I think it’s crazy that it’s being positioned as purely a negative space,” he said. In New York as elsewhere, many students aren’t thrilled with the prospect of “schlepping back to these shitty, oppressive environments five days a week to do pretend life.”

Older students, he said, could be working or helping out with family duties. “They could be progressing at their own pace at different subjects, and they can do something that’s much more competency-based. And it’s just nuts that de Blasio is acting as if, again, for high school kids, being back in school is like the Holy Grail. It’s not, for a lot of people.”

As more Americans receive Covid-19 vaccines and schools move to reopen widely, leaders are doing their best to make sure everyone gets the memo: School is happening in-person this fall.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently , “We must prepare now for full in-person instruction come next school year.”

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy said in March he is “” schools across the state to return in-person in the fall, no exceptions. “We are expecting Monday through Friday, in-person, every school, every district,” he said.

Good luck with that.

Even as vaccination rates soar and the government authorizes access for adolescents, school districts nationwide are grappling with sometimes widespread suspicion and dissatisfaction over how they handled the pandemic, especially in communities of color. That’s forcing them to offer families an option that might have been unthinkable a year ago — and one that has a terrible track record: enrolling their children online this fall and continuing learning from home.

Dawn Williams, whose daughter will start first grade in August in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, said she’s seriously considering an online program. “Most of my friends that have children, their kids are still virtual,” she said.

So far it’s happening in just a fraction of the nation’s 13,500 districts. But those include a wide mix of rural and suburban districts, as well as large urban school systems like Albuquerque, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Dallas, Indianapolis, Nashville, Omaha, Richmond, and the District of Columbia, according to the University of Washington’s Center for the Reinvention of Public Education (CRPE).

In Colorado’s Jefferson County, the school district, responding to “high demand” from families, an online option in the fall. District spokesperson Cameron Bell said more than 700 students have enrolled so far, with at least 1,000 expected by August.

In Montgomery County, the largest school district in Maryland, officials are developing a virtual academy “to address both the students who may want to remain virtual for health reasons but also those who have thrived in virtual learning,” said spokesperson Gboyinde Onijala.

What’s going on here?

Much of this can be chalked up to simple consumer demand. One recent found that nearly 30 percent of parents would rely on virtual learning “indefinitely” going forward. That suggests a potential market of more than 15 million students.

Districts are listening. When RAND researchers surveyed about 320 public school leaders last October, they found that were either considering or actually planning to keep “one or more virtual schools” operating after the pandemic ends, said RAND’s Heather Schwartz.

“I expect that to hold, or even to increase somewhat based on early anecdotal indications that a sizable minority of students and parents prefer remote learning,” Schwartz said via email.

More recently, in early April, researchers at CRPE surveyed officials in 100 large urban school districts and found nearly identical results: 23, or just over one in five, plan to offer a remote option next fall.

District leaders told Schwartz and other researchers that their main motivation was “to be responsive to parent and student preferences” — and in no small part to improve sagging enrollments. of 33 states by The Associated Press and the education news site Chalkbeat found that public K-12 enrollment in 2020 dropped by more than half a million students, or 2 percent.

“You keep hearing this word: ‘thriving’”

As he talks these days to school leaders nationwide, education consultant John Bailey said he hears many of them say they plan to make online learning “a more permanent part of their offering to kids going forward.” A one-time U.S. Department of Education official who now advises the Walton Family Foundation, Bailey has supported the idea that reopening schools is safe. He said that while many educators acknowledge millions of students lost ground via distance learning, “for some kids, it’s working really well. So why not offer that going forward?”

Nationwide, families of color are keeping their children home at especially high rates. In Chicago, the district’s chief of school management told school board members late last month that most students are “learning virtually.” But about one in four Black high school students was absent from both in-person and remote learning in late April. Overall, only about two-thirds of high school students attended in-person classes on days they were expected in school, the Chicago Sun-Times .

At the same time, Asian fourth-graders attend school remotely at the of any group — 95 percent, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Eighth-graders attend at an even higher rate: 96 percent. Asian families have expressed fears about their children experiencing anti-Asian discrimination or even violence in the wake of the pandemic.

While state and local restrictions can play a part in attendance statistics like these, many families are simply voting with their feet, said Bree Dusseault, a practitioner in residence at CRPE.

“There’s still a really sizable population of students who, even when given the option to be in-person, aren’t taking it,” she said.

“You keep hearing this word: ‘thriving’ — particularly in families of color,” said Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools in Baltimore. “Districts have never had to wrestle with ‘How do we provide education in multiple formats?’ They thought this was a stopgap. Now what I think they’re finding is that there are many parents that were just fine with virtual learning.”

