Enrollment in NYC public schools last year was 1.1 million. Today, it's 750,000, with almost two-thirds of those fully online. https://schoolcovidreportcard.health.ny.gov/#/districtData;bedsCodeId=300000

We know that the schools with more students in the classrooms serve populations that are mostly white and middle class, while those who are fully online are disproportionately nonwhite and lower income. https://newyork.edtrust.org/press-release/ed-trust-ny-analysis-finds-that-students-of-color-and-students-from-low-income-backgrounds-are-more-likely-to-rely-on-remote-learning/

It's true that in-person education is better than online in all kinds of ways, but that's irrelevant and unhelpful now -- it's a kind of willful denial of the reality that makes it harder than it needs to be to deal with the problems we are facing.

Most students in New York (as in many other parts of the country), and especially most of the most vulnerable students, *are* fully online, and will almost certainly continue to be for the rest of the school year. Making school work for them, means making it work online.

Resources that go into getting a few students in the classroom few days a week, mean less available for dealing with the (unquestionably real) challenges of online education for the majority of students who are doing that.

As @JoshuaMound points out, while advocates for reopening claim to be concerned about poor students, insisting on getting some (mostly white, higher-income) students into classrooms is more likely to widen educational disparities than narrow them. https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/neoliberal-education-reform-scapegoat-teachers-covid-19-reopening-school

Survey data suggests that the sorting of white, higher-income families into in-person and the lower-income, nonwhite majority into online, is likely to continue when/if families have the option of switching later in the year. https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2020/10/28/21537531/education-trust-poll-nyc-in-person-school

Here in NYC, a specific way commitment to reopening made problems worse is bad data. When parents surveyed about online vs hybrid, hybrid was default and parents told they only needed to return surveys if they wanted all-online. Goal was to nudge parents to choosing hybrid...

... but result was that schools started year with inflated estimate of number of kids who would be coming to school, since all non-responses were treated as preference for hybrid. This gave mayor good numbers to boast about, but made school-level planning even harder.

It's worth noting that while online education poses bigger problems for lower-income and immigrant families, they also may have good reasons to choose it - more likely to live with older relatives, more likely to have family members with asthma or other respiratory problems, etc.