Chalkbeat

Don’t scale back sports access, advocates and students tell NYC

2024-04-17T21:43:47+00:00

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In late 2022, New York City’s Public Schools Athletic League made a bold promise: By the following spring, every public high school student would have access to all 25 sports the league offers.

To reach that goal, officials proposed expanding a program called “individual access” that allows students without a particular sports team at their school to try out for that team at a nearby campus.

The expansion was a game-changer for schools like the Urban Assembly Bronx Academy of Letters that don’t have enough students to reliably field a wide variety of sports teams, said David Garcia-Rosen, the dean and athletic director of the 470-student school.

“In spring of 2023, every single kid in New York City, no matter where they went to school, had the opportunity to play whatever sport they wanted to play,” Garcia-Rosen said.

But Garcia-Rosen, a veteran advocate for sports equity in city schools, is worried that the Education Department is quietly laying the groundwork to scale back the initiative. And he’s gearing up for a fight. The dispute over individual access is the latest chapter in a long-running fight over sports equity in New York City schools.

Despite previously pledging to open individual access to “all” students, the PSAL updated its website in February to describe the individual access program as a “pilot” for students at schools with fewer than six teams in “targeted districts.”

That language is in line with the stipulations in a 2022 legal settlement about sports equity. But it excludes the vast majority of city students.

An Education Department spokesperson said the PSAL is now prioritizing individual access requests from kids in schools with the least access to sports. The spokesperson said roughly 1,500 students participated in individual access this year, but didn’t share how many kids participated last year.

Officials concluded that guaranteeing individual access beyond what was required by the legal settlement “moved us away” from the goal of increasing sports access for entire schools, the spokesperson said.

To better achieve that goal, officials have expanded the number of new teams by 222 over the last three years and created 20 shared-access programs between schools.

“There has been no scaling back of our commitment to providing equitable access to PSAL sports, and students and families have told us that they want access to teams at or close to their home school,” said spokesperson Nathaniel Styer.

But Garcia-Rosen said that approach demonstrates a “complete lack of understanding of how to solve the problem,” because equity isn’t achieved by simply expanding the number of teams. He noted that small schools often can’t sustain the teams because of their low student numbers.

Garcia-Rosen filed a complaint Wednesday with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights alleging that curtailing individual access disproportionately harms Black and Hispanic students.

A long-running fight for sports equity

Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately clustered in small schools like Bronx Letters, meaning they’ve historically had far less access on average to a wide variety of sports.

Just 38% of Black and Hispanic students go to a school with 20 or more teams, compared to 61% of students who are white, Asian, multiracial, or belong to other groups, according to research compiled by Garcia-Rosen.

A major milestone came in 2022, when the city agreed in a legal settlement to add 200 new teams in future years and expand a “shared access” program that allowed small schools in the same geographic area to combine sports programs.

The city also committed to offering individual access to students in schools with under six teams and couldn’t participate in shared sports programs because of their location.

But Garcia-Rosen argues that those steps alone won’t erase the equity issues.

That’s why universal individual access — what Garcia-Rosen calls the “holy grail of equity” — is so transformative.

“It’s really simple, and it’s done all over the country,” he said. “If you go to a school that doesn’t have the team you want to play, you could try out [at] another school in the district.”

Students, educators report positive results

Students at Bronx Letters, a public school for students in grades 6-12, are accustomed to not knowing year to year whether there will be enough interested students to field a given team.

This school year, Bronx Letters didn’t have enough kids for a girls basketball team.

But 15-year-old sophomore Jayla Jerez, an avid player, was able to join the team at South Bronx Prep, just a five-minute walk from her school, through the individual access program.

“It was just a great experience,” she said. “I felt good to be able to play and get more used to being on the court and being more open to socializing with people.”

Bronx Academy of Letters student Jayla Jerez, wearing number 20, playing on the South Bronx Prep basketball team through the city's individual access program.

Jerez values basketball and wants to keep playing. If she can’t participate through individual access, she might have to consider transferring schools, she said — an option she is not relishing.

Losing a guarantee to individual access for all students could also change how schools communicate with families about sports options, he said. Last year, Garcia-Rosen could promise prospective families that their kid would have access to every PSAL sport at Bronx Letters. He even printed a banner advertising that option.

Without that same assurance for next year, he said, “when a family comes to pick a high school, I can’t guarantee them that they come to this school and have access to every sport.”

Setting up the individual access program requires clearing some administrative and logistical hurdles, but administrators have largely reported positive results, Garcia-Rosen found.

He said he reached out to athletic directors and principals across the city, and 49 of the 51 who responded said they supported maintaining universal individual access.

One athletic director from Manhattan, who asked to speak on the condition of anonymity, told him “it has definitely taken a lot of work to get this program off the ground but it is working and students are playing. It will only get better as we invest in it more!”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools disband teaching and learning division, which oversees Banks’ top literacy initiative

2024-03-25T20:34:00+00:00

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In a major shakeup, the city’s Education Department is disbanding its division of teaching and learning, which oversees schools Chancellor David Banks’ centerpiece literacy initiative.

The deputy chancellor who leads that department is leaving at the end of the school year, according to a letter Banks sent to Education Department staff on Monday.

The announcement of Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning Carolyne Quintana’s departure took some staff by surprise. Quintana has been supervising Banks’ top education priority to reshape how the city’s elementary schools teach children to read, mandating that all elementary schools across the five boroughs are using one of three curriculums by next school year. The department has also been working to overhaul high school algebra programs.

“We are moving forward with dissolving the Division of Teaching & Learning and integrating its work into the Division of School Leadership under the leadership of Deputy Chancellor Dr. Danika Rux,” Banks wrote in a Monday letter to Education Department staff.

Banks signaled that the move was designed to put resources closer to schools — a pledge he made with Mayor Eric Adams when he first took the helm of the nation’s largest school district more than two years ago. He suggested some of the staff could be placed under the purview of local superintendents, who directly supervise principals.

The shakeup follows other efforts to give superintendents more power, with Banks previously assigning other Education Department staff who work in central offices to local superintendents’ offices.

“The superintendents are clearly in charge, and the content experts are subordinate,” one staffer who works in a superintendent’s office wrote in a text message, adding that they were “shocked” to learn of Quintana’s departure.

Shakeup could be logical for next phase of literacy push

Some observers are optimistic that the restructuring could help create clearer lines of authority and streamline the implementation of the curriculum changes. Before the latest shakeup, decisions about which curriculums to mandate and how to set up teacher training came from Quintana’s division. But the local superintendents who work with principals to implement those curriculums answer to Rux, the deputy chancellor responsible for school leadership.

There are challenges “having decision making split between the curricular choices and the implementation of those across two different deputy chancellors,” said Evan Stone, the CEO and co-founder of Educators for Excellence, a teacher advocacy group. The organization supported the Education Department’s push for a curriculum mandate, and Stone said Quintana is an “incredible leader.”

Another source involved with implementing the NYC Reads initiative said shifting responsibility for the program closer to the superintendents was logical now that districts have all chosen which curriculum to use and are focused on the daily work of helping schools adjust.

“This makes complete sense in terms of managing the NYC Reads initiative in particular,” said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Now we’re more into the implementation … and that falls on the superintendents.”

But other observers said that they are concerned that the reorganization will wind up shuffling many of the system’s literacy experts into superintendent offices where those leaders may not be able to deploy them as effectively. Education Department officials have not said how many staffers will remain in central offices or sent to local superintendents.

“Many of these district superintendents are just getting on board [with the new reading curriculums] and literacy is not necessarily their field of expertise,” said Susan Neuman, a professor at New York University who serves on the city’s literacy advisory council. She added the literacy council wasn’t in the loop on the shakeup which “came out of nowhere for us.”

Another department employee who works in a superintendent’s office said change could deliver needed manpower to help schools implement new curriculums.

“We don’t have the people to do that effectively on top of everything else,” the staffer said. Still, they added it was unclear who would be sent to their office and whether they would have relevant expertise.

The reorganization also comes at a delicate moment for Banks’ signature literacy initiative. The second half of the city’s districts will begin implementing the mandated curriculums in September, which requires a massive effort to train thousands of teachers. The initial rollout, which began this school year, has been bumpy so far with some teachers reporting that they have not received sufficient training on the new curriculum materials.

The overhaul of the high school algebra curriculum, which has drawn mixed reactions from educators, is also poised to expand next year.

Layoffs not expected

In his letter to Education Department staff, Banks indicated that the restructuring would not result in layoffs.

“I know change is hard,” Banks wrote. “I want to assure you that this restructuring is not a negative reflection of your work. In fact, we want to make sure that your hard work is as close to our students as possible.”

The teaching and learning division is staffed by about 2,000 people. The division includes hundreds of staff who oversee support for special education and multilingual learners; those people will not move to superintendent offices and will instead report to Rux.

Quintana did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the circumstances of her departure or whether she has another job lined up. The New York Post previously reported that Quintana was frustrated that she was paid less than a male deputy chancellor, though an Education Department spokesperson said that did not play a role in her departure.

“I want to thank the dedicated team of the Division of Teaching & Learning for their tireless work to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of students daily,” Quintana wrote in a statement. “It was an honor to lead you, and I will always be your ally in fighting for educational equity. I look forward to supporting this transition.”

Banks indicated the department’s Chief of School Support Miatheresa Pate will oversee the restructuring effort and will be the “interim executive chief” of teaching and learning during the transition period. The superintendent of Bronx District 10, Maribel Hulla, will move into the chief of school support role.

The chancellor indicated that Quintana will spend the remainder of the school year helping with the transition and advising him on “other key projects.”

Do you have inside details about the shakeup? Send us a tip to ny.tips@chalkbeat.org

Michael Elsen-Rooney contributed to this story.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC may encourage principals to hire teachers over other roles to reduce class sizes

2024-02-29T23:28:24+00:00

Principals with vacant positions next year might start feeling more pressure from the city to hire teachers over other roles to comply with the state’s class size law, officials said Thursday at a New York City Council hearing.

The law, passed by the state legislature in 2022, requires that kindergarten to third grade classrooms have 20 or fewer students, fourth to eighth grade classes have no more than 23 students, and high schools classes have 25 or fewer. The law takes effect in phases – requiring that 20% of classrooms across the city meet the mandates by this September, and 40% satisfy the requirements by September 2025. The entire city will have to be in compliance by September 2028.

So far, the city’s Education Department hasn’t had much trouble complying. Roughly 40% of classrooms across the city are currently at or below the caps, officials testified Thursday.

But to make sure the city is still in compliance by next September, and begin preparing for the stricter requirements in coming years, the department is considering some policy changes next school year, Deputy Chancellor for Operations Emma Vadehra testified on Thursday.

One of those changes may be “asking schools to prioritize hiring teachers over other positions” when they have vacancies, Vadehra said.

That could mark a significant shift in a system where principals have traditionally had wide latitude to manage their hiring decisions and decide how to distribute their dollars among classroom teachers and other positions including aides, administrators, deans, and counselors and social workers.

First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg said, pushing school hiring decisions “top-down” would be “overrid[ing] the judgment of the people we want making those judgments.”

Officials didn’t offer many details on how that directive would work. Schools already have some hiring restrictions unrelated to the new class size law, such as maintaining the mandated number of teachers and paraprofessionals for students with disabilities and ensuring they have teachers for required subjects.

The plan will need to be approved by the teachers and principals unions, and officials aim to communicate plans to principals by this spring before they have to begin hiring for next year, Vadehra said.

Henry Rubio, the president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the union representing principals, expressed concerns about the idea, calling it “tremendously short-sighted.”

In addition to more teachers, schools also need “support staff, paraprofessionals, and supervisors to maintain effective instruction and provide the adequate professional development that a school’s staff needs,” he said. “Otherwise, the academic gains from smaller class sizes may be eroded since new teachers and other staff will require more support given their lack of experience.”

Mike Sill, the assistant secretary at the United Federation of Teachers, said the union “like[s] the concept in general,” but there are “caveats.”

Some schools might need more counselors or deans, he said. “It’s a half-baked plan at this point.”

Education Department previews other potential changes next year

Officials said they are considering a recommendation from a recently-convened working group to restrict how schools can spend $215 million in funding through a state program called Contracts for Excellence, or C4E.

C4E money is distributed by the city, based on the level of student need at a school, measured by the number of low-income and academically struggling students, as well as English Language Learners and kids with disabilities.

Currently, schools that receive C4E money can use it for reducing class sizes, launching professional development programs to improve teacher quality, offering full-day pre-Kindergarten classes, and running programs for English Language Learners, among other things.

Officials on Thursday said they’re considering restricting that funding so it can only be used to lower class sizes.

More than 1,500 schools got C4E money this year, with an average of nearly $141,000 per school.

Bigger changes are ahead

The challenges facing the Education Department are going to grow as the class size law continues to phase in.

Officials estimate that the city will need to increase its teaching force, which currently stands at around 77,000, by between 10,000 and 12,000 to fully comply with the law. That will cost between $1.4 to $1.9 billion a year, according to the Education Department’s estimates, and require a significant boost in hiring at a time when the number of new teachers entering the workforce is shrinking. The Education Department also estimates that there are about 500 schools that will need more classrooms than they currently have in their buildings to meet the class size standards. Some schools that only need one or two extra classrooms might be able to shift around existing space. But other schools need as many as 78 additional classrooms, Vadehra said.

The School Construction Authority, which is in charge of building new facilities, estimated that it will cost between $22 and $27 billion to build all the new facilities needed to meet the class size mandates – a budget far greater than is currently slotted in the SCA’s capital plan.

State legislators have argued that the Education Department doesn’t need any additional funding to comply with the law because Foundation Aid from the state increased by more than $1 billion in recent years. But Education Department officials say they’ve already committed that money to bolstering school budgets, increasing funding for low-income and homeless students, and paying for increasing mandated costs for charter schools and special education.

Adding to the complexity, the schools with the largest class sizes currently are more likely to have larger concentrations of students from affluent families, creating concerns that the city could have to shift resources away from schools with needier populations to those with lower levels of student need.

One of the city’s cheapest options for reducing class sizes citywide would be capping enrollment at the most overcrowded schools, and redirecting students to schools with more room and lower class sizes. But that policy would likely spur significant pushback from parents, since many of the schools with the largest class sizes are among the city’s most in-demand, especially at the high school level, where students have the greatest freedom to apply to schools across the city.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

When schools assign substitutes the wrong status, the error suppresses their pay

2024-01-31T10:00:00+00:00

This story was published in partnership with New York Focus, a non-profit news site investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter here.

This is the second installment in a two-part series reported with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. You can read the first part here.

When the Queens public school where she was working assigned Antonietta Auriemma to seven classroom sections, she realized something was wrong.

Between January and June 2023, Auriemma, a substitute teacher, filled in for two different teachers on long-term leaves of absence, on top of extra classroom periods as needed.

According to her handbook, she should have been classified as a “long-term sub” — and qualified for the requisite pay and benefits.

In the nation’s largest public school system, most substitute teachers work day-to-day, filling in for short-term absences at a fixed daily rate of roughly $200. But amid a teacher shortage made worse since the pandemic spurred educators to flee in droves, more and more New York City schools have come to rely on substitutes on longer-term assignments. Because they are more like regular teachers, these long-term subs are supposed to earn around $100 extra per day, which can add up to roughly $25,000 more per year, according to the teachers union. Some accrue sick time, vacation time, and even get health insurance.

Auriemma wasn’t receiving any of that.

“I was basically a full-time teacher,” Auriemma told New York Focus. “I was lesson planning for these classes, entering grades for these students, speaking to parents for parent engagement, all while making the [lower] sub pay of $200 a day.”

For years, subs like Auriemma have been underpaid for their long-term services — a violation of the New York City Department of Education’s teacher contract with the United Federation of Teachers, or UFT.

Interviews with 10 former and current substitute teachers or substitute paraprofessionals suggest that the practice is systematic and widespread across the city, and that since the pandemic began, violations may have increased. In a Sept. 11, 2023, UFT executive board meeting, Mark Collins, the union’s grievance director, stated that schools paying substitutes at an incorrect rate is “probably the most common grievance we have in the city.” A UFT spokesperson confirmed that it is one of the top grievances in the union.

Nearly all the interviewed substitutes, whose labor spans multiple city boroughs, said they knew of schools that underpaid subs because of misclassification. Five of them said they had filed grievances related to these issues; three have won back pay as a result, while the others’ grievances are still pending resolution.

Those who don’t grieve their wage shortages may choose not to because they’re unaware of the contract provisions. Others, because of their relative precarity: Many subs depend on the work as their primary income and cannot miss days for fear of falling behind on bills. Six subs described a culture of retaliation that might get them fired or suddenly removed from the classroom if they complain.

“Once you file, you’re essentially blacklisted at a school.”
JOE DIODATO, SUB WHO FILED A LABOR GRIEVANCE

Even if subs get to stay in the same school, they might get moved from classroom to classroom to preserve their place in the arcane classification system that keeps pay down. And when teachers get shuffled, students suffer.

Beth Ellor, who retired from full-time teaching in 2009, has subbed regularly since. She said she covered a class whose students blamed themselves for their lack of a regular teacher.

“They said, ‘Everybody hates us. Nobody wants to stay with us. We are a terrible class,’” Ellor recounted. Later, she found out that another substitute teacher had previously worked 27 days with that class before being moved to another assignment.

Ellor believes it was done to prevent that substitute from achieving the higher-paying status.

Asked about the problem, Education Department spokesperson Jenna Lyle acknowledged the “critical support” that subs provided during the pandemic.

“Thanks to temporary stimulus funding, we were able to provide additional financial support to schools to take on the additional costs of hiring more substitutes and have worked with the UFT and individual employees to address any outstanding pay issues from this period,” Lyle wrote in an email.

She declined to comment on the widespread, sometimes intentional practice of misclassifying subs, which existed before the outbreak of COVID.

In the education system, it’s not uncommon for subs to fall through the cracks, said David Bloomfield, an education law professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. “Those cracks widened during the pandemic,” he said. “This seems like a situation that hasn’t been given adequate attention by either the union or the central administration.”

Pay scale for subs varies by assignment length

The teachers union contract establishes various letter-coded “statuses” of service to which a substitute teacher can be assigned.

The most common sub classification, “O-status,” is for day-to-day subs who cover short-term absences. Subs are assigned “Z-status” or “Q-status” when working full-time for schools, filling in for longer-term teacher absences or vacancies. Those subs receive higher pay and limited benefits that are unavailable to O-status subs. The Education Department’s payroll system automatically grants the higher-paying Z-status to substitutes so long as they teach a class without an absence for 30 days.

When subs are told to miss a day, it resets the clock.

“What happens is a lot of principals know that [subs] get paid more money” under higher tiers of sub service, said a former school payroll secretary, who asked to remain anonymous because she still works in the school system and fears retaliation. “They don’t want to pay them the higher status, so they’ll tell a sub, don’t come in on this day, for whatever reason, and that defers them back to the old status so they can’t get paid more money.”

“You want to use money to hire more teachers, more supplies, or to get air conditioners. Nobody even thinks of subs.”
JOHN WENK, FORMER PRINCIPAL IN MANHATTAN

The substitutes who spoke to New York Focus described a widespread practice of either denying qualified substitutes Q- or Z-status, actively preventing subs from qualifying, or displaying incompetence in staffing subs under the appropriate status.

“It’s a known thing that principals have tight budgets … and [forcing a missed day] is one way they cut corners in saving money,” said the former payroll secretary. “It doesn’t even get discussed.”

When Joe Diodato subbed for a semester at an elementary school in the Bronx, it found a way to underpay him — without forcing a missed day.

Instead, according to documents Diodato shared with New York Focus, the school periodically changed the code in the payroll system associated with his work assignment. The action incorrectly made it seem like he wasn’t teaching the same class over the course of his employment, a condition required to earn Z-status.

Diodato didn’t learn about the higher-paying sub statuses until a couple months into the job. When he asked his payroll secretary about them, they said he didn’t qualify.

“Every day I came in I documented what I did,” Diodato explained. “I saved my classroom Zoom meetings, I saved my Google Classroom posts, my parent engagement. Everything that showed I did the job of a classroom teacher, I saved.”

At the end of the year, he used his records to file a 187-page grievance. He eventually won nearly $6,000 in a settlement with the Education Department.

Joe Diodato won nearly $6,000 in a settlement with the DOE. He’s now a full-time teacher.

Diodato intentionally waited for the school year to run out before filing his grievance. “Once you file,” he said, “you’re essentially blacklisted at a school.”

Now a full-time teacher, Diodato runs a private Facebook group for substitutes and a blog about the city Department of Education. He believes that more substitutes have likely been filing grievances on long-term status issues since the pandemic began, when the DOE increased its reliance on subs. But most violations, several subs explained, likely go unchallenged.

Without the higher pay and benefits, subs often quit mid-assignment, Diodato said.

Several subs who spoke to New York Focus requested anonymity because they were pursuing full-time teaching positions at their schools. They described a common belief that contesting their status would endanger their chances of full-time employment — or get them fired from their temporary positions.

One substitute, who requested anonymity, subbed regularly at a high school for seven years until she tried to claim increased benefits and wages.

When the sub challenged a principal’s reasoning as to why she could not earn Z-status, “she fired me on the spot,” the sub said. “She said, ‘You are on my last nerve … Yeah, I lied to you. I know what the rules are … but I’m the principal and I make the decisions, and you’re just a sub.’”

John Wenk, a former principal of a Manhattan high school, said that retaliation against subs is unsurprising behavior for some principals and can be done with impunity.

A principal, he explained, is free “to get rid of the sub for any reason whatsoever.”

“I’ve seen that happen,” said the former payroll secretary. But in most cases, she said, subs don’t bring the issues up in the first place. “They need a job. They need money,” she said, “so they’re not going to rock the boat.”

A UFT spokesperson acknowledged that most subs grieve pay violations after their assignment has finished, presumably out of fear of retaliation. They emphasized, however, that subs are already covered by contractual and legal anti-retaliation rules, and that the union is trying to add further protections so they are comfortable filing grievances as soon as the violation occurs.

Pointing fingers at Education Department red tape

Although it falls on individual school payroll secretaries, principals, and administrators to carry out pay violations, some argue that the DOE’s bureaucracy is to blame.

The money to pay substitutes comes from the DOE central administration, but once schools receive it, principals can use the money however they please. Operating under strained resources, with dozens of budgetary items to attend to, a principal may be incentivized to use the money intended for subs on resources deemed more necessary.

“You want to use that money to hire more teachers, or for more extracurricular activities, more supplies, or to get air conditioners,” Wenk said. “Nobody is thinking about this problem. Nobody even thinks of subs.”

Joe Diodato in the South Bronx. Though he's now a full-time teacher, he still runs a Facebook group for subs.

Bloomfield believes principals and individual schools are not equipped to deal with the problem in the first place.

“Principals have neither the expertise nor the budgetary acumen to make the substitute puzzle pieces fit together with all the other pressures they’re under,” he said. “It’s therefore incumbent on the central administration, both the DOE and the city, to offer clear guidance consistent with union contracts and other legal provisions to assist in filling these positions.”

A UFT spokesperson said the union has been working to shift the burden of ensuring correct pay from the subs to the Education Department. The spokesperson referenced an agreement the union won in recent contract negotiations to establish guidance to re-train and educate administrative staff on substitute hiring — to ensure correct classification, pay, and health coverage.

But some subs told New York Focus that they attribute the ubiquity of pay violations in part to the UFT’s inadequate representation of substitutes.

“While [UFT reps] seem to be helpful and they want to be that point of contact for when situations need to be escalated, a lot of them are just at a loss,” said a former substitute teacher in Bushwick, Brooklyn, who requested anonymity.

“We disagree that UFT reps are ‘at a loss,’” a teachers union spokesperson wrote in a statement. They noted that any substitute can receive immediate representation for a grievance.

Bloomfield sees the problem as baked into the DOE’s treatment of its workforce.

“Just that very term ‘substitute’ reeks of second-class citizenship in the personnel constellation,” he said. “They’re an afterthought.”

Teddy Ostrow is a journalist from Brooklyn. He was the host of The Upsurge podcast and his work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, In These Times, and elsewhere.

In NYC schools, substitute teachers are systematically denied COVID sick pay

2024-01-29T10:00:00+00:00

This story was published in partnership with New York Focus, a non-profit news site investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter here.

This is the first installment in a two-part series reported with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Shane Lorenzen finally caught COVID days before Christmas in 2022.

A substitute teacher in New York City, he knew the state offered paid COVID leave to public employees — a key protection for essential workers put in place early in the pandemic. But when he asked his school payroll secretary about it, she informed him that as a sub, he didn’t qualify.

Like thousands of substitutes, Lorenzen helped prop up the city’s education system throughout the pandemic. He signed up in March 2020 to staff one of the education centers for the children of health care professionals, transit workers, and other frontline employees when regular schools were closed to other kids. During the omicron wave in January 2022, he was in the classroom as thousands of teachers went on sick leave.

When Lorenzen tested positive himself, the denial of paid leave felt like a slap in the face. He tried to insist — and was asked not to come back to his school.

Substitutes have been entitled to paid COVID leave since the state mandated the benefit in 2020, the New York state Department of Labor confirmed. But many subs assumed they didn’t qualify and never requested the benefit. And in New York City, many were denied even if they did ask.

The city Department of Education instructed schools to exclude nearly all substitute teachers and substitute paraprofessionals from the benefit, according to internal emails New York Focus obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request.

“Generally speaking substitutes … would not be eligible to receive the excused leave at full pay for up to two weeks if they needed to quarantine,” the DOE advised schools in an email. “They would not be paid for any time not worked.”

“I got COVID recently, and last year,” said one former substitute teacher in Bushwick who requested anonymity out of fear of employer retaliation. “[COVID leave] wasn’t a conversation that was had between me and the school.”

An education department spokesperson confirmed that during the pandemic, staff received guidance indicating that per diem workers — the teachers and paraprofessionals employed on a day-to-day basis who make up the majority of the substitute workforce — do not qualify for sick leave or other benefits normally provided to full-time staff. The spokesperson later contradicted this guidance, telling New York Focus in a phone call that subs could receive paid COVID leave if they provided a “quarantine order,” as required by the March 2020 state law.

Asked to elaborate, the department did not acknowledge the contradiction, only reiterating that per diems were not included in its guidance for schools.

The state Labor Department confirmed that per diem workers are included in the mandate.

“NYC DOE (including substitute teachers or sub paraprofessionals) qualify for paid COVID leave,” the Labor Department press office wrote. The DOE did not respond to the state agency’s apparently contradictory interpretation of the law.

Among subs, the lack of support has added to a sense that the school system sees them as disposable — even after they stepped up to help the city in a time of great need.

“I saw a couple of my coworkers get sick and get taken out in an ambulance, and I never saw them again,” said Lorenzen, recalling the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic’s early days. “And they were subs. They were subs or paras.”

While much attention has been paid to the sacrifices that full-time teachers made and the harms that students sustained during the pandemic, substitutes like Lorenzen played a critical role in holding the system together.

As sickness, refusal to abide by vaccine mandates, and burnout pushed thousands of teachers out of their posts, the city’s teacher attrition rate reached a decade high in 2022, with 2,000 fewer teachers in the system than five years earlier. Full-time teachers are still calling out sick at higher rates than before the pandemic, and the crisis may worsen as the United States experiences one of the largest surges in COVID cases since 2020, with New York flagged as a hot zone by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a public resolution addressing schools’ difficulties in hiring substitutes, the United Federation of Teachers recently asked the DOE to make nominations for substitute teachers and sub paras more flexible, and to offer subs pay differentials in “hard-to-staff” schools.

But while full-time teachers are still being offered COVID leave, subs remain in the lurch.

“There’s no safety net for me,” said the former Bushwick sub. “It was disappointing because there was this whole chatter about ‘essential workers,’ but it just felt like I wasn’t getting taken care of as a worker in the city.”

The DOE did not respond to requests for the number of substitutes in the city system, nor how many of them got sick with COVID. But based on broader figures — over 75% of Americans have contracted the virus at least once; over 35,000 short-term substitute teachers work in New York state; and well over 100,000 COVID cases have been confirmed among DOE staff since September 2020 — it’s likely that thousands of New York City substitutes have contracted the virus.

Although some subs work at their schools on longer-term appointments, many are still paid by the day — usually at a $200 rate. They typically don’t get employer-funded health insurance or paid sick days. But in March 2020 — when Lorenzen became a sub — the state passed a law, which is still in effect, granting some private and all public sector workers between five and 14 days of paid sick leave for Covid isolation and precautionary quarantines.

During severe coronavirus surges, DOE administrators tasked with answering COVID leave questions advised school staff that most substitutes did not qualify for paid COVID leave in at least 57 responses, according to emails New York Focus obtained via FOIL. (Initial senders’ names were redacted, but the number of threads suggests that dozens of schools inquired about the issue.)

Just four complaints were filed against the DOE for failing to provide substitutes paid COVID leave, according to Labor Department officials, who declined to provide further details about the cases. DOE officials said they received only one related complaint from the Labor Department, which was promptly addressed.

As teachers called out sick, schools grew increasingly desperate to place subs in classrooms, many in longer-term assignments. The DOE resorted to offering “special financial incentives” to subs when COVID rates were highest — up to $100 extra per day, according to emails sent to substitutes and obtained by New York Focus.

According to Lorenzen, there were periods during bad COVID surges, like the omicron wave, when most of the teachers in his school were substitutes. Others described a similar reliance.

“We reopened the schools back up and kept them open,” said Joe Diodato, a full-time teacher who subbed for a year and a half in the Bronx beginning in the winter of 2020. “It only happened because of subs.”

While subs often teach to supplement other jobs, some rely on substitute teaching as their primary source of income. From the three days Lorenzen was absent due to COVID isolation, he lost $615.75 from his paycheck. Other subs may have lost north of $2,800.

“Earned sick days are particularly important for low-wage workers who, absent sick leave, lack the savings, access to credit or assets needed to buffer against lost earnings if they need to take time off,” wrote Hilary Wething, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute who co-authored a report on state paid sick leave policies, in an email to New York Focus.

Paid leave can also protect the health of other staff and students by keeping people home when they’re sick. One substitute at a school in Brooklyn, who requested anonymity, said that he felt forced to work while down with the flu in order to pay his bills.

“I endured the whole week of just being sick,” he said. “I could not even speak, and I just did the job.”

When his school’s payroll secretary told Jack Ganley he was ineligible for leave, a teachers union representative instructed him to file a complaint with the Labor Department. Ganley, a substitute paraprofessional at a Brooklyn elementary school, decided not to file a complaint — or even raise the issue with school administrators.

“I can guarantee what the response would be, which would be we can’t help you,” Ganley said.

Multiple workers described a culture of retaliation in New York City public schools, with little recourse available to subs who are fired for filing grievances or otherwise challenging school administrators. Many of the subs who spoke to New York Focus requested anonymity for that reason.

Shane Lorenzen spoke out when he did not receive COVID sick pay.

Lorenzen was the only substitute interviewed who made a persistent attempt to claim his benefits.

When Lorenzen got sick, he emailed Nelson Mandela School for Social Justice in Crown Heights, where he was substitute teaching full-time. Aware of the March 2020 law, Lorenzen made sure to mention COVID leave in his initial communication.

“I’m hoping that at this point I am entitled to sick pay, as I cannot afford to take time off, but do not want to come in if I am still symptomatic,” wrote Lorenzen in a December 20, 2022, email, reviewed by New York Focus, to Nelson Mandela’s payroll secretary and principal.

He tested positive the next day and stayed home for the last three days before winter break.

The payroll secretary wished him well, but ignored his inquiry regarding sick leave.

After winter recess ended, Lorenzen returned to the classroom and asked the school repeatedly whether he would receive pay for the missed days. The school eventually said he wouldn’t because he wasn’t a full-time employee, though documents he provided to New York Focus show he was indeed working as a full-time substitute.

But it shouldn’t have mattered, Lorenzen believed. He shared with the school a public personnel memo from the DOE stating that part-time workers qualified for the leave, too. According to a United Federation of Teachers spokesperson, subs have previously won their paid sick days through the union grievance process by citing the memo.

In a conversation on January 9, 2023, a recording of which was shared with New York Focus, Nelson Mandela principal Matthew Anderson told Lorenzen that the problem was technical: Because of an issue with payroll codes, the school was operationally incapable of releasing the benefits. Anderson did not respond to multiple email requests for comment.

It seems the principal’s hands were tied. The Education Department did not appear to have distributed the appropriate codes for per diem employees, payroll memos obtained through a public records request confirmed. Only “long-term substitutes” classified as “part-time” — rather than “per diem” — workers qualified for COVID leave, as officials told schools in dozens of emailed messages.

Lorenzen kept on insisting, sending email after email. Then, less than two weeks after returning from winter recess, an assistant principal informed him that it would be his last day at Nelson Mandela. Originally, Lorenzen said, his position was supposed to last until June.

Anderson, the principal, told Lorenzen that he was being let go for budgetary reasons and that the school had teachers returning to fill his position, according to a recording of their meeting that day. A DOE spokesperson noted that terminations of subs’ positions are typical upon the return of a regular staff member or a shift in school needs, especially during the pandemic.

When Lorenzen suggested that the school was retaliating against him, Anderson chided him for being confrontational.

“I don’t have anything to do with the money you’re missing,” he said. “Continue with the process and you’ll get your money. That’s an issue with the city and central services.”

Lorenzen filed a complaint with the Labor Department shortly after he lost his position, but he has not heard back.

Nearly a year later, he’s still waiting to receive his benefits.

Teddy Ostrow is a journalist from Brooklyn. He was the host of The Upsurge podcast and his work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, In These Times, and elsewhere.

NYC rolls out long-awaited school bus tracking app

2024-01-19T23:38:34+00:00

New York City is finally rolling out a long-awaited school bus GPS app citywide – four and a half years after officials first announced the plan.

The NYC School Bus App, developed in partnership with the rideshare company Via, allows caregivers of the roughly 150,000 students who ride a school bus every day to track their kids’ vehicles in real time. The sprawling school bus system, which serves tens of thousands of students with disabilities, often subjects students to hours-long rides, delays, and no-show buses. In the past, parents often had to repeatedly call bus companies to track down missing buses.

Education Department officials first announced the five-year, $36 million contract with Via in summer 2019. They said at the time the app would roll out citywide in the 2020-21 school year. Those plans were scuttled by the COVID pandemic, but even after the full return of in-person learning in fall 2021, it took two-and-a-half more years to get the app up and running citywide.

Mayor Eric Adams and schools Chancellor David Banks struck a celebratory note in a press release announcing the citywide rollout.

“I’m thrilled to be launching this system for families across the city and to provide peace of mind to parents as they send their babies off to school each day,” Banks said.

Lori Podvesker, a parent and director of disability and education policy at IncludeNYC, said launching the bus-tracking app was long overdue.

She often relies on text messages with a bus attendant to get a heads-up on when her son, Jack, will be picked up and dropped off each day from his District 75 program, which serves students with more significant disabilities.

“Knowing that I can access this information helps build trust,” Podvesker said.

She recalled an incident several years ago when Jack’s bus didn’t turn up and she frantically called the bus company, which didn’t answer the phone. When Podvesker called the Education Department’s transportation office, she was placed on hold.

“It is so nerve-wracking — especially as a parent of a kid with intellectual disabilities who’s nonverbal. You just freak out,” she said.

One Staten Island parent in 2021 resorted to slapping an Airtag on her elementary school daughter in lieu of working GPS on the school bus.

Podvesker welcomes the new app, but she wasn’t sure if it’s working yet for her son’s bus route, which ferries him from Downtown Brooklyn to the Lower East Side. When she logged into the app on Friday, a page came up that said, “No activity so far. We hope to see you soon!”

Still, she noted her son was already off the bus when she checked.

Indeed, officials’ claims of a full citywide rollout come with several big caveats.

First, the app only works if drivers sign up for the program – and currently about 25% of the city’s bus drivers aren’t signed up, according to officials. In the press release, officials advised caregivers whose kids’ drivers aren’t subscribed to contact the bus company and ask them to help.

An Education Department spokesperson said drivers are required to sign up and can be fined if they don’t. Use of the app was a part of the protracted contract negotiations with the city’s largest school bus drivers union that threatened to throw the school bus system into chaos last fall, the spokesperson added. While negotiations were underway, union drivers were instructed not to use the app, delaying the rollout, the spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, the city’s largest school bus drivers union, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Another obstacle for many families is that the app requires a New York City Schools Account, or NYCSA. Roughly a third of the city’s public school families weren’t linked to an account as of summer 2023. And for the tens of thousands of charter and private school students who also ride city school buses, signing up for a NYCSA is difficult or impossible, parents and advocates said.

A 2022 Education Department manual said private school students are “ineligible” for the accounts, and that charter school students can get one but have to go through a more onerous process.

Manhattan parent Naomi Peña said she lost access to her NYCSA when her son transferred to a private school because the Education Department couldn’t accommodate his learning disability. Her son still relies on city school buses, but she can’t access the new app.

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” she said. “When busing routes get switched … we are left scrambling waiting for the new bus driver or matron to call us.”

An Education Department spokesperson said the agency is working with individual charter and private schools to give families access to NYCSA logins.

The bus tracking app is also supposed to have a feature that allows school administrators to track the buses of their students.

The school bus tracking app is the Education Department’s second recent high-profile foray into developing software to support families. The agency recently released its own grades, attendance and messaging app, following a catastrophic hack of Skedula, a widely used online gradebook run by an outside vendor.

To allay concerns about privacy, officials said they will “share the minimum required data, will require highly secure logins for all users, and will perform data encryption and continuous security testing on the system.”

The Via app also isn’t the city’s first attempt to equip school buses with GPS. A City Council bill from 2019 required the Education Department to install location tracking technology in all city school buses by that September – a deadline council members said they didn’t meet.

And, of course, even if the new app works seamlessly and makes it into the hands of every parent, it won’t address the many other problems plaguing the sprawling school bus system, including frequent delays and no-shows, buses without air conditioning, and an ongoing shortage of drivers and bus attendants.

“It wouldn’t necessarily make the routes shorter,” said Sara Catalinotto a long-time transportation advocate and head of the group Parents to Improve School Transportation. “But at least people wouldn’t come out into the cold to wait.”

Alex Zimmerman contributed.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

NYC launches ‘campus revival’ program to upgrade neglected school buildings

2024-01-18T21:46:28+00:00

For years, students and staff at Bushwick Leaders High School for Academic Excellence in Brooklyn had a recurring complaint about their aging school building: There were no working water fountains.

Staff and students tried in vain to get them fixed, and Principal Enrique Garcia resorted to stockpiling bottled water to hand out to thirsty students. Seventeen-year-old senior Gabrielle Smith felt compelled to act after a friend passed out on a sweltering day because of dehydration.

“That was the turning point for me and my mom. She was like, ‘I need to bring this issue up, I need to do something,’” Smith recalled.

Her mom, Florence Knights, brought the problem to East Brooklyn Congregations, the four-decade-old network of faith-based community organizations that helped found the school. Leaders from that group got the attention of First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg, who came to the school to meet with families and staff in spring 2022.

“The day after he met with us, water and AC units were brought into our school,” Smith recalled.

City officials are now looking at Bushwick Leaders’ partnership with the community organization as a model of how to improve conditions in other schools and districts that have been historically overlooked when it comes to facilities upgrades, schools Chancellor David Banks said Thursday.

That means bringing in community organizations to work with school staff and families to identify the most critical facilities upgrades and setting aside funds in the Education Department’s capital plan for targeted districts. The resulting “campus revival project” began in the 2022-23 school year in Brownsville’s District 23 with $10 million in capital funding, and it will expand next year to District 5 in Harlem, District 7 in the South Bronx, and District 29 in southern Queens.

“When you have a building that is in disrepair it sends a message to kids subliminally about how important we really think you are,” Banks said. He added that he’s noticed that some schools have “out of order” signs hanging on water fountains for a year, while others see the problem fixed in a day.

P.S. 137 in Ocean Hill Brownsville, where Banks spoke Thursday, was one beneficiary of the new initiative. The school got a library redesign after several years during which the space was out of date and unusable, according to the principal.

Shaun Lee, the lead pastor at Mount Lebanon Baptist Church, recalled hearing in a spring 2022 meeting with District 23 families and school staff about “young scholars not going to the restroom because of broken and dilapidated bathrooms. Not being able to hydrate because water fountains were broken. Struggling to concentrate on hot days because there’s no air conditioning.”

The listening sessions surfaced a total of 168 repairs that the Education Department pledged to address. Facilities workers completed 117 of them last year, and expect to finish most of the rest this year. Some of the larger projects, like an upgraded swimming pool, will take longer, a spokesperson said.

Officials said schools in the three districts participating in the expansion of the campus revival initiative next year are currently working with community-based organizations to identify the problems they want fixed. Funding for repairs in those districts will depend on what problems the schools and community groups identify, a department spokesperson said.

Garcia, the principal of Bushwick Leaders, said community organizations were a key ingredient in getting the fixes.

“They connect the dots,” he said. “They have relationships with other organizations, they have relationships with elected officials. They’re able to get everyone into the same room.”

Garcia said he hopes this new focus and approach to targeting facilities in overlooked communities can begin to address the stubborn disparities in school buildings he’s witnessed first hand.

“I went to LaGuardia High School. I had students in my class who were from very affluent families. We had an escalator in the building, the water fountains worked,” he said. “You see the difference when you go to other school communities. It’s an injustice when you go to a school in Bushwick, or in District 23 and it’s not the same.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

NYC school suspensions spiked 13% last year, returning to pre-pandemic levels

2024-01-08T23:41:07+00:00

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Suspensions across New York City public schools came roaring back last school year, according to newly released data.

Schools issued 28,412 suspensions during the 2022-23 school year, a 13% spike compared with the 2021-22 school year, the first time students were required to return to school buildings in the wake of the pandemic.

The number of suspensions remained below the most recent academic year before the coronavirus forced school buildings to shutter in March 2020. But with fewer students enrolled in grades K-12, suspensions issued per capita returned to pre-pandemic levels. (The figures do not include charter schools.)

It’s difficult to know exactly why suspensions spiked last school year, the second year students were required to attend school in person since the pandemic. Some other large districts, including Nevada’s Clark County and Broward County, Florida, also have seen suspensions climb toward pre-pandemic levels.

It’s possible educators were reluctant to remove students from their classrooms the first year they returned to school buildings to avoid further disruptions to their learning — a feeling that may have faded last year. Student mental health remains a pressing concern that can affect behavior, and schools are not always well-equipped to handle it. There was also a 9% uptick in the overall number of weapons confiscated in schools last year, according to Police Department data.

Robert Effinger, a social studies teacher at the Bronx High School of Business, said fights and verbal altercations seemed to return to pre-pandemic levels, as students were less wary of the pandemic and masks were largely off. He noted that teachers’ were still dusting off their classroom management skills, too.

“I think some people had forgotten what it was like to go back to normal,” he said, noting that even as students first returned to buildings full time the prior year, they were still readjusting to regular school rhythms and were more skittish.

As in previous years, the new suspension data showed significant disparities between student groups. Roughly 40% of all suspensions went to Black students, though just 21% of students are Black. About 38% of suspensions were issued to students with disabilities, a group that represents about 22% of all students. Latino students represented about 40% of suspensions, roughly in line with their share of the student population. Meanwhile, white and Asian American students were much less likely to be suspended relative to their share of enrollment.

Still, the number of New York City students excluded from their classrooms remained at some of their lowest levels in at least a dozen years, partly the result of discipline reform efforts under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. But as suspensions creep back up, some observers contend that Mayor Eric Adams and schools Chancellor David Banks may be less focused on limiting their use.

Nelson Mar, an attorney at Bronx Legal Services, an organization that represents students in suspension proceedings, worries the uptick could signal “more of a disciplinarian approach” from the Adams administration.

“It definitely reflects the general attitude and approach,” he said.

Adams has ramped up harsher tactics to combat crime, one of his signature issues, though the administration has not sketched out a detailed vision on school discipline or moved to overhaul the discipline code, which spells out the city’s suspension policies. Banks has signaled that he doesn’t favor “zero tolerance” approaches to school discipline, though he has also said there must be consequences for misbehavior.

An Education Department spokesperson did not express concern over the rise in suspensions last year — or their disproportionate use against Black students and children with disabilities — and emphasized that students must follow school rules.

“We are focused on equipping schools with the resources they need to address any issues not only in accordance with our discipline code but in conjunction with meaningful moments for education,” Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, wrote in an email.

But some advocates worry that schools will soon have fewer resources at their disposal to address student behavior without resorting to suspensions. The city has used one-time federal relief funding to hire hundreds of social workers and expand funding for restorative justice programs, which prioritize peer meditations and other methods of talking through conflicts. Those programs are on the chopping block next school year as federal relief money runs out. Department officials have not said whether they are looking for alternate funding.

“With each of these, we continue to be concerned about the expiration of federal funding and what that will mean for support for students,” said Randi Levine, policy director at Advocates for Children. “It’s important for students to have access to mental health professionals who can help work with students and help address student behavior.”

The figures also include breakdowns of suspensions by how severe the punishments were. Principal suspensions, which last five days or fewer and are typically served in school, increased nearly 14% last year. More serious superintendent suspensions, which stretch beyond five days and are served at outside suspension sites, increased about 11%. (Superintendent suspensions can technically stretch for an entire school year but have been restricted to 20 days in most cases since 2019.)

Under city law, the suspension data was required to be released publicly by the end of October. Despite requests from Chalkbeat over the past two months, the Education Department declined to release the statistics or explain the delay. Officials ultimately released the figures after Chalkbeat prepared to publish a story about the missing data.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s class size working group delivers recommendations — but some members dissent

2023-12-12T00:54:10+00:00

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After months of deliberation, internal clashes, and comments from nearly 2,000 people, a working group tasked with advising New York City’s public schools on complying with a landmark state law capping class sizes released its final recommendations Monday.

The 55-page report, which had an initial Oct. 31 deadline, includes more than 50 recommendations. Its prominent suggestions include capping enrollment at some overcrowded schools, moving pre-K programs out of district buildings and into community organizations, and offering financial incentives to boost teacher hiring.

The report, which is similar to a draft version released in September, is non-binding. Education Department officials still have final say in how they’ll meet the new legal mandates, which are expected to be phased in over the next five years. But the contentious process of putting the recommendations together illustrates how complicated meeting the new mandates will be.

The caps require K-3 classes to be no larger than 20 students, classes in grades 4-8 to be smaller than 23 students, and high school classes to be capped at 25 students.

Proponents of the law, including a wide array of parents, advocates, legislators, and educators, point to extensive research on the educational benefits of lower class sizes — and argue that the new recommendations give the city a clear roadmap for how to get there.

“Given these actionable proposals — many of them cost-free — the Chancellor no longer has any excuse for delay,” said Leonie Haimson, working group member and executive director of Class Size Matters, in an email. “If the DOE really cares about following the law and the goal of providing all NYC students with a better opportunity to learn, the time for action is now.”

But the law has also prompted fierce pushback from city Education Department leaders, who argue they don’t have the necessary funding to implement it. Parents concerned the law could restrict enrollment at sought-after schools and advocates worried about equity implications have also criticized the law.

Several studies suggest that the highest-poverty schools will benefit less because they are already more likely to have classes under the legal cap.

The working group’s deliberations got so contentious that nine of the working group’s 46 members declined to endorse the final recommendations — and several even authored a dissenting “minority report.” Those dissenters argue that the law itself is deeply flawed.

Dia Bryant, the former executive director of Education Trust-New York and one of the dissenters, said the law and the working group ignored practical concerns and are “very aspirational.”

“Ultimately, I think the implementation under the current conditions … is just bad for kids,” Bryant said.

In response to the report, schools Chancellor David Banks noted the city is currently in compliance with the class size law, but that “the work to remain in compliance will take changes, tradeoffs and additional resources across NYCPS.”

Currently, more than half of the classes across the city’s 1,600 public schools, or more than 73,000 classes, are out of compliance, the working group has said.

Here are some of the working group’s most controversial recommendations.

Cap enrollment at overcrowded NYC schools

Capping enrollment at oversubscribed schools and diverting kids to under-enrolled ones nearby was among the most divisive suggestions.

There are 386 schools across the city currently enrolled above their building’s capacity, the report noted, and in many cases, there are neighboring schools with plenty of room.

But many of the city’s overcrowded schools are also among its most popular and sought-after, meaning any efforts to cap their enrollment are likely to meet fierce opposition.

One way to decide who should get access to limited seats is by prioritizing those who live within a school’s geographic zone, the working group noted. Roughly 17,000 kids at overcrowded schools are attending those schools from out-of-zone, according to the report.

But the authors cautioned that decisions about if and how to cap enrollment should still be made “in harmony with the principles of equity and community cohesion.” For example, they pointed out that some out-of-zone students attend specialized programs like dual-language classes.

Meanwhile, the dissenting minority report argues that enrollment caps are a nonstarter because they would lead to increased travel times for families in overcrowded districts and fewer seats in popular programs.

Instead, the working group’s dissenters want to give parents a role in deciding when schools should be exempt from the law, according to Stephen Stowe, a working group member and co-author of the minority report who is also Community Education Council President in Brooklyn’s District 20. (Currently, under the law, only the chancellor and union officials can weigh in on exemptions).

Moving prekindergarten classrooms out of overcrowded schools

As the city works to fill empty 3-K and pre-K seats amid enrollment declines, the working group’s enrollment committee offered a possible solution: consider relocating 3-K and pre-K seats from schools that are overcapacity to nearby pre-K centers that are under-enrolled.

This could help struggling programs — which get funding from the city based on their enrollment — have “more sustainable budgets,” according to the working group report. The pre-K sector has long complained about the competition it faces from programs in district schools.

With nearly 14,000 empty 3-K classrooms, all 3-year-olds in school-based programs could move to community-based organizations, the report suggested, freeing up as many as 451 classrooms in schools. For pre-K, which serves the city’s 4-year-olds, nearly 17,000 empty seats could accommodate the majority of those in school-based programs, potentially opening up 1,000 elementary school classrooms.

The report did say that some members of the working group worried this solution might inconvenience parents, especially those with older children in public schools. In response, the group urged programs to have flexible drop-off and pick-up times, as well as longer days for families needing after-care.

Merge co-located schools, avoid opening new schools

The creation of small schools gained traction under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, with nearly 470 new schools opening between 2003 and 2010. That has resulted in more administrative overhead and less classroom space, the report stated.

In light of that, the working group suggested merging schools that share buildings, “especially those that have similar or complementary designs, programs, and student populations.”

The working group also advised the city to reconsider the creation of new schools (except for schools in District 75 that serve students with significant disabilities).

“If there is a perceived need or idea for a valuable new program or service, existing underutilized schools should be given the resources and support to provide these new programs or services,” the report stated.

Pay teachers more in schools where hiring is hard

New York City will need to hire at least 17,000 new teachers to meet the class size mandate over the next several years, according to the Independent Budget Office. The Education Department put the figure at somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000.

Some working group members worried that a wave of new teachers could affect the quality of instruction — an issue that researchers have raised — and could dilute the intended impact of smaller classes.

At the same time, in public forums on the law, many teachers spoke out in favor of smaller classes. Some of them said it could improve their working conditions, reduce burnout, and cut down on attrition.

To address concerns around the influx of new teachers, the working group issued various recommendations, including providing teachers with “high-quality, research-based lesson plans” to reduce workload.

The group also wants to analyze whether teachers in non-teaching roles — such as deans, lunchroom supervisors, or grade advisers — could return to the classroom, giving greater oversight to superintendents of these so-called compensatory positions.

The report said such a change “would be a historical shift away from greater principal autonomy and defer control to a more centralized system.”

(Only one member of the working group dissented from this, the report noted.)

The working groups also wants to offer pay differentials to educators in hard-to-staff schools in places like the Bronx, Far Rockaway, and Central Brooklyn, as well as in difficult-to-hire subjects, including special education and bilingual education.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Participation in parent conferences has plunged 40%. Is Zoom to blame?

2023-11-09T23:04:04+00:00

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Remote parent-teacher conferences, a holdover from the height of the pandemic, continue to elicit mixed feelings among families and educators alike.

For some parents, these virtual meetings — which were enshrined in the most recent teachers union contract — have been a boon. They can Zoom with teachers during their work day. They no longer need child care to travel to and from schools for the meetings. For those with multiple kids, it can be easier to juggle meetings at different schools.

But just as remote learning exacerbated New York City’s gaping digital divide, these virtual meetings also leave out families with less tech access and those with language barriers. Faced with an array of teachers with different sign-up methods, joining the meetings can feel insurmountable to some.

Schools Chancellor David Banks has repeatedly said parent engagement is among his top priorities. But participation in parent-teacher conferences was down 40% last year compared with the most recent school year before the pandemic hit, according to city data.

One Manhattan middle school principal expressed deep frustration with the remote conferences. The school leader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said attendance at the virtual sessions is significantly lower than the in-person conferences before the pandemic.

It’s especially difficult for the school’s growing number of migrant families to participate, as they often don’t have easy access to technology or reliable Wi-Fi at their shelters.

The school’s 10- to 15-minute student-led conferences, where kids show off their work and share plans for improvement, have been tricky to transition virtually.

“There’s something important about physically coming to the school, seeing where your child sits, seeing their work displayed on the bulletin board, and actually having a heart- to-heart conversation,” the principal said. “What we need more than ever is people back in the building and people being a part of the community.”

Education Department officials defended the virtual meetings, saying they “expanded opportunities” for families to meet with teachers.

“We support remote parent/teacher conferences to accommodate guardians who have disabilities and are more comfortable in a controlled environment, guardians who cannot take time away from work, guardians who are caregivers to additional children/family members,” said Education Department spokesperson Chyann Tull.

She added, “Parent/teacher conferences can also occur in person, upon request, at a mutually agreed upon time.”

Many parents, however, were not aware of that provision in the teachers union contract.

Amy Clow, the parent association president at Manhattan's P.S. 51, with her children.

Amy Clow, the parent association president at P.S. 51 in Hell’s Kitchen, echoed that in-person conferences helped build a sense of community.

“Maybe you’d see another family waiting,” she said, “we could actually talk to other parents and get to know them.”

Although she said the school’s teachers have tried to make the virtual conferences work, there are limits to the approach. A recent conference that was scheduled for 10 minutes wound up feeling more like five, given that her kids were at home interrupting her.

“Nothing’s as good as in person,” she said. “We learned that during COVID.”

Brooklyn mom Tamra Dixon also believes she got more out of the in-person meetings.

“By the time you exchange greetings — “Yeah, he’s great” — then they log off before you even get a chance to really talk,” said Dixon, whose fifth grader attends P.S. 282 in Park Slope. “It’s a little more difficult to do that when someone is sitting in front of you, so you have a better chance of getting all your questions answered in person.”

At her recent parent conference, all of her son’s teachers were together on the Zoom, each giving their assessments, which was “not bad,” Dixon said since that meant she didn’t have to log in to various Zooms. Still, one of the teachers kept her camera off and didn’t chime in, leaving the mom feeling confused.

Mike Robles, with his 8-year-old daughter, who attends P94M in Hell's Kitchen.

On the other hand, Manhattan dad Mike Robles said he appreciated the virtual conferences in part because they were set up with each teacher individually instead of conferencing with multiple teachers at once.

The feedback “feels a little bit more specific,” said Robles, whose daughter attends P94M, a school in District 75 that exclusively serves students with disabilities. “They’re not like five in a room [at] the same time.”

Ean Pimentel, a dad at P.S. 51, said the online setup was helpful since two of his children attend schools in different neighborhoods. Plus, he didn’t have to scramble for child care.

“You got to pay somebody to come watch the other kids, so [remote] is easier,” he said.

For Brendan Gillett, a teacher at International High School at Prospect Heights, which serves recently arrived immigrants, getting families to log on isn’t the biggest hurdle. The school makes a big effort to get families to come to the conferences. But the quality of the meetings are different than they were when they were in person, Gillett said.

“They feel shallower than in the past,” Gillett said. “It’s harder to go over documents. Parents will Zoom from their car or work or somewhere so they seem distracted, and generally, I just don’t think it’s as meaningful.”

Most elementary schools held parent-teacher conferences last week. Most middle schools hosted them on Thursday, and high schools have them on Nov. 16.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

‘We can do better’: NYC schools chief acknowledges flawed communication in response to flooding

2023-10-03T19:42:51+00:00

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New York City botched its communication to schools in response to last week’s record rainfall, Chancellor David Banks acknowledged on Tuesday. He vowed to conduct a review of what went wrong.

Hours after the school day began last Friday, Mayor Eric Adams and Banks said during a press conference about the storm that schools should shelter in place, which typically means that no one is allowed to enter or exit campuses. The Education Department issued the same directive soon after on social media.

But that order was never directly communicated to school principals, Chalkbeat reported on Monday. The communication breakdown created confusion about which procedures campus leaders should have been following in the middle of an emergency.

Banks issued a mea culpa during a Tuesday press conference when asked about the lack of communication.

“This incident does suggest to us that we needed to have a clearer level of communication all the way through,” he said, adding that schools ultimately kept children safe during the storm. “We can do better, and I think we will certainly be working to do better next time.”

The chancellor also suggested that the Education Department never intended to issue a typical shelter-in-place order in the first place. “What we’re trying to say to everybody was: ‘Stay where you are. Don’t send kids out to the streets.’”

A shelter-in-place order was the “closest thing our policies have for taking refuge in buildings,” but that approach is “ill-fitting to last week’s circumstances,” Banks said in a written statement after the press conference.

Ten school administrators told Chalkbeat that they did not enforce the shelter-in-place order largely because they weren’t aware it existed. The first official communication about it came in a 1:56 p.m. email that day to school leaders notifying them that the order had been lifted.

With many parents rushing to schools to pick up their children before the school day was over, enforcing a systemwide shelter-in-place order would have created “a level of chaos” because parents would not have been allowed to do so, Banks told reporters.

The Education Department is conducting a review of what happened “to identify policies and protocols that must be updated to account for increasingly frequent events like Friday’s rain or the air quality emergency this summer,” according to Banks’ statement.

A department spokesperson did not respond to questions about the timeline for completing that review or whether it will be made public.

The chancellor’s comments represented a departure from the Education Department’s position just a day earlier.

On Monday evening, a department spokesperson did not acknowledge any errors in communication and pointed to the mayor’s Friday press conference and subsequent social media posts as sufficient notice to schools about the shelter-in-place order.

Adams has faced intense criticism for not directly addressing the public about the storm until after some neighborhoods had already flooded, though he has largely avoided any acknowledgement that the city’s response was inadequate. Adams also deflected blame for the unclear communication to schools, implying that he hadn’t used the words “shelter in place” on Friday — even though he was the first official to publicly use the phrase. He also said that “the chancellor made a determination of what should be done.”

One Queens assistant principal said they were glad the chancellor acknowledged the miscommunication.

“I appreciate [Banks] taking the responsibility,” said the assistant principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The school leader said the city should resist the urge to make blanket directives during similar emergencies in the future, as some campuses experienced significant flooding and others were largely untouched.

“There’s no citywide guidance and directive that they should have made other than: ‘Be safe and please be in touch with your borough offices,’” the administrator said.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Here’s what NYC’s teacher workforce looks like as a new school year begins

2023-09-06T22:05:44+00:00

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New York City hasn’t seen the kinds of severe post-pandemic teacher shortages plaguing other parts of the country.

But the teaching force in the nation’s largest school system hasn’t emerged from the pandemic unscathed.

Last year, New York City public schools saw a higher rate of teacher attrition than any time in the last decade, and the pool of educators shrunk by roughly 2,000, mirroring the yearslong decline in student enrollment, according to Education Department data.

Hiring for certain hard-to-fill positions also remains a big challenge, with bilingual educators and high school special education teachers near the top of the list of shortage areas.

Efforts to diversify the disproportionately white teaching force continue making slow progress, with recent classes of new teachers that are far more representative of the city’s student body than the teaching force as a whole, which was 55% white in 2022, according to city data. The student body is just 16% white.

City officials say the teaching workforce is still in a strong position for now, and that both hiring and attrition are trending in better directions than last year, though numbers aren’t finalized until October.

“We should be thankful that we are in a better position than a lot of districts, including some large urban districts,” said First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg.

More help is also on the way. Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday that New York state is investing $30 million in a teacher residency program that subsidizes the cost of master’s degrees and certification requirements for new teachers. The state will also award funds to districts that come up with promising plans to diversify their teaching forces.

But there are big challenges on the horizon as the city struggles to continue hiring bilingual educators to keep pace with a historic influx of English language learners and prepares to comply with a new state class size law that could ultimately force the city to increase its teaching force by an estimated 9,000.

Here’s a look at how the disruptions of the past few years have reshaped New York City’s teaching force, and some of the changes that lie ahead:

The teacher workforce has shrunk

In the years prior to the pandemic, and even during its height, the city’s teaching force stayed at a relatively stable number, usually hovering between 78,000 and 79,000, according to Education Department data shared earlier this summer.

But that number dropped below 76,000 last fall – the biggest reduction in recent years.

That’s not altogether surprising: The city’s K-12 enrollment has fallen by more than 120,000 over the past five years. Schools that lost enrollment faced budget cuts last year after the city began phasing out federal pandemic relief funds. And the percentage of unfilled teaching positions in city schools remains low, under 2% citywide in the 2021-2022 school year, with the highest vacancy rates at the poorest schools.

But it’s worth understanding the forces behind the drop.

The reduction was due to an unusually high rate of teachers leaving between fall 2021 and 2022, and a comparatively small hiring class last fall.

More than 8% of the city’s teachers left the Education Department between fall 2021 and fall 2022, the highest rate of attrition in at least the past decade.

Much of that higher-than-usual attrition likely came from an exodus of teachers who refused to comply with the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for school staff. But educators are also confronting mounting levels of burnout and stress.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew sounded the alarm this week, warning that New York City is not immune from the national teacher staffing challenges.

“For years, everybody said, ‘Well New York City would never deal with it.’ Well, we are,” Mulgrew said at a press conference Wednesday. “It was always, ‘People will come from all over the country to live in New York City and teach.’ Well, that’s no longer true, and this is a big problem.”

On top of the higher attrition, the Education Department hired fewer than 3,900 new teachers last fall – down from 4,500 in 2019. Officials have pointed to national trends including low percentages of teacher certification candidates completing their programs as part of the problem.

A spokesperson said the Education Department is anticipating 4,500 new teachers this year, but won’t have a final count on new hires or attrition until October.

Shortage areas persist

The overall numbers don’t tell the whole picture of teacher hiring in New York City.

Specific teaching roles have long been harder to fill – what education officials call “shortage areas.”

The number of candidates per open position fluctuates wildly depending on the specific teaching role. At one end, the position of early childhood educator got about 30 applicants for every hire last year. At the other, applications for the role of high school special education teacher fell hundreds short of the number of open positions.

Math and bilingual education are also among the areas for which the Education Department gets the fewest applicants per job.

The shortage areas can create staffing crunches for schools and even threaten to put schools out of compliance with laws governing staffing ratios for students with disabilities and English language learners.

The citywide teacher workforce numbers also mask significant differences between schools. In general, higher-poverty schools see more teachers leave every year and have more open positions at the start of each school year.

In the highest poverty schools, more than 1 in 6 who started at the school in fall 2021 had left by fall 2022, either to go to another New York City public school, or out of the system. In the wealthiest schools, by comparison, just 1 in 10 teachers left last year. The constant churn at high-poverty schools means less continuity for kids and higher proportions of inexperienced teachers at schools with the highest levels of need.

It also translates to more vacant positions at high-poverty schools when the year starts – forcing some schools to scramble to find substitutes or even ask teachers to cover courses outside of teaching license.

Challenges are on the horizon

Even as New York City seeks to regain some of its footing with teacher recruitment this year, there are big challenges ahead.

In the immediate term, an influx of roughly 21,000 asylum seeking students since last summer has increased the need for bilingual teachers, both in Spanish and other languages.

The Education Department made some small-scale efforts last year, including a program to bring in 25 teachers from the Dominican Republic that was soon mired in controversy. Currently, the city has roughly 1,700 bilingual teachers — and just half of the schools that enrolled asylum seekers last fall had a bilingual educator on staff, according to an analysis from the Independent Budget Office.

Schools Chancellor David Banks said in a press conference last week that the city has been in conversations with the teachers union and the state about ways to bring in more bilingual teachers, but he declined to share details.

Mulgrew said some teachers who speak multiple languages have certificates to work as bilingual teachers, but opt not to because the “state requires them to go back into a probationary status if they want to switch… we don’t feel that should be there any more.”

In the longer-term, city officials are already sounding the alarm about the teacher recruitment implications of the new state law capping class sizes across the city.

Education Department officials are estimating the law will eventually require the city to increase its teaching workforce by 9,000 members in order to shrink class sizes.

That means hiring significantly more teachers in the coming years, on top of the normal 4,000 to 5,000 the city has to hire every year to replace those who left. That’s sparked concerns among some experts that the quality of new teachers could fall, offsetting some of the educational benefits of the lower class sizes.

Education Department officials pointed to some homegrown efforts to expand the new teacher pipeline, including a program that allows paraprofessionals to get their teaching license, and vocational classes to help high school students prepare to become teachers.

But Weisberg said a big part of the pipeline problem is that “particularly in New York state, it’s really expensive to become a teacher.” A “big chunk” of would-be teachers can’t afford to get their credentials, he added.

The program Hochul announced Wednesday could help with that — and send additional teachers into the pipeline right as the city needs to up its hiring, Mulgrew argued. New York City was not among the first round of districts to receive the state grant money, but the city has an application in and expects to be approved, according to a union spokesperson.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Only 1 in 3 NYC schools are fully accessible to students with physical disabilities, report says

2023-08-23T10:00:00+00:00

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Fewer than one in three New York City public schools are fully accessible to students with physical disabilities, according to a report released Wednesday by Advocates for Children that calls on the city to ramp up funding for building upgrades.

With the city expected to release its initial five-year capital plan for schools in November, the group is pushing for $1.25 billion to more quickly address major gaps in building accessibility.

That funding, which would run from 2025 through 2029, would allow roughly half of the city’s schools to be fully accessible according to the report, addressing a longstanding problem that has drawn criticism from parents and federal prosecutors alike. The City Council is slated to approve the capital plan in June, though it is typically amended twice a year thereafter.

Officials have made some strides in recent years, in part due to pressure from advocates who successfully lobbied the city to devote $750 million to the effort in the current capital plan, which runs from 2020 through 2024.

The city is on track to boost the share of fully accessible programs from about one in five schools to one in three under the current capital program, according to the Advocates for Children analysis. (The figures do not include certain alternative schools, prekindergarten programs, or charter schools. Nor do they include satellite campuses, as schools may have more than one location.)

“That represents a huge amount of progress, which really shows that when you commit to making schools accessible, you can make a huge difference,” said Sarah Part, a policy analyst at Advocates for Children. “The current lack of accessibility isn’t inevitable.”

Inaccessible school buildings have long represented a barrier for students with physical disabilities, leaving children with few — or even zero — nearby school options. They can also limit students’ ability to take advantage of New York City’s extensive choice system, which allows children to apply for schools outside their home neighborhoods. Nearly 39% of schools have no accessible classrooms for students with mobility needs, according to the Advocates for Children report.

Abraham Weitzman, a rising junior at Columbia University who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, took the bus more than an hour each way to private school through eighth grade.

“This was while I lived across the street from an inaccessible elementary school,” Weitzman wrote in an email. “I didn’t get the chance to find community in my neighborhood.”

Weitzman eventually attended Bard High School Early College Queens, a fully accessible public school, though the process of navigating the high school admissions process was a challenge. The staff and students on many campuses were welcoming, but he quickly found the buildings weren’t as accommodating.

In one case, he visited a school he liked, only to find his wheelchair didn’t fit in the bathroom, leaving his mother to carry him into a stall.

Although he had a positive experience at Bard, access for students with physical disabilities across the public school system “is disgraceful,” Weitzman wrote. “We must put our efforts into making it better for future students.”

Obstacles for students remain despite building accessibility gains

Federal officials have also spotlighted dire accessibility problems.

In 2015, then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara released findings from an investigation that found elementary school accessibility problems in New York City were so severe they amounted to a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Even though many of the city’s school buildings are more than 100 years old, Bharara found city officials failed to improve accessibility even when renovating older buildings.

Part said the city has taken accessibility improvements more seriously in recent years. But the scale of the problem — and the massive amount of funding required to fully address it — means even if the city heeds Advocates for Children’s call for more funding, about half of schools will still not be fully accessible by 2029, nearly four decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act passed.

Asked about their accessibility goals, city officials declined to say whether they hope to make all schools fully accessible, though they pointed to improvements over the past five years.

“This report acknowledges how far we have come, and the ongoing $750 million commitment in our current capital plan towards our shared goal of making school buildings more accessible,” Kevin Ortiz, a spokesperson for the School Construction Authority, said in a statement, referring to Advocates Children’s analysis.

City officials have made incremental gains, including improvements that render some buildings “partially accessible.” About 20% of the city’s school buildings meet that definition, which means some — but not all — classrooms and facilities can accommodate students with physical disabilities.

In recent years, the city began releasing more granular school-level reports that outline which areas students with physical disabilities can access. Advocates for Children also created a map alongside their report with school-level accessibility information.

Partially accessible buildings can still present significant obstacles. Manhattan mom Yuvania Espino sent her daughter Mia Simpson, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, to a partially accessible elementary school in East Harlem that specializes in serving students with disabilities.

But the front entrance was above a small set of stairs, which forced the family to stand by a separate accessible entrance, sometimes in the rain, as they waited for a staff member to unlock the door each day.

Mia took classes on the school’s first floor, but didn’t have access to certain classrooms or support on other levels, including a second-floor gym that helped students with sensory difficulties. Over time, many of her friends moved to classrooms on other floors, which distressed Mia and made her act out, Espino said.

Mia Simpson, left, poses for a photo with her little sister, Kira. Mia lacked access to certain classrooms during her time at a New York City public school, and wasn’t able to use the school’s front entrance.

“We don’t know to this day what an elevator would have done for Mia’s academic performance at that school,” Espinso said. The family ultimately decided to send Mia to an accessible private school, where her tuition is covered by the city.

Mia, now 14, is still affected by accessibility problems. She often has to miss performances and other events at her younger sister’s public school because the auditorium is on the second floor and there is no elevator.

“When enrolling your kids in school, no parents should have to think about accessing the building,” Espino said. “I’m thrilled that we’ve taken some baby steps, but we need to buckle up and take some giant leaps.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC must slash class sizes under a new law. The neediest schools stand to benefit least.

2023-08-17T10:00:00+00:00

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When Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a new law last year that would slash class sizes in New York City, praise came in from many quarters.

Teachers, along with their union, hailed the move as a victory that would improve classroom conditions and boost learning. Education activists said smaller class sizes would benefit the most vulnerable students. Lawmakers in Albany, who overwhelmingly passed the bill, rejoiced.

There are good reasons for this enthusiasm. Studies have found that students often learn more in smaller classes. Some research suggests that children from low-income families, who constitute a majority of New York City students, benefit the most. Plus, smaller classes are popular with parents and teachers alike.

But in recent months, some of the new law’s costs and tradeoffs have come into sharper focus. A Chalkbeat analysis shows that because the city’s highest-poverty schools already have smaller classes, they stand to benefit the least from the state’s class size cap. This aligns with recent reports from the New York City Department of Education, the city’s Independent Budget Office, and The Urban Institute.

Researchers who have studied class size say that these findings raise troubling equity concerns. The class size cap could mean that new resources will be funneled not to the schools that have the greatest needs or lowest test scores but to some of the city’s better-off schools.

The cap could exacerbate teacher shortages in high-poverty communities by creating a hiring spree that encourages more advantaged schools to poach teachers. And city officials, including Mayor Eric Adams, said they’ll be hard pressed to afford the class size mandate absent additional state money.

“Some of the less advantaged schools already have smaller class sizes — in that way, it’s not putting the additional money you have into the schools that probably need it the most,” said Susanna Loeb, a Stanford University researcher who has studied New York City schools.

Highest-needs schools already have smallest class sizes

The new cap dramatically reduces the number of students allowed in a single classroom.

Under the previous rules, classes were generally capped at 30 to 34 students, depending on the grade, with 25 students in kindergarten. Under the new law, classes may not exceed 20 students in kindergarten through third grade, 23 students for grades 4-8, and 25 students in high school. Physical education and classes involving “performing groups” are limited to 40 children.

But the reductions in class size will not be shared evenly once the law is fully implemented over five years.

At the city’s highest poverty schools, only 38% of classrooms are larger than the new caps allow, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of city data from last school year. By contrast, at low- to mid-poverty schools, 69% of classrooms are above the caps.

To bring schools into compliance with the law, which will take full effect in 2028, the city will need thousands of new teachers at an annual cost of $1.3 billion to $1.9 billion, according to projections from the Education Department and the city’s Independent Budget Office. That’s at least 4% of the department’s operating budget.

At overcrowded schools that need more classroom space to reduce class sizes, the School Construction Authority estimated the costs could run tens of billions of dollars.

But since the state has not earmarked new funding attached to the class size law, it remains unclear how the city will pay for it. Experts warn of difficult tradeoffs. Additional dollars spent reducing class sizes on lower-need campuses could instead be directed to the city’s highest-need schools — to, say, hire more tutors to combat pandemic learning loss or additional social workers to address student mental health challenges.

In Brooklyn’s District 16, which includes much of Bedford-Stuyvesant and where the vast majority of students come from low-income families, 36% of classrooms were above the new class size caps. That’s the second-lowest rate of the city’s 32 districts.