Anderson, a Black educator who is also a mother of three teens, said the past year has taught parents “that they have a voice at the table – and they are not being shy and retiring about letting people know what they want in terms of how they want their children to learn.”

Recent survey data suggest that Black, Hispanic and Asian parents are more likely than their white peers to say they prefer online learning. For instance, the journal recently noted data from early April that showed 60 percent of white parents have a preference for in-person learning, compared to just 25 percent of Black and Hispanic parents.

At the same time, Dusseault said, many parents of color see how badly education systems have served their kids in the past, with substandard instruction and .

When Anderson surveyed her three children recently, none wanted to go back to their Baltimore school this fall. They like learning from home and have been successful.

“I think my kids sometimes miss their friends,” she said. “But aside from that, I don’t have any of my three children saying right now, ‘Mom, I want to go back to school today or tomorrow.’ They have adapted to this.”

Anderson was quick to add that her kids “have every kind of technology possible,” as well as space at home to use it. All three have their own rooms, plus their home has a backyard. But whatever their situations, she said, “There are a lot of kids who are at home and they’re thriving. You can’t negate the success of those students and the opportunity that they have had to be separated from their peers and still do well academically.”

Williams, mother of the Maryland first-grader, said her daughter is already doing advanced work — and she’d like to keep it that way. Giving her child a chance to work virtually and independently is key.

“Students that are more advanced — and parents that have the choice — we’re going to keep our kids home,” she said. “Those kids are going to accelerate. They’re going to soar and they’re going to keep advancing.”

“School hesitancy” and safety

Vladimir Kogan, an Ohio State University political scientist who studies politics and public policy, said “school hesitancy” may in part be a function of the messages families hear — especially in places where teachers’ unions loudly demonstrated last year, enacting and the like to warn of the dangers of reopening schools.

“I think that messaging has definitely filtered down to the parents,” he said.

But has shown that when prevention strategies are in place in schools, transmission of the virus is typically lower than, or similar to, levels of community transmission, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As a result, public opinion is shifting. A February Pew found that 61 percent of Americans said K-12 schools that weren’t open for in-person instruction “should give a lot of consideration to the possibility that students will fall behind academically.” That’s up from 48 percent last July. And fewer Americans said schools should give a lot of consideration to the risk to teachers or students.

“I think the number of parents who are hesitant is going to go down pretty substantially,” Kogan said. “But I don’t think it’s going to go down to zero.”

Bailey, who recently summarizing research on safe school re-openings amid Covid fears, predicted that there will be a group of parents “who will probably never feel that it’s safe until there’s a vaccine for kids.”

The prognosis on vaccines seems promising: This week, both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved expanded use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children 12 to 15 years old. Pfizer also said it’ll ask the FDA for emergency authorization in September to administer its vaccine to children as young as 2 years old.

Both Johnson & Johnson and Moderna are conducting trials in children.The U.S. vaccine developer Novavax is also on children — its vaccine has a reported 96 percent efficacy rate in adults and is awaiting emergency use authorization in the U.S.

A “really terrible” track record for virtual schools

Kogan, the political scientist, worries that by relying on virtual schools, districts are embracing a well-studied — and failed — reform.

In a 2019 , researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center found that graduation rates at virtual and blended-learning schools were far lower than the national average for public schools. The review followed years of from researchers nationwide.

In 2016, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, along with other groups, issued “A Call to Action” to , saying far too many virtual schools “have experienced notable problems.”

At the student level, most of the dilemma lies in what’s required for students to be successful in virtual settings: huge amounts of self-control, motivation and discipline, said Kogan, who last January that found worse declines in reading achievement among Ohio third-graders in districts that used fully remote instruction.

The track record of these programs “was terrible before Covid,” Kogan said. “And I think it’s certainly the case that there are kids who do fine. But the districts are not saying, ‘We’re going to limit it only to kids who do fine.’”

To be fair, many educators get it. In its announcement of a “modified digital learning option,” the , district last month offered an official warning: “Digital learning is not optimal for every student. Some students did not do as well academically, socially, or emotionally in the digital learning environment.”

In the long term, Kogan said, his larger worry is that this could open the door to a two-tier education system: a bigger, functional one for students whose parents are comfortable sending them to school, and a smaller, inferior one “for kids whose parents are too scared and keep them home.”

The long-term damage, he said, “is going to be so devastating. It’s going to exacerbate all the inequalities that we already have.”

Anderson, the Baltimore educator and mother, acknowledged the dilemma, but emphasized it was nothing new: Millions of kids weren’t being served well before the pandemic. Here’s a chance for something better, especially for students of color who are already staying away in large numbers.

While leaders may insist that everyone attend in-person on the first day of school this fall, Anderson said, “I’m not hearing what is going to significantly shift over the summer that is going to make sure that these large numbers of families of color are going to suddenly show up in September.”