NeQuan McLean, the president of District 16’s local parent council, said he wasn’t aware that higher-need districts are less likely to benefit from the new law, noting there wasn’t much public debate of that issue when the law passed.

“I would definitely have a problem with resources being pulled from low-income districts to go to high-income districts when investments need to be made in underserved districts,” McLean said. “We can’t use the method of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

He said additional investments in his district are sorely needed, from upgraded gyms and bathrooms, to additional wraparound services in schools to combat food insecurity. He also wants more on-campus health services and dental clinics, as students often miss school to go to those appointments.

There will be tradeoffs at lower-need schools, too, as school leaders may be required to direct more resources to staff smaller classes, potentially forcing cuts to other programs. City officials may also have to cap enrollment at some schools.

“Maybe principals have decided they want slightly larger class sizes [in exchange] for a math coach,” said Matthew Chingos, an Urban Institute researcher who recently published a report about the impact of the class size caps and serves on a city advisory group on the issue. “It may force some tradeoffs that people didn’t fully appreciate.”

Supporters point to advantages of small classes

The law’s backers contend that small classes are a basic necessity with broad benefits to students.

Jake Jacobs, a Bronx art teacher, said it is difficult to offer individual support when his classes exceed 30 students. “Those classes were nightmares because of it,” he said. Despite some of the tradeoffs of the law, “as a teacher I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.”

As for concerns about equity, supporters point out that most students in New York City are from low-income families, so much of the class size cuts will still redound to their benefit.

“The law actually lowers class sizes for a higher number of high-need kids compared to lower-need kids,” said Christina Collins, the director of education policy at the United Federation of Teachers, which pushed for the new caps.

Collins and other supporters emphasize that the law also requires the Education Department to prioritize higher-need campuses first as the new caps phase in. (However, experts note this doesn’t address the key equity issue, since all schools regardless of poverty level will be required to meet the new class size limits within five years.)

Asked about concerns that the law would still require the city to funnel resources to schools with fewer high-need students, Collins pointed to education programs that give students access to the same resources regardless of family income, such prekindergarten or free meals.

Proponents also contend that there is funding available to cut class sizes, pointing to recent boosts in state education dollars that stem from a decades-old lawsuit that argued New York’s schools were not properly funded.

“The courts mandated that every kid get a sound, basic education. And their mandate cannot be achieved when kids are still in excessively large class sizes,” said state Sen. John Liu, who sponsored the class size legislation.

The city’s Education Department may use increases in state funding to reduce class sizes. But officials note the department has already committed the money to other priorities, including for the first time fully funding the city’s own school budget formula, which channels more resources to schools that enroll higher-need children.

Mayor Adams has warned that complying with the class size mandate will restrict city officials from spending education dollars as they see fit.

“Clearly we should use taxpayers’ dollars to focus on equity — not equality, equity,” Adams said at a press conference last September. “There are certain school districts that need more,” he added. “We’re taking away the chancellor’s ability to focus on where the problem is, and the governor made the decision to sign it.”

A spokesperson for Gov. Hochul did not respond to questions about the equity implications of the law.

Unintended consequences loom large

Hiring thousands of new teachers in New York City could prove a particular challenge, especially at a moment of rising teacher turnover. A hiring spree might force schools to bring on less skilled or less qualified educators, which could limit the gains from smaller classes.

In one study of New York City, Michael Gilraine, an economist at New York University, found that when schools reduced class size without having to hire a new teacher, there were large improvements in student test scores. But when they had to add a teacher to get class sizes down, the benefits from smaller classes were swamped by a decline in teacher quality.

“The results indicate that smaller class sizes do improve student achievement,” wrote Gilraine. “Policy makers and school administrators need to be mindful, however, that these gains can be offset by changes in teacher quality.”

Research in California has highlighted a similar tradeoff, though it suggests that the problem dissipates over the longer term.

Higher-need schools typically bear the brunt of teacher shortages. For instance, an older study in New York City found that better teachers were more likely to migrate from lower-performing schools to high-performing ones, a concern echoed in the city’s working group on class size reduction.

One leader of a Manhattan middle school, where most classes already met the new class size caps last school year, said he’s concerned that higher-performing schools in the district may poach quality educators.

“How many teachers from the lower-performing schools are going to go [to higher-performing schools] because they can get paid the same amount and have an easier life?” said the principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly about the class size cap’s impact on their campus. “That’s my bigger worry honestly.”

New York City does not offer additional pay to teachers working in higher-needs schools to potentially counteract this effect.

“It’s hard to recruit teachers right now” and high-poverty schools typically have a harder time doing so, said Loeb, the Stanford professor. “Adding class size reduction may in fact escalate that.”

Collins, of the UFT, says there should be efforts to expand the pipeline of new teachers to meet rising demand.

For now, officials don’t have clear answers to these challenges and much remains uncertain about how the city will implement the new law. The Education Department has convened a task force that includes advocates and policy experts to gather input.

The law also includes a handful of exemptions to the class size mandate, including for schools that are overenrolled, would face significant economic hardship to comply, or or have insufficient teachers in subjects that are difficult to staff. The Education Department and the unions representing teachers and school administrators must all agree to those waivers. If they don’t, the decision falls to an arbitrator.

“It’s not clear how those decisions are going to be made — and school communities that wind up losing valuable dollars are going to be up in arms,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who has studied New York City schools.“I would like that process to be as open and transparent as possible.”

Regardless of the challenges, Liu, the state senator who championed the law, remains sanguine. “I don’t think anybody will say 10 years from now that, ‘Oh, this was the wrong thing to do,’” he said.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

NYC disbands literacy coaches amid reading curriculum overhaul

2023-07-13T15:25:15+00:00

Hundreds of literacy coaches hired under a program to help improve literacy instruction need to find new roles, even as many elementary schools are working to adopt new reading programs.

The literacy coaches, originally part of the city’s Universal Literacy Program, must apply for other jobs, according to education department officials familiar with the city’s efforts and emails sent to coaches and school leaders obtained by Chalkbeat.

The move represents a shift in the way educators who teach reading are trained and supported at a key moment. Education officials are mandating that all elementary schools use one of three reading curriculums, beginning with 15 of the city’s 32 districts this September, with the rest to follow in 2024-25. In the past, school leaders had wide leeway to pick their own programs, with many choosing materials that city officials now say are inadequate.

To help get teachers up to speed on new curriculums, the city plans to use the three publishing companies to provide initial training and then create partnerships with outside professional learning organizations, officials said.

The city’s new literacy approach scraps the remaining elements of the Universal Literacy program, launched by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2016 to ensure that all third graders were reading proficiently by 2026. About half of third graders are meeting that benchmark, according to the most recent state tests. At its peak, the program sent about 500 literacy coaches to work with teachers in more than 600 schools, largely focusing on grades K-2.

Mayor Eric Adams has chipped away at the program, cutting the number of coaches this past school year to about 200 for grades K-5, with an estimated 60 coaches for middle and high schools. A separate Bloomberg-era program known as the Middle School Quality Initiative, which supported literacy efforts, is also coming to an end, two eduction department sources said.

Publishers of the three mandated curriculums have already begun training educators, said Nicole Brownstein, an education department spokesperson. The training includes various instructional routines and planning for their first unit.

During the school year, districts will be paired with an “external professional learning partner” to provide “shoulder-to-shoulder” training to educators, including monthly coaching, Brownstein said. Officials estimate the first phase of training will cost about $30-35 million for the initial group of schools.

The city had previously budgeted nearly $69 million annually over the next three years for the Universal Literacy Program, according to the Independent Budget Office.

“It’s been an expensive proposition to have centralized coaches,” said an education department official familiar with the city’s literacy efforts, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But it’s bad timing.”

‘They won’t be there now’

Some observers contend that the impact of the Universal Literacy program has been modest and a reset could be beneficial, giving the city a chance to deploy a new suite of training options that are more consistent for teachers. But others said the coaches, who already have relationships with educators, are a valuable resource as schools work to navigate a new set of curriculum materials.

“They could have been the folks on the ground supporting the [new curriculum mandate],” the education department employee said. “They won’t be there now.”

The official expressed concern that schools will have less coaching support overall, including significantly fewer days of on-site support, even if the new training efforts are high-quality. They believe that ending the program could be an effort to cut costs.

Brownstein did not dispute that cost was a factor but also did not offer a detailed explanation of why the coaching program is ending. She emphasized that the coaches could apply for other roles that will support the city’s new reading curriculum mandate.

According to job descriptions sent to coaches, some of the new roles they’re encouraged to apply for involve helping struggling readers directly, rather than focusing on training other teachers. Another recommended job involves supporting superintendents’ offices, a role that department sources said would likely involve working with a much wider group of schools than the coaches currently support.

“This group is being offered roles in making the implementation of NYC Reads a success,” Brownstein said in a statement, referring to the curriculum mandate. “Ensuring every student grows as a strong and confident reader is priority one for this administration.”

Coaching program’s impact is mixed

Brian Blough, who served as principal of P.S. 161 in the Bronx, said his experience with the coaching program was uneven, but the program grew on him. The first coach he worked with didn’t seem to have much direction or training, making it difficult to deploy the coach effectively. But after the school received two new coaches last year, Blough found the program more useful.

“The coaches we got this year were effective and came with a real depth of knowledge about what they’re doing,” said Blough, who left P.S. 161 and will lead a charter school this fall. The coaches helped P.S. 161 teachers implement and interpret reading assessments and deploy a new program for phonics, which teaches the relationships between sounds and letters. On other campuses, coaches helped teachers learn to implement new curriculums and reading strategies.

Blough said he is disappointed that P.S. 161 won’t have access to coaches going forward. “They had purpose and direction in making the teachers successful. It’s unfortunate that now they’re trying to pull them.”

The city’s own evaluations of the program showed modest evidence of success. A 2022 progress report obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request described the program’s impact as promising, according to assessment data, but also concluded that “the initiative had not yet achieved impact at scale before the onset of the pandemic.”

Most principals believed the coaches were helping their schools improve reading instruction, according to education department surveys, though some also said there were disconnects between what their schools needed and what the coaches could offer.

Susan Neuman, an early literacy expert at New York University and member of the education department’s advisory council, said little information has been shared with the council about how the city plans to train teachers on the new reading curriculums, making it difficult to assess whether those efforts will be more effective than the coaching program.

Still, Neuman said it could make sense to “start anew and bring in people who might all have the same basic training. I think that’s not a bad idea.”

But she emphasized that effective training requires building trust, something that coaches said they worked hard to build.

“If you don’t like that coach you’re going to resist what that coach might suggest,” she said. “These new people need to know that relationships really matter.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC updates 2023-24 school calendar, adding 4 more days off

2023-06-26T16:54:19+00:00

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After many educators complained about certain holidays missing from the 2023-24 school calendar, New York City’s education department is adding four additional days off, officials announced Monday.

The city also shared the calendars for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years — after families expressed outrage over calendar delays the past few years.

The extra days for the upcoming school year are:

Monday, April 1, for the day after Easter.
Monday, April 29, and Tuesday, April 30, for the last two days of Passover, which did not fully overlap with spring break this year. (This extends the weeklong break by another two school days.)
Monday, June 17, for Eid al-Adha. (The holiday begins on June 16.)

The changes mean that there will be 178 instructional days for students on the calendar, down from the original 182, though state law requires that school districts remain in session for at least 180 days or risk losing state funding. City education department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer said the city will not violate the 180-day rule because certain days devoted to teacher training will count toward the requirement.

State officials confirmed that up to four conference days, including staff orientation, curriculum development, and parent-teacher conferences, may count toward the 180-day requirement. But a state education department spokesperson said compliance with the mandate would depend on how the city reports the days to the state and couldn’t yet offer a definitive answer.

The long-delayed calendar, released earlier this month, touched off a wave of anger among educators and families of various religious groups. Because Easter and Passover are so far apart this year (since the Jewish holiday follows a lunar calendar), spring break became a scheduling conundrum.

The city initially had a day off for Good Friday but not Easter Monday, sparking some backlash. And though spring break coincided with the start of the eight-day holiday of Passover, it did not include the last two days, spurring a petition that garnered nearly 4,000 signatures. Some also expressed concern that the calendar left out Eid al-Adha, which families observe starting on Sunday but continues into the next day.

The calendar changes, announced on the second-to-last day of the school year, came hours after city officials held a celebration at City Hall to commemorate the passage of a state law that mandates Diwali as an official school holiday.

The holiday will not affect next year’s calendar because Diwali falls on Sunday, Nov. 12. (There is no set date for Diwali each year, as it is governed by the lunar calendar, but it falls in October or November.)

“For over two decades, the South Asian and Indo-Caribbean community has fought for this moment,” state Assembly member Jenifer Rajkumar said during the celebration at City Hall on Monday that included a smattering of state and local officials, including Mayor Eric Adams and schools Chancellor David Banks.

Diwali, known as the “festival of lights,” celebrates the triumph of good over evil and is celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and some Buddhists.

Lawmakers initially proposed removing Anniversary Day, also known as Brooklyn-Queens Day, a holiday that celebrates the founding of the first Sunday school on Long Island. But some legislators objected to removing that holiday and pushed behind the scenes to keep it.

Rajkumar initially said that the city would not be able to meet the 180-day requirement without finding another holiday to leave off, though city officials say they will be able to add the new holiday without such a change.

The bill has not yet been signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul, but a spokesperson signaled the governor’s support of the holiday and said the legislation is under review.

Banks emphasized that the education department plans to use the new holiday as an opportunity to teach children about Diwali, offering schools sample lesson plans and suggested activities. According to calendars posted Monday, New York City schools will be closed for Diwali on Monday, Oct. 20 in 2025. They will also be closed Friday, Nov. 1 in 2026.

“It’s less about the fact that schools will be closed in recognition of Diwali — it’s more about the fact that minds will be open because of what we are going to teach them,” he said.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

New York wants to revamp how schools are evaluated. Here’s what could change for now.

2023-06-22T16:45:25+00:00

How does the state determine whether schools are doing well or if they are struggling and need extra support?

Before the pandemic, state officials relied on standardized tests and high school Regents exams to figure out how well students were doing, along with other factors, such as graduation rates. But the public health crisis paused state testing and affected school performance metrics in other ways.

Now, education department officials are seeking a new, temporary evaluation system for the next two school years, with the hopes of creating something more permanent for the 2025-26 school year.

If a school is found to be struggling, it is required to develop an improvement plan that must be approved by local and state officials. Schools that don’t make progress for five years could face state takeover or closure — but it’s a route that state officials rarely took even before developing the current accountability system, which is meant to be less punitive for schools.

In the short term, over the next two years, state officials want to exclude certain science and social studies exams, as well as measures for student growth and college and career readiness, when deciding which schools need improvement. These changes are necessary, officials say, because schools are still missing a trove of data, such as enough student participation in state tests, because of the pandemic.

Already, the conversation is sparking some controversy. Some groups focused on education reform believe the move represents a step backward just as schools need more help as they recover from the pandemic. Other observers believe the state’s proposed plan is reasonable.

Ultimately, the federal government must sign off on these proposed changes, since the state’s accountability system is required by federal law and is written into New York’s federally required Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, plan.

“They’re doing a decent job of balancing what’s of interest in the state and the federal ESSA requirements, and incorporating all the instability and uncertainty that came with the slowdown of testing during the pandemic,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Teachers College and an expert in testing.

But Education-Trust New York, an advocacy organization focused on equity issues, worried that several of the proposed changes could mean masking “bright spots and disparities,” according to their written public feedback to the state.

“I think these next two school years are incredibly important for kids coming out of the pandemic,” said Jeff Smink, the group’s deputy director, in an interview with Chalkbeat. “We have to both give them all the support they need but also hold them to high standards, and I just don’t feel like we’re doing that right now.”

What metrics would still be used?

Under the state’s proposal, schools will still be measured on English language proficiency (based on a state language exam for English learners), graduation rates, how well students are doing in core subjects based on Regents and state test scores, and chronic absenteeism. In New York City, chronic absenteeism has been a pressing issue, with 41% of students last school year absent for at least 10 school days.

What do state officials want to ditch (for now)?

The state wants to put a pause on measuring academic progress based on certain goals for student scores on state English and math tests.

State officials say they want to update these goals — first set in the 2017-18 school year — before they use them to determine whether schools are struggling.

The state’s proposed plan would also pause the use of “Measures of Interim Progress,” which more broadly measures whether schools are meeting goals for academics and other things, like their graduation rates.

For elementary and middle schools, officials want to pause how they’ve been measuring student growth, largely because of the lack of testing data. Typically, they calculated student growth using three years of testing data, but the pandemic caused big disruptions: For example, just one in five New York City children took state exams in the 2020-21 school year, when most children chose to learn from home.

For high schools, officials won’t consider college, career, and civic readiness metrics, which include advanced coursework or extra credentials in specialized jobs-based courses. That’s because the pandemic may have hampered students’ access to some of these programs or courses, officials said. They also worried that the pandemic’s impact on learning may have caused students to perform worse academically than they otherwise would have, such as on AP exams.

What will the state do with data, even if it’s not being used to evaluate schools?

State officials still plan to provide all of this data to schools for “informational purposes only” for the next two school years, they said.

Why do state officials want to exclude elementary school science exams and high school social studies assessments?

Science tests would be excluded because the state has changed who must take those exams. Traditionally, students in fourth and eighth grades take the state science test. However, only eighth graders took the test this school year, as the state prepares to offer the exam next year to fifth graders instead of fourth graders. That means they won’t be able to compare results equitably across elementary and middle schools that have different grade configurations.

Fifth graders will take the exam next spring. Asked why those scores won’t be taken into account for the 2024-25 school year, a spokesperson said that it allows districts to have “consistency and predictability” for now, as they attempt to rebuild the accountability system.

While calling it a “logical” move, Ed-Trust argued that excluding science tests “undermines the importance of science education” and worried schools will have less reason to focus on it. The organization suggested that the state should instead work with local districts to “ensure a smooth transition” to the new science assessments without entirely removing it as one way to measure student performance.

On the high school level, officials want to pause using social studies tests because of multiple exam cancellations in recent years. The state looks at cohorts of students, such as the graduating class of 2023, when considering how they performed on these tests, namely the Regents exams for Global History and Geography and U.S. History and Government.

But students who will graduate this year couldn’t take Regents exams in 2021, when they were in 10th grade, because of the pandemic. U.S. History and Government exams were also canceled last year, when these students were juniors, in the wake of a mass shooting in Buffalo, with the state education department claiming there was material on the exam that could “compound student trauma.”

State officials have emphasized that this plan “in no way diminishes” the importance of science or social studies instruction.

How will schools be labeled if they need support?

The lowest performing schools are known as schools in need of Comprehensive Support and Improvement, or CSI. But the state won’t list new CSI schools until the 2025-26 school year because they identified a group of such schools this year under a tweaked system, and that process only happens every three years, officials said.

A total of 139 New York City schools were identified this year as in need of some level of improvement, with 83% of them listed as CSI schools, according to state data.

However, New York will identify schools for Targeted Support and Intervention, or TSI, next year, which must happen annually per federal law. Those are schools that aren’t meeting goals set for specific student groups, such as by race, economic status, and those with disabilities.

In one recent — and perhaps confusing — change, schools that are meeting or exceeding their goals are no longer called “Schools in Good Standing” and instead are now labeled by the state as schools identified for Local Support and Improvement, or LSI.

What will happen for the 2025-26 school year?

State officials plan to revamp the accountability system for the 2025-26 school year after collecting feedback from the public. The new plan will also incorporate any changes to the state’s graduation requirements, which could come as soon as the end of this year. The education department is rethinking the role of Regents exams in graduation, among other considerations.

Pallas said that the plan for the 2025-26 school year and beyond would still have to meet federal ESSA requirements and earn the buy-in of school district leaders — meaning that it likely won’t be “a dramatic break from the past.”

“It’s gotta be something that feels progressive but also comfortable,” Pallas said.

Thomas Wilburn contributed.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City public schools. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools go remote Thursday for staff training as wildfire smoke engulfs region

2023-06-07T22:12:02+00:00

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New York City educators will not be expected to report to their buildings in person on Thursday, as wildfire smoke from Canada engulfed the region in a thick haze leading to the worst air pollution on record.

They will instead participate virtually in staff training on what’s known on the school calendar as “Anniversary Day/Chancellor’s Conference Day,” according to a text message the teachers union sent to its members on Wednesday.

Students were already scheduled to be off from school.

“The DOE, with our encouragement, is making Chancellor’s Conference Day tomorrow fully remote for all staff,” the text message said. (The union sends texts to teachers to let them know about cancellations and snow days.)

New York City schools Chancellor David Banks confirmed the move at a press conference alongside Mayor Eric Adams Wednesday evening.

The air quality index hit 484 at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Adams said. It was believed to be the highest index level since the 1960s.

Anything above 300 is considered hazardous, officials said. The index tops out at 500.

Adams encouraged all New Yorkers to remain indoors, if possible, especially elderly and younger children.

The decision to switch to remote staff training came after pressure from educators, who launched a petition, and Rita Joseph, a former teacher and leader of City Council’s education committee. City officials signaled earlier on Wednesday afternoon to prepare for a remote pivot, telling staff to bring materials and laptops home with them.

Still, some schools operate programs for children in partnership with community organizations on staff development days. Whether Department of Youth and Community Services-funded programs such as COMPASS, Beacon, and Cornerstone open on Thursday is up to the program’s discretion, city officials said. If they’re running, all activities should be indoors. The programs should check with their school partners about whether the building will be open. If it’s closed, these programs may offer remote activities, if they elect to do so.

Gov. Kathy Hochul indicated on Wednesday that the smoke could continue for days and described the situation as an “emergency crisis.”

Officials said they would make a decision on Thursday about Friday’s school schedules.

“We’re taking it day-by-day,” Banks said.

Elementary and middle school students were already scheduled to be off from school on Friday for “Clerical Day.” Students attending standalone District 75 schools, which serve children with more complex disabilities, also have the day off.

But thousands of students attending high school are scheduled to report to buildings on Friday.

The wildfire smoke has already disrupted some school programming. On Wednesday, city officials canceled outdoor school activities, including athletic competitions, recess, and field trips — a decision that was announced on Twitter just before midnight on Tuesday. Banks also postponed a town hall meeting in the Bronx.

Health officials have warned that the polluted air poses greater risks to young people, the elderly, and those with pre-existing breathing issues, such as asthma. Nearly 1 in 10 public school students in grades K-8 have “active asthma,” according to the city’s health department, though the rates are higher among Black and Latino students and disproportionately affect children living in low-income neighborhoods.

The city’s health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan, said children may be susceptible to air pollution because their lungs are still developing. Officials urged residents to stay indoors.

“Right now, our health guidance to all New Yorkers is to limit outdoor activity as much as possible,” Vasan said. “For people who must be outdoors, a high quality mask like an N95, a KN95 or a KF94 is recommended.”

Vasan expressed concern for New Yorkers who were feeling rattled by the air pollution.

“If you feel anxious, if you feel worried, that’s totally understandable,” he said. He encouraged New Yorkers to call the 988 crisis hotline for help, if needed.

Amy Zimmer contributed.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s literacy mandate: Why one reading program is gaining the most traction

2023-05-31T10:00:00+00:00

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Under NYC’s aggressive literacy push announced earlier this month, officials are mandating all elementary schools use one of three reading curriculums.

One is proving to be far more popular than the others.

Thirteen of 15 local superintendents charged with selecting their districts’ reading curriculum in this first phase of the rollout picked Into Reading, a program published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The education department vetted all three of the mandated reading programs, including Wit & Wisdom and EL Education, officials said. And all three received high marks from the independent curriculum reviewer EdReports.

So why is Into Reading far and away the most popular option among superintendents?

Curriculum experts and department insiders pointed to a series of interlocking factors that may have helped Into Reading elbow out the competition. The program is widely perceived as easier for teachers to implement, especially with little time remaining before deploying it in September. Plus, Into Reading has a Spanish version, which may appeal to superintendents who oversee many dual-language and bilingual programs.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt may have also benefited from a savvy marketing strategy, current and former department employees said. When the pandemic forced school buildings to shutter in March 2020, the company quickly made a slew of free digital materials available to the city’s public schools, including Into Reading and its Spanish counterpart.

“It was a huge help. We were able to make sure that schools had the digital resources they needed during remote learning and hybrid learning,” said a current education department employee familiar with the city’s literacy efforts who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Within two years, the education department had added Into Reading to its approved list of curriculum offerings. That meant if principals choose Into Reading, the cost was subsidized, though they were still free to use their own budgets to purchase other curriculums.

“Houghton Mifflin made a strategic decision during the pandemic and they hoped it would pay off,” the official said. “And it did.”

EL Education, one of the other programs included in the new mandate, was also on the approved list at the time. All three curriculums covered by the new curriculum mandate, including Wit & Wisdom, will be similarly subsidized.

A spokesperson for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt downplayed its decision to make materials free as a key driver of superintendents’ decisions to mandate their product. “There were already hundreds of schools across the city using HMH reading resources,” Bianca Olson, a company spokesperson, wrote in an email. “These partners have seen strong results and they want to continue that momentum in support of student achievement.”

A city education department spokesperson noted that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was one of more than a dozen vendors that provided free digital resources during the pandemic. But officials have generally not collected or published comprehensive curriculum data over time, making it difficult to ascertain the full impact of the company’s strategy.

The education department also declined to say how much they are projected to spend on Houghton Mifflin Harcourt materials and training now that Into Reading is being widely mandated, saying they are still working on creating cost estimates.

Focus turns to ‘science of reading’

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s move to make its materials free came at an opportune moment. Before the pandemic struck, many schools were already in the process of reconsidering their reading curriculum choices, multiple curriculum experts said, pressured in part by a small army of literacy coaches dispatched to schools.

A growing movement backed by years of research, known as the “science of reading,” was persuading more school leaders to back away from “balanced literacy” — an approach that sought to foster a love of literature by allowing students ample time to independently read books of their choosing. It also sometimes included dubious methods, such as encouraging students to use pictures to guess at a word’s meaning instead of focusing on the letters and sounds themselves.

“Every school that I was in was in the midst of changing,” said Heidi Donohue, an early literacy expert at Teaching Matters, an organization that works with city schools to improve reading and math instruction. “They were really talking about, ‘Is the curriculum high-quality? Is it meeting the needs of our kids?’”

More recently, schools Chancellor David Banks has declared that balanced literacy is not an effective approach, often singling out a curriculum developed by Lucy Calkins at Columbia University’s Teachers College — one of the most popular reading curriculums in the city’s public schools. (Heinemann, the publisher of Calkins’ curriculum, is also a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.)

NYC Chancellor David Banks stands at a podium, with Mayor Eric Adams standing off to the left at Tweed Courthouse on June 27, 2022.

Some observers said they were not surprised that Into Reading has become a popular choice in New York City, since it is also widely used elsewhere. An Education Week survey found that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s reading offerings are among the five most popular early reading programs in the country, in large and small districts alike.

Others emphasized that its lessons may seem easier to unpack: Donohue noted that many lesson plans from the teachers manual can fit on two pages. Experts also said Into Reading has common DNA with curriculums that schools have used for years that are structured as anthology-style textbooks with passages written specifically to teach reading skills. (In education jargon, those programs are often referred to as “basals.”)

“A basal-type program is going to have much more structure in the teaching, in the lesson plan itself,” said Esther Friedman, who directed the city education department’s literacy efforts until 2020. Although Friedman said the other two programs also have detailed teacher guides, Into Reading may feel “a little bit more manageable.”

In Brooklyn’s District 16, which covers a large chunk of Bedford-Stuyvesant, teachers got a head start. About two years ago, nearly all of the district’s elementary schools adopted Into Reading, and the new superintendent, Brendan Mims, plans to keep the program in place.

Even though the district’s schools have already used Into Reading, Mims said there’s still room for improvement. “We haven’t hit that bar yet,” he said, in terms of implementing it as effectively as he thinks is possible. He’s hopeful that a more centralized approach to training will help. “Now, teachers and principals and district staff can work together to make sure that they’re getting what they need,” he said.

No curriculum checks every box

Into Reading has the potential to reshape reading instruction across hundreds of elementary school classrooms. That number could grow as more than half of superintendents aren’t implementing the curriculum mandate until September 2024.

Curriculum experts offered mixed feelings about the popularity of Into Reading. Nearly all said that it has many strong elements, including challenging readings, and a broad array of lessons that build vocabulary, spelling, and grammar skills.

But some also said in an effort to sell the curriculum to the widest array of districts, Into Reading is jam-packed with different strategies and resources, similar to other anthology-style programs. That will require teachers to be selective about which lessons to teach.

“Teachers really have to plan for this, and they have to understand that they’re not going to use all of the resources,” Merryl Casanova, a literacy coach who works with schools in the Bronx, previously told Chalkbeat.

Donohue, of Teaching Matters, said the program can be used effectively, but there are also elements of it that feel “watered down.” She said the texts and vocabulary tend to be slightly less challenging, and the other two curriculums include deeper student discussions and units with more sophisticated themes.

The other two programs “bring a higher quality of text and expectation for kids,” Donohue said. A New York University report also found that Into Reading materials are not culturally responsive, though Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has disputed that characterization and some educators told Chalkbeat the materials do speak to the diversity of New York City’s student body.

Other observers said that EL Education and Wit & Wisdom are somewhat more focused on exposing students to nonfiction in an effort to boost their background knowledge of topics they’re likely to encounter in the future, a strategy meant to boost students’ ability to understand texts about a wide range of subjects.

Still, experts emphasized that all three curriculums come with tradeoffs. And much of the success of the literacy mandate may rest on whether educators buy into the changes — which can be tricky given there was not a public input process. The quality of the training they receive is also critical to the program’s success.

“Really none of the three [curriculums] give a teacher all of the tools for teaching what needs to be taught,” Friedman said. “That has to come from the professional development.”

With just over three months until the next school year begins, there is limited time to fully prepare.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Enrollment at NYC’s transfer high schools tanked during the pandemic. Can it rebound?

2023-04-28T21:22:08+00:00

Alyssa Cartagena stopped attending school after giving birth a year ago. She had no babysitter, and going back felt insurmountable.

But a small alternative high school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side helped pull her back in. The program, Edward A. Reynolds West Side High School, boasts an on-site day care center operated by the education department. She enrolled her two-month old son, Shawn, dropping him off each day before heading to class.

“I was nervous, but I was also relaxed knowing I was so close to him, and I can stop by anytime,” said Cartagena, now 19. “It was easier for me to focus in class.”

She’s now on track to earn a high school diploma later this year.

The city has nearly 60 transfer schools like West Side that focus on the students who struggled to succeed at traditional high schools and are at risk of dropping out. They pride themselves on offering individual support, small classes, and a suite of wraparound services to push students to graduation.

But the city’s transfer schools are in a precarious position, as enrollment across the sector has plummeted. The number of students attending transfer high schools fell 22% over the past four years compared with a 5% decline at traditional high schools, a Chalkbeat analysis found. Steep dips in enrollment can put schools in danger of being closed or merged.

Already, the education department has put forward a contentious plan for West Side, which shrank from serving about 500 students six years ago to about 200 this year. The proposal calls for West Side to swap buildings with The Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem, which is outgrowing its campus.

Community members have blasted the proposal because it would leave West Side without an on-site child care center or health clinic. Some have also warned students may face threats to their physical safety if they cross neighborhood lines.

The education department has argued the move, along with a new Spanish dual-language program, could help attract new students to West Side. After the department delayed the proposal earlier this month, the city’s Panel for Educational Policy is scheduled for a Monday vote that will be closely watched.

The battle playing out at West Side only represents the most high-profile example of the transfer school enrollment crisis that has been simmering below the surface. About 70% of the city’s transfer schools now enroll fewer than 200 students, up from about 26% in 2017. A handful have slipped below 100.

The enrollment drops are likely due in part to more relaxed academic standards at traditional high schools during the pandemic, observers say. Some of the sector’s leaders believe it will bounce back as regular grading policies — and state graduation exams — fall back into place.

But dwindling enrollment raises questions about the sustainability of a network of schools that exclusively serve students who are at risk of dropping out, including those who have been tangled in the criminal justice system, face difficult family circumstances, or may be parents themselves. Since schools are funded largely based on enrollment, shrinking rosters can make it difficult to offer a wide range of classes and extracurricular activities.

Manhattan’s Edward A. Reynolds West Side High School is at the center of a contentious proposal to move the school into a smaller space.

Education department officials did not respond to questions for this story, including whether they are considering merging or closing transfer schools.

Some leaders across the sector believe that enrollment will rebound, but there is lingering concern that a broader wave of restructuring could be on the horizon.

“It might have to be the reality — I don’t know that you can run a school with 100 students,” said one transfer school principal who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

“We’ve been sort of warned, in a sense: Keep your numbers up or that’s something that could happen.”

Why is transfer school enrollment dropping precipitously?

Transfer school leaders trace the steep decline in enrollment to pandemic-era policies that made it easier for students to stay on track at traditional high schools.

When the pandemic forced campuses to shut down in 2020, schools eased their grading policies. And state officials temporarily paused the Regents exams, typically required for graduation. Students only had to pass their courses to graduate rather than sit for an additional state exam.

Students may have been able to pass classes they would have failed in a typical year, said Jai Nanda, executive director of Urban Dove, which operates two charter transfer schools, one in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx.

Traditional high schools had incentives to hang on to more of their students, since many of those campuses were also experiencing enrollment declines. Plus, families may simply have been more reluctant to switch schools during such a chaotic time, even if a student was struggling.

“[Students] chalked it up to being remote rather than their school not being a good fit for them,” Nanda said.

Transfer schools may also have lost students who became disconnected from school due to growing mental health and anxiety problems, or because they needed to work to support their families. Some may have moved out of the city with their families because of rising housing costs.

Small-by-design schools are more vulnerable to enrollment drops

Whatever the cause, declining enrollment has an outsized effect on transfer schools, which are typically smaller to begin with to offer more individualized support than a traditional campus.

Shawn Henry, a director of high school programming at Queens Community House, helps oversee the organization’s partnership with three transfer high schools. The group ensures every student is paired with a counselor, conducts home visits if a student doesn’t show up for three consecutive days, and helps coordinate paid internship opportunities.

“The ideal model is a smaller environment,” Henry said.

But that size makes it difficult to absorb big enrollment swings — though so far the schools have been insulated by an influx of federal relief money.

At Urban Dove, which has seen enrollment dip, the school has a heavy focus on sports, with all students expected to participate on athletic teams with coaches who work with them multiple hours each day. “A great deal of that program is beyond the traditional school budget,” Nanda said. Emergency pandemic aid kept the program afloat.

Still, other campuses are beginning to feel the pinch — and relief money is beginning to dry up. One transfer school principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said their school has already reduced staff positions. That has limited the number of electives they offer. And it forced them to cut the number of classrooms with a mix of students with disabilities and general education students; those classes are typically staffed by two teachers.

Those types of cuts can prompt a downward spiral, where fewer classes and programs makes the school less attractive to prospective students. At the same time, shrinking rosters make operating the schools even more expensive on a per-student basis, creating incentives for city officials to consolidate or close them.

“As you contract, it becomes harder to even grow,” the principal said.

Some transfer school leaders predict a rebound

Despite the serious headwinds facing transfer schools, some of the school’s leaders believe demand for the schools will return.

As schools return to normal grading policies and Regents exams are back in full swing, there may be an even larger contingent of students who struggle to graduate without moving to a transfer school.

Nanda, the leader of two charter transfer schools, said he is already seeing signs of an enrollment uptick. “You’re going to have a lot of kids coming into high school in the next couple years that won’t have the fundamental skill[s],” he said, though he noted that it remains to be seen how many will wind up at transfer schools.

Transfer school staff also noted that the schools could be an asset to serving the growing number of asylum-seeking students arriving in New York, as alternative schools specialize in reaching students with interrupted educations.

Emma Lazarus High School, a transfer program on the Lower East Side, has long focused on serving students who are still learning English and has seen its enrollment snap back relatively quickly thanks in part to an influx of new arrivals.

“The uptake in immigrants has definitely impacted our enrollment upward,” said Principal Melody Kellogg, who retired this month. Education officials previously indicated that they planned to place some new arrivals at transfer schools, but officials have provided few details about the program.

Still, Kellogg and other transfer leaders said it can be difficult for other transfer schools to serve newly arrived immigrants, arguing that even with a boost in funding, it is often not commensurate with the need to hire new staff. Finding qualified educators, especially mid-year, is a major challenge.

“It’s nice to have a little extra money, but it’s not going to be enough to support them fully,” Kellogg said.

More broadly, Natalie Lozada, who works with four transfer schools through East Side House Settlement, worries that a focus on enrollment declines could jeopardize programs that are doing solid work. “Are we saying that because these numbers are low that we should discard supports for these students?”

Still, like many of the sector’s boosters, she anticipates a rebound is coming.

“I believe in my heart, and based on my experience, and all my years of doing this work, that it’s circular. Their numbers are going to come back up again.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

As NYC teacher contract negotiations heat up, educators worry raises won’t match inflation

2023-04-24T21:24:26+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to keep up with NYC’s public schools.

As New York City’s teachers union pushes for a contract, some educators took to the sidewalks during arrival on Monday to call attention to administrative tasks that distract from teaching.

“We were hired to nurture and educate children, not to feed a bureaucratic beast that can no longer ever be satisfied,” United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said Monday morning, flanked by educators at P.S. 527 and M.S. 114 on the Upper East Side. “And that is why the teachers are here today.”

But one major issue received comparatively less attention during the event with the union chief: pay increases.

Educators across the city said they’re concerned that an upcoming deal won’t keep up with rising costs, even as teachers faced enormous responsibilities during the pandemic to quickly spin up remote schooling and are now working to catch students up from years of interrupted learning.

“We were called pandemic heroes, we were called essential,” said Martina Meijer, a Brooklyn elementary school teacher. “Love and thank-you cards cannot pay our bills. Our wages are not keeping up with inflation.”

Educators have good reason to worry that a contract will likely not match inflation, which has moderated somewhat in recent months but reached 6.5% last year. New York City unions historically participate in pattern bargaining, which means that once one union reaches a deal on wages, subsequent unions typically follow the same rough outline.

So far, none of the unions that have recently reached deals with the city have matched or exceeded the rate of inflation, which means workers effectively experience pay cuts. District Council 37 — which covers cafeteria workers, crossing guards, and childcare workers — accepted a $3,000 signing bonus and annual wage increases of 3% with a 3.25% increase in the final year of the contract (the agreement is retroactive to 2021). The Police Benevolent Association scored somewhat higher wage increases, topping out at 4%.

“The moment the DC37 contract came out, they set the pattern for wage increases. And those numbers are pretty dismal,” said Ilona Nanay, a literacy coach who is part of the UFT’s 500-member bargaining committee and a member of its executive board. “UFT members are now extremely worried that’s the pattern that’s been set.”

Mulgrew indicated that significant pay bumps would be difficult to achieve given the increases that have been established by other unions. “We have tried to break pattern bargaining in the past — we have not been successful,” he said Monday. “That’s as far as I want to go on that subject right now.”

Mayor Eric Adams has argued the city can’t afford to take on significant cost increases, pointing to uncertain economic headwinds and dwindling federal pandemic relief funding. A City Hall spokesperson declined to comment on the status of negotiations, or any of the city’s proposals, except to say officials hope to reach an agreement soon.

The UFT represents about 120,000 school staff, including 77,000 teachers who currently earn just over $61,000 at the bottom of the pay scale to nearly $129,000 at the top. The union also includes 25,000 paraprofessionals who typically work as classroom aides for students with disabilities and earn considerably less, with salaries that start just under $28,000 and top out shy of $45,000. The UFT’s current contract expired in September.

Many educators already struggle to afford to live in the communities where they teach, and some said they worry that anemic raises will make it even harder to attract and retain them. Mirroring patterns across the country, teacher turnover in New York City increased this past year to 8%, up from about 6% before the pandemic.

“The first few years are really difficult — it takes a while to become a really good teacher,” Olivia Swisher, a middle school art teacher at Sunset Park Prep who is part of the union’s bargaining committee and has been teaching for about five years. “If we don’t create a way for me to pay my bills, pay my rent, then I won’t be able to continue being a teacher and I desperately want to.”

Still, it’s unclear to what extent raises that don’t keep pace with inflation might influence the local labor market for teachers. Although the cost of living in the city is high, “salaries are already relatively high,” said Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor at the University at Albany who studies education-related political and policy issues. “They probably have more wiggle room than other places.”

Pocketbook vs. paperwork

The UFT’s focus on workplace rather than pocketbook issues may reflect that the union is boxed in on wages. Last month, for instance, union officials organized a “grade in” where teachers took to coffeeshops and other public areas to demonstrate how much time they devote to non-teaching responsibilities.

On Monday, teachers gathered outside their school buildings across the city to distribute flyers that detail survey results that suggest many teachers believe administrative tasks are interfering with student learning. The union is planning similar actions all week.

Teachers spread flyers about burdensome paperwork and administrative tasks outside of P.S. 527 and M.S. 114 on the Upper East Side.

Multiple educators said they agree that administrative tasks can take time away from teaching and learning and hoped the union could make some headway on those issues in a new contract. Some pointed to clunky attendance and special education data systems that are time-consuming to use, eating into time that could be used planning lessons.

Others pointed to assessments educators were required to fill out regarding their students’ social-emotional health, which certain schools have found useful but some educators said was a waste of time. (The city has since made them optional.)

“There are all of these diagnostics that superintendents put on principals that we have to do — we lose instructional time to those assessments,” said Swisher. “It’s burdensome, and we don’t do much with the data anyways.”

Union officials have been tight-lipped on exactly how they want to change the contract to reduce the time teachers spend on paperwork or other administrative tasks. “I’m not allowed to specifically talk about any of the demands,” Mulgrew told reporters. Members of the union’s 500-member negotiating team have also been required to sign non-disclosure agreements, multiple participants told Chalkbeat.

Secrecy around contract demands frustrate some members

The union’s reluctance to lay out its proposals publicly has frustrated some UFT members who believe that sharing specific demands would help galvanize support for a stronger contract from the public and make it easier to organize their colleagues.

Keeping the demands a secret “makes it really hard to mobilize folks because people want to know what they’re being mobilized for,” said Nanay, the bargaining committee member who is also part of the Movement of Rank and File Educators, or MORE, a progressive caucus within the union that is often critical of Mulgrew’s leadership.

Several teachers pointed to Los Angeles as a model of an activist approach, arguing that the union has been more public with its demands and was willing to walk off the job to pressure district officials. Union and district officials there recently reached an agreement to raise teachers’ wages by about 21% over three years.

Mulgrew defended the union’s strategy, arguing the UFT does not want to tip its hand. “If you tell the other side exactly everything that you want, it’s probably a good bet that they’re gonna use that against you in negotiations.”

Lyon, the University at Albany professor, also emphasized that the UFT can’t easily threaten or carry out a work stoppage because a teachers strike would violate New York’s Taylor Law, which imposes significant financial penalties for public sector unions that strike.

Still, frustration with the union’s leadership over wages could create political headaches for union leaders. When the last contract was approved in 2018, teachers raised similar concerns even though inflation was considerably lower.

The union’s leadership is facing other headwinds, too, including a controversial effort to move retirees to a privatized but federally funded Medicare Advantage plan. Mulgrew was re-elected last year by the smallest margin since he won his first full term in 2010, though his victory was still decisive.

“He’s maintained power pretty successfully, and has been able to continue his same leadership style, even in the face of resistance,” Lyon said. “But it will hinge on his ability to win the benefits that the majority of teachers want.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC bought 725K devices for remote learning. Now they’re trying to count them — and all school tech.

2023-02-16T21:30:24+00:00

When the COVID pandemic started about three years ago, New York City scrambled to get hundreds of thousands of students connected to the internet, buying iPads and Chromebook laptops, so students could learn from home.

The education department struggled for months to get enough devices for students and continued to purchase more. City officials ultimately bought 550,000 internet-enabled iPads, as well as 175,000 Chromebook laptops, costing roughly $360 million, according to the education department.

Now the education department has set out to find and track all of its technology, including the devices purchased during the pandemic. Although schools keep a record of devices, city watchdogs have criticized the education department for having no centralized system. The “Central Inventory Project” will log all technology at schools and central offices, including other kinds of tablets and laptops, desktop computers, printers and smartboards, according to a department spokesperson.

The department’s inventory project — which began last June and is expected to be completed this summer — is large. Twenty-six teams of five people each plan to visit all district and charter schools, as well as all central offices. So far, they’ve covered 660 schools and offices in 519 buildings.

A spokesperson declined to share takeaways from their inquiry so far, saying that they’re still collecting data from the inventory sweeps.

City officials are hoping to tally up how many devices are located in schools and central offices, as well as how many of those they’ve assigned to students for use at both school and home, according to a spokesperson.

Officials said they’re attempting to follow city, state, and federal guidelines for tracking devices. But they also appear to be addressing an issue raised years ago by former Comptroller Scott Stringer, who noted in multiple reports that there was no centralized system for tracking computer hardware.

A 2017 audit, for example, found that the department was missing more than 1,800 computers, laptops, and tablets. (At the time, the education department disputed the comptroller’s methodology and rejected most of Stringer’s recommendations, including his call for a systemwide inventory count.)

And a 2021 audit found that the education department had logged iPads for 5,000 students who were not also marked as having received those devices.

Some educators, who praised the scope of the project, said it is highlighting how difficult it can be to account for school devices, including computers purchased during the pandemic.

Eighth grade social studies teacher Nate Stripp, who is also the technology coordinator at Brooklyn’s M.S. 50, said their inventory process was straightforward and happened over a two-day period last month, when 10 technicians came in to count devices. In preparation for the visit, education department officials asked the school to remind students to bring in any school-issued devices they had at home. Officials also provided an estimate of how many devices they believe the school should have in hand.

There were some hiccups. In a majority of cases where iPads were missing during the inventory process, students had forgotten to bring them to school, Stripp said. There were several cases where students didn’t know where their devices were.

Stripp has come across students who were supposed to bring their remote-learning iPad to M.S. 50 from their old elementary school but claimed that they no longer have it in their possession — leading to a complicated scramble to figure out where the device is.

“I have enough technological competence to be able to run my own internal spreadsheets,” Stripp said. “But to really keep track of devices, we need a person who, at least part of their job, is paid to keep track of and maintain the technology inventory in the building.”

Officials hope to use this project to improve the process for when schools do a required annual device inventory, which is supposed to happen each spring, a spokesperson said.

Stripp said the centralized process last month was the first time he had seen such an effort in his five years at M.S. 50.

Some schools may do a better job than others of tracking their inventory, said a teacher at a Brooklyn high school, who went through the inventory process in December. For example, his school had a technology coordinator who kept a detailed spreadsheet of all their computers – but since she left, no one has taken over her responsibilities.

“It’s something that’s needed,” said the teacher, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. “There are definitely ways that things can go missing without accountability.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Applications to run for NYC’s Community Education Councils open for 2023

2023-01-09T23:16:18+00:00

Election season has begun for New York City’s Community Education Councils, the advisory bodies that represent the best chance for most public school parents to get directly involved in district and citywide education policy.

Each of the city’s 32 geographic districts has a 10-member elected parent council responsible for holding monthly public meetings, approving education department rezoning plans, passing resolutions, and working with district superintendents. There are also citywide councils representing high school students, multilingual learners, special education students, and kids with significant disabilities in specialized District 75 programs.

This year’s election will be the second since a major rule change that opened the voting to all city parents, instead of just a handful of parent leaders from each school.

Applications for council seats opened Monday, and parents have until Feb. 13 to submit their names. In order to run, parents must have a child currently enrolled in a city public school and an active New York City Schools Account (NYCSA). Parents can run for multiple councils, but only serve on one. Education department employees are not eligible to serve on councils while employed by the agency.

During the last CEC elections, held in 2021 before city schools had fully reopened, there were bitter debates over policies related to school admissions and accelerated programs. There were also wide disparities in voter turnout between districts. In Manhattan’s District 3, one of the city’s wealthiest, the top vote-getter received over 700 votes, while the top vote recipient in Brooklyn’s District 19, which has a similar number of students but twice the poverty rate, got only 39 votes.

While voter turnout was underwhelming in many districts, the number of candidates surged last election cycle, with nearly 1,800 parents throwing their hats in the ring, an increase of roughly 70% from the previous round of elections in 2019.

The education department will sponsor candidate forums from Feb. 27 to April 20. Voting takes place April 21 to May 9. Education department officials didn’t immediately say how voting will take place this year.

District 75 gets broader representation

Parents from the city’s specialized District 75 programs for students with significant disabilities have traditionally elected representatives to a citywide Community Education Council that’s separate from the geographic district councils.

That citywide council will continue. But now, for the first time, District 75 families can also elect a representative to sit on each of the 32 geographic districts’ councils, thanks to a change in state law.

Because Community Education Councils are controlled by state law, the rules governing the bodies are often tweaked when the law granting mayoral control over city schools comes up for renewal. That was the case again last year, during a particularly hard-fought battle to extend mayoral control.

District 75 programs are located throughout the city and often share spaces with traditional public schools. But some staffers have long contended that the specialized programs don’t get equal use of school space and facilities.

“For far too long, our students with special needs have been left out of the equation,” schools Chancellor David Banks said Monday, kicking off this year’s election season at the education department’s Lower Manhattan headquarters. “You can’t have a school system like this and leave any group on a sideline looking in.”

Agency warns against accepting endorsements

In a guide for aspiring council members, the education department warned candidates not to “solicit or accept endorsements from political parties and party officials, or from elected officials, including current Community or Citywide Education Council members.”

“We are very clear in our guidelines that you should not accept endorsements either from unions or organized groups. We don’t want anyone to have an upper hand or an advantage,” said Christina Melendez, the head of the education department’s Family and Community Empowerment office.

Some candidates told Chalkbeat in 2021 they received warnings from the education department about accepting endorsements after the advocacy group Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education as well as the Movement of Rank and File Educators, a caucus within the city teachers union, released lists of preferred candidates. It’s not immediately clear how the education department will enforce the endorsement rule for this year’s election.

Officials target voter turnout

Roughly 22,000 parents, or just 2% of those eligible, voted in the 2021 CEC elections.

Multiple factors may have contributed to the low turnout and disparities in voter interest, including limited in-person voting options because of ongoing COVID-19 restrictions and divides in technological access and know-how.

But Banks also pointed to broader problems with civic engagement that transcend just CEC elections.

“It doesn’t surprise me when folks don’t come out necessarily and vote in great numbers in CEC elections. We don’t come out in great numbers and vote for lots of elections, because we don’t see the direct connection to how it actually impacts our lives,” he said.

Kenita Lloyd, Banks’s deputy chancellor for family and community engagement, said the education department will be hosting workshops in multiple languages every day through the application period for candidates.

Banks added that he’s asked the district superintendents to make it a priority to spread the word about the upcoming elections.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

NYC school bus delays reach highest level in five years, City Council analysis shows

2022-11-22T00:03:57+00:00

School bus delays spiked this fall to levels higher than any point in the last five years, according to figures revealed during a City Council hearing Monday, representing a growing hardship for families who depend on yellow buses to ferry their children to school.

Last month alone, there were nearly 14,500 school bus delays, lasting 41 minutes on average. That’s up from about 10,600 delays averaging 37 minutes in October 2021.

Both the number — and duration — of delays last month were higher than during any other month over the last five school years, according to the City Council’s analysis, which is based on self-reported data from bus companies.

City officials emphasized that the self-reported nature of the statistics may make it unreliable and noted that the data shows heavy traffic represents a significant share of the increase in delays. But numerous advocates and elected officials said Monday that the bus system appears to be under greater strain.

“In 2018, the education committee held a hearing on [the Office of Pupil Transportation’s] failure to provide students with reliable school busing services,” Rita Joseph, the committee’s chairperson, said during an oversight hearing on school bus transportation. “The only thing that seems to have changed since that is that the problem has gotten worse.”

New York City’s school bus network is responsible for transporting roughly 150,000 students to school at a budgeted cost of $1.6 billion this year, according to the Independent Budget Office. But families have struggled for years with delayed buses, no-shows, or even getting a bus route assigned at all. Some of the city’s most vulnerable students — including 65,000 students with disabilities — are dependent on buses to transport them to programs that are often outside their immediate neighborhoods.

Late buses have wreaked havoc on Jalissa and her 6-year-old son, Deandre. The family moved to a Bronx domestic violence shelter last year, at least an hour and 15 minutes from Deandre’s elementary school in Jamaica, Queens. Last year, the bus was late so often that Jalissa was fired from her job at a food preparation and delivery company.

“My manager was really thoughtful and tried to be as lenient as he can,” she said. But “I got terminated because I was constantly late every single day” on account of the school bus delays. (Jalissa requested to be identified only by her first name to protect her privacy.)

The situation hasn’t improved this year. Despite help from Advocates for Children, a nonprofit group, Jalissa struggled to secure a bus at the beginning of the school year, even though the required paperwork was filed on time, according to her advocate. She took Deandre to school on public transportation, leaving their shelter at 6:30 a.m. for the hour and a half trip by subway and bus, trips she paid for out of pocket.

Even after Jalissa finally secured a bus roughly a month into the school year, it is almost always at least an hour late. That has left her in an impossible position, as she does not want to transfer her son to a new school. “I’m very serious about my child’s education,” she said. “I don’t want to change his school.”

At the same time, she worries about the impact of missed class and lengthy waits. Plus, the unpredictability of the bus schedule has made her reluctant to search for a new job. Frequent calls and complaints to the bus company and the education department’s Office of Pupil Transportation have not resolved the issue.

“He is still developing; he should not be a whole hour late,” she said. “Something has to change.”

At Monday’s City Council hearing education department officials said that bus driver shortages were partly to blame for disrupted service, even as officials in the previous administration insisted it wasn’t an issue. At the beginning of the school year, the system was short about 500 drivers, said Glenn Risbrook, the education department’s senior executive director of student transportation. In some cases, that forced drivers to run two routes, one after the other.

“It is often our highest needs students who are on these routes that end up without permanent drivers and thus are put in these situations,” Risbrook said. He added that the shortage has dropped to 313 drivers and the city is working with bus companies “to get qualified drivers on the roads as quickly as possible.”

But officials also acknowledged that getting drivers back on the job may be a challenge after thousands of them were furloughed in the wake of school building closures.

“They were laid off, in a worldwide pandemic, with no wages, no pension contributions, and, above all else, no health care,” said Kevin Moran, the education department’s chief school operations officer. “And so when we talk about the driver shortage and trying to bring people back into the system, we have a fair bit of work to do to re-establish trust.”

In the meantime, city officials said they are paying for rideshare services to help fill in the gaps and also pointed to a long-delayed GPS tracking system that is supposed to eventually give parents real-time information about the location of buses, help the education department create better routes, and more comprehensively track delays. (The education department is piloting the GPS system in District 26 in Queens but a spokesperson did not provide a specific timeline for rolling it out citywide.)

Advocates said the rideshare solution is imperfect because it is not always explicitly offered to families and requires a caregiver to ride with their child, often disrupting work routines.

“It doesn’t really work for all families and it doesn’t resolve the actual bus issue,” said Janyll Canals, the director of the Robin Hood Project at Advocates for Children and who testified at Monday’s City Council hearing. “Multiple families that I’ve worked with don’t know it’s an option until they come to us.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Eric Adams touts NYC’s literacy efforts in school year kickoff

2022-09-08T18:33:34+00:00

On his inaugural first day of school since taking office, Mayor Eric Adams and his schools chief David Banks made no secret of their top priority: improving literacy instruction in a system where the majority of third through eighth graders are not considered proficient readers.

They pointed to new efforts requiring that elementary schools use reading curriculums rooted in phonics and highlighted plans to ramp up screening for reading challenges including dyslexia.

“You’re going to see a dramatic change over the next several years in reading scores and our approach to the teaching of reading,” Banks said Thursday morning.

The backdrop of their joint appearance was the Bronx’s P.S. 161, one of two pilot schools that will offer intensive literacy instruction and which Banks said will serve as a “beacon and a blueprint” for other schools the city plans to launch for struggling readers.

Lastassia Hargrove will be watching closely to see how her youngest son Carter Miller, a third grader at P.S. 161, benefits from the program.

She spotted Carter’s reading challenges early on, worried that he wasn’t interested in books, and he didn’t remember details from those she repeatedly read aloud to him. Hargrove said she struggled to get her son connected to services and that he’s missed benchmarks.

On Carter’s first day of third grade, Adams put his arms around him and his mother and vowed to prevent students like him from slipping through the cracks.

“There are so many like him that have been left behind,” Adams told reporters assembled in the auditorium of P.S. 161. “You are going to be the symbol of this program — this young, bright man.”

Achieving big literacy gains will undoubtedly prove challenging, as schools typically have wide latitude to pick what curriculums they use, and the process of adapting to new materials requires time and support.

Some school leaders feel uncertain about how the city plans to support them, as the administration is reducing the number of literacy coaches while expanding the number of grade levels the remaining coaches will serve. On top of that, the vast majority of schools are facing budget cuts.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the education department’s chief academic officer during the Bloomberg administration and current president of the Bank Street College of Education, praised Banks’ focus on “investing in a research based literacy strategy.” But he also noted that districts that made curriculum changes have sometimes still struggled to move the needle.

“Selecting the right curriculum is never a silver bullet,” he wrote. “Success in improving literacy outcomes depends on capacity building that strengthens the instructional culture of the school and supports growth in teacher’s skills through regular reflection with peers and coaches.”

Disruptions stemming from the pandemic may also complicate the city’s plans. It’s unclear how students are faring academically or how far off track they might be. City officials have refused to provide assessment data from last year, and the state has not yet shared standardized test results for the city’s third through eighth graders.

But there are already some concerning indicators. Math and reading scores for 9-year-olds from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose test is known as “the nation’s report card,” plummeted. (NAEP scores for New York City students are expected in October.)

Chancellor David Banks welcomes students at P.S. 161 in the Bronx on the first day of school.

Some of the city’s efforts are starting relatively small: Although the mayor and chancellor touted the pilot program to improve literacy instruction at P.S. 161 and Manhattan’s P.S. 125, they are each serving just over 30 students in the first year, Banks said. Some observers also expressed concern about launching schools geared toward students with dyslexia or other reading challenges, arguing that all schools should be able to reach those students.

At P.S. 161, the pilot will include a second and third grade classroom staffed by teachers who have received intensive training to reach struggling readers, according to the Literacy Academy Collective, an organization founded by a handful of parents whose children were not getting the reading support they needed in the city’s public schools.

Banks acknowledged the parents’ role in building the program on Thursday, a moment that they said was the culmination of years of advocacy.

“For three and a half years, we’ve been saying this has to change,” said Emily Hellstrom, one of the organization’s parent co-founders. Watching the chancellor explain that “we have to teach our children to read and this is the way to do it — it’s indescribable.”

For her part, Hargrove is excited that her son will be part of the literacy pilot. She hopes that by the end of the year, Carter will be able to confidently translate the thoughts swirling in his head into written sentences.

“I think it’s gonna be a great program,” she said.

NYC schools to move 1,000 central, borough staffers to district offices

2022-09-02T21:56:30+00:00

New York City’s education department will move 1,000 central and borough-level staff to district offices, Chancellor David Banks announced on Friday.

Staffers will be pulled from central leadership, First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg’s office, early childhood education, and from borough offices “to more effectively support schools in coordination with district superintendents,” according to a news release about the restructuring.

Borough offices — which a spokesperson said will no longer exist after the administration’s shake-up — each have traditionally served multiple districts. They’re staffed with people who are supposed to help schools with things such as assessments and screening, planning lessons, and analyzing student data.

Officials did not share what most of these 1,000 staffers currently do, or how exactly their jobs will change once they move into their new roles.

Staff will be moved to superintendents’ offices “to be used in direct support of schools,” said spokesperson Nathaniel Styer, who said that the change removes a bureaucratic layer in providing schools with direct support. For example, Styer said, social workers will be working with schools in “maximizing social-emotional support” for students.

About 100 of them are social workers from the early childhood division who, once moved to district offices, will focus on “high-need communities,” such as students who are living in temporary housing, officials said. City officials had promised last year to equip each school with at least one full-time social worker or access to a school-based mental health clinic; Styer said Friday that they’ve achieved that goal.

“As we continue the work to reimagine the education we provide, it is critical that our central and borough staff are moving closer to the communities, schools, students, and teachers they serve,” Banks said in a statement. “Our Superintendents are accountable for partnering with families and schools to meet the needs of their communities and improve the school experience of our students, and these personnel are being reassigned to support those efforts.”

The move represents Banks’ second shakeup of the education department’s bureaucracy and leadership. He first eliminated the nine executive superintendents appointed by his predecessor, Richard Carranza, and required district superintendents to reapply for their jobs. That process met with some backlash.

Friday’s announcement appeared in line with early priorities set by Banks. In his first official agenda-setting speech, Banks said he wanted to give superintendents more staff and resources and signaled that he was considering cuts at borough offices.

The city teachers union applauded the move.

“Any time we move resources closer to the schools, it is a win for our students and our school communities,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, in a statement.

The principals union did not immediately respond for comment.

Some central office staffers are already questioning what the move will achieve. One central office employee within the city’s early childhood division — an area where some of these 1,000 staffers will be moved from — said there’s still no clarity about what this plan will mean for her office.

“I have no words for their inability to create a clear plan,” said the staffer, who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak with the press. “It’s not clear what actually is happening.”

One example of what the reorganization will look like on the ground: This staffer was informed Friday that all of the city’s 185 early childhood instructional coordinators, who work directly with 3K and prekindergarten providers, will be excessed — which Styer confirmed, adding that there will be available jobs for each person. “Excessing” means the employee would lose their current job, but would continue earning a city paycheck while they reapply to jobs within the system.

Those workers will be encouraged to apply for new instructional coach positions as part of this reorganization, the staffer said — but she has yet to receive any more details.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Gov. Hochul says she supports bill to cap NYC school class sizes

2022-08-25T17:11:31+00:00

Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Thursday that she supports sweeping legislation that would establish more aggressive class size limits in New York City’s public schools, the strongest comments she’s made since the bill was overwhelmingly passed by the legislature last month.

“I’m looking closely at it. I’m inclined to be supportive,” Hochul said on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, adding she spoke yesterday with Mayor Eric Adams and expected a resolution in the coming days. “I just have to work out a few more details with the mayor.”

The Adams administration has opposed the bill, warning that the legislation would cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to implement and could detract from other funding priorities. Hochul suggested that funding was a sticking point and is considering “chapter amendments” that would allow the legislation to go into effect now but with changes that would be taken up by the legislature next year.

“There might be something about a funding source or a responsibility that’s, you know, on the shoulders of the state right now — and I have to make sure I’m protecting the state taxpayers as well,” Hochul said. “So there are some loose ends, but philosophically it’s something I’m supporting.”

State lawmakers passed the bill in early June with just six voting no across both chambers. But Hochul has yet to take action, drawing pressure from advocates and the city’s teachers union to sign it into law. The legislation would significantly shrink the maximum number of students allowed in each classroom, which for most grade levels is currently set between 30 and 34 students (the limit for kindergarten is 25).

By 2027, the legislation would cap classes at 20 students in kindergarten through third grade, 23 students for grades 4-8, and 25 students for high school classes. Physical education and classes for “performing groups” must be limited to 40 students.

Proponents of the bill argue that stricter class size limits are popular among educators and parents. They point to research that suggests smaller classes boost student test scores and can also lead to high attendance and greater classroom engagement.

“The governor should sign the bill now since the school year is about to start, and as is since the bill was passed nearly unanimously by both chambers of the legislature,” state Sen. John Liu, the legislation’s main sponsor, said in a statement. Asked about the governor’s suggestion that the bill be tweaked, a spokesperson for Liu wrote in an email that “the legislature can easily override a veto and therefore would not be inclined to accept the governor’s request for a chapter amendment.”

Michael Mulgrew, head of the city’s teachers union, wrote in a statement that “the parents, teachers and students of New York City want this legislation signed and signed as soon as possible.”

The bill has drawn criticism from City Hall and some budget watchdogs who argue that it is an expensive mandate; city officials have estimated the annual price tag for grades K-5 alone would be $500 million.

At the same time, the Adams administration is reducing most school budgets, which some educators say will have the effect of raising class sizes on some campuses this fall.

“While this administration strongly supports lower class sizes, unless there is guaranteed funding attached to those mandates, we will see cuts elsewhere in the system that would harm our most vulnerable students in our highest need communities,” Amaris Cockfield, an Adams spokesperson, said in a statement.

There are also unresolved questions about how the bill would function in practice. The cap could reduce the number of available seats at some of the city’s most coveted schools or require construction of new classrooms even as enrollment has fallen significantly in recent years. It’s also unclear if the policy would benefit the highest-need students the most, as it could require big investments at schools with fewer low-income students.

“Much of the effort will be expended on other students less likely to be helped by the reduction,” Andrew S. Rein, the president of the Citizens Budget Commission, wrote in a letter to Hochul urging her to veto the bill. “There also will be unintended consequences as resources to reduce class sizes are shifted from other programs, which may well be more beneficial.”

The bill says that class size reductions “shall prioritize schools serving populations with higher poverty levels” though it does not define what that means. The legislation also lays out some exemptions to the mandates, including “space,” “over-enrolled students,” “license area shortages” and “severe economic distress.”

In an interview last month, Liu said the precise definitions of those carve-outs should be hashed out between the district and union officials, which must collectively approve any exemptions according to the bill.

“This language is trying to foresee problem situations where meeting the class size mandate would be extremely difficult,” he said. “We’re not trying to create impossible situations here.”

Reema Amin contributed to this story.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools lays out plan to enroll hundreds of asylum-seeking students

2022-08-19T21:51:56+00:00

As New York City sees a surge of new immigrants seeking asylum from Central and South American countries, officials announced Friday that they will provide extra enrollment help to hundreds of new students expected to attend city schools.

City officials estimate that about 6,000 such immigrants have entered the city’s shelter system over the past three months, which the administration has blamed, in part, on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sending migrants on buses to New York.

At least 1,000 new students are expected to enroll in district schools, including preschool-aged children. However, that figure is “fluid” and will continue to change, said education department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer.

Many of these students may need extra support, such as legally mandated services for children learning English as a new language.

“Our public schools are prepared to welcome families seeking asylum with open arms,” said Chancellor David Banks in a statement. “We are working alongside our agency partners to set students up for success by addressing their academic, emotional and social needs, and ensuring there is no disruption to their education.”

As part of a city plan dubbed “Project Open Arms,” shelters will host “pop-up” enrollment offices, where education department staff will help new families sign their children up for school. Staff will also accompany families to Family Welcome Centers, which are city offices where people can enroll their kids and get more information about school.

Staff will give out backpacks and school supplies and connect new asylum-seekers with the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Clinics for medical care, officials said. The city also plans to work with community-based organizations that work with immigrant families so that they can provide families with “critical resources and services.”

Enrollment officials are placing students in schools with open seats that are near their shelters, and considering a family’s preferred choice of language instruction, according to the department. Children who are learning English are entitled to traditional English as a new language instruction, meaning their classes are in English but they’re supposed to get extra support and translation help during and outside of class. They can also choose bilingual programs or dual language instruction, but most city schools lack such programming, according to program data from last school year.

So far, students are concentrated in Districts 2 and 3 in Manhattan, District 10 in the Bronx, District 14 in Brooklyn, and Districts 24 and 30 in Queens, officials said. These new students range across ages and grades, said Yesenia Escalante, an education department enrollment counselor.

Students who enroll after the traditional admissions process has concluded tend to have higher needs, such as this influx of asylum seekers. In the past, late-arriving students have been sent to lower performing schools, raising questions about where these new immigrant students will be enrolled and whether they will be adequately served.

Enrollment has declined across the city, meaning there could be enough seats available across many different types of schools.

In Manhattan’s District 2, officials have been speaking with families at shelters, then connecting them to individual schools, said Kelly McGuire, superintendent for the district.

“Our schools have pulled together some of their office staff, they have folks who are enrolling students directly at the school site, and that’s kind of the critical piece in terms of evaluating who the students are, what their language needs are, their students with disabilities, making sure that they are getting connected with the services that they need,” McGuire said.

Kamar Samuels, superintendent of District 3, noted that they’re working with organizations and schools’ staff to ensure students “are feeling welcome.”

“We’re working with CBOs, we’re working with school staff to just make sure that we tap into all of the resources that we have regarding language and making sure that we have access to those languages,” Samuels said.

The new wave of students comes as schools across the city are seeing budget cuts due to projected declining enrollment, though a legal fight could eventually overturn those cuts. Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg said that schools seeing an influx of new students, particularly those with extra needs, will be able to request more funding, such as to hire more staff — a process, he added, that’s not unique to this school year.

“You might need to immediately post and hire for an additional guidance counselor, or an additional (English as a new language) teacher, and if you need to do that, you’ll talk to your budget director, you talk to your superintendent, and you’ll get it posted very quickly,” Weisberg said of principals. “It won’t be, ‘Oh, gosh, you’re gonna have to wait a few months,’ and then do it then, because you need it right now.”

Advocates lauded the city’s effort to work across various agencies to address immigrant students’ needs.

However, they worried about historic barriers to adequate schooling for new immigrants, which have been the subject of a longstanding state-issued corrective action plan. For example, the city has for years failed to provide legally required services to all bilingual students with disabilities, in part due to a shortage of trained bilingual educators.

“We know there aren’t enough bilingual programs in the city for all of the English language learners that qualify for them,” said Rita Rodriguez-Engberg, director of the Immigrant Students Rights Project at Advocates for Children New York. “We also know schools don’t always inform families of their right to elect bilingual programs.”

Additionally, city officials should ensure that school workers and those at Family Welcome Centers are trained on the legal rights of immigrants, especially those who are undocumented, said Vanessa Luna, co-founder of ImmSchools, which trains schools on supporting immigrant families.

Rodriguez-Engberg and other advocates worried that there won’t be enough bilingual social workers to help these students, who may be experiencing varying degrees of trauma after fleeing their home countries and relatives or friends. City officials said they plan to evaluate every student’s social-emotional needs using screeners that the district launched last school year.

“We want kids to be in schools that can support them – schools that create a sense of safety for the child and for the family,” said Alejandra Vázquez Baur, an education policy expert who focuses on immigrant students for think tank Next 100. “That is critical for the child’s educational opportunities and also the child’s well being in the school.”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

NYC education panel approves school funding formula after last month’s rejection

2022-05-19T01:26:50+00:00

Following a stunning rejection last month, New York City’s education panel approved Wednesday the city’s school funding formula for next year, as Schools Chancellor David Banks promised to create a group that will review the 15-year-old formula.

The commitment from the city followed concerns from some panel members and public school advocates who want the current funding formula to provide more support for additional groups of high-needs students, such as students living in temporary housing.

The panel voted 12-1, with an additional abstention, to approve the formula, known as Fair Student Funding. The 15th member, a Staten Island borough appointee, quit last month. Chancellor David Banks said he, too, supports a more equitable formula, calling it a “horrible and ridiculous” situation that he inherited from previous administrations. He said he would put in writing his commitment on a working group.

But Banks, who called last month’s vote “deeply disappointing,” said schools could not afford a delay in getting their budgets if the formula was rejected again. Receiving a delayed budget could hamper hiring decisions, making it tougher to plan out classes for next year — an issue schools faced over the past two school years as the pandemic wore on, officials said.

“Passing it tonight does not mean that this is a chancellor who doesn’t give a damn — quite the opposite,” Banks said. “I have to keep the system moving.”

Officials had planned to get budgets to schools this month before the panel’s rejection in April. After Wednesday’s approval, it was not immediately clear when schools would receive their budgets.

Each year, department officials ask the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), composed mostly of mayoral appointees, to reapprove the funding formula. The formula accounts for $10 billion in funding and 65% of school budgets. It is structured to send more money to schools that are struggling academically, as well as those with higher shares of students with disabilities and English language learners.

But after hearing from public speakers last month who opposed the current formula, six panel members, who were not appointed by the mayor, shared their own concerns. Some pressed city officials about why the previous administration never released a report created by a 2019 task force that was charged with reviewing the funding formula.

Even then, the formula likely would have been approved at last month’s meeting. But Mayor Eric Adams, who appoints nine of the panel’s 15 members, had failed to replace an appointee who was forced to resign in March, and another of his appointees was absent. As a result, five panel members appointed by borough presidents abstained from voting on the formula after raising concerns, and a sixth elected representative voted against approval — leaving the city one short of the necessary votes.

Hours before Wednesday’s meeting, City Hall officials announced the appointment of Kyle Kimball to fill the final mayorally appointed seat which became available after the panel member was forced to resign over anti-gay remarks. Kimball is a former Bloomberg and de Blasio administration official who oversaw the New York City Economic Development Corporation. He is now vice president of government relations for Con Edison.

It’s possible that a future working group could look at what the 2019 task force came up with. A draft report from the task force called for adding weights to the formula for more student groups, such as children who are homeless, living in poverty and in foster care, as well as increasing weight for high schools to match those that have specialized academic portfolios — a matter related to how the formula sends money to some higher performing schools, which tend to enroll fewer Black and Hispanic students. The report did not specify what the weights should be.

On Wednesday, Banks said he would have First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg oversee the creation of the new working group and put that commitment in writing. He also said before the vote that revamping the formula would take time, and that another rejection of the formula “would bring the system to a grinding halt.”

Still, roughly two dozen people — mostly parent leaders — asked the panel to again reject the formula because it was not equitable.

“This is not new,” said Isha Taylor, a member of the parent council in Bronx’s District 10. “We appreciate the new [department of education] administration for creating a space for us parents to be a part of this process, but we really ask you, take a hard look and hold your team accountable for making these decisions.”

Some speakers asked the city to create a commission that would be independent of the education department so that it would feel free to analyze and pick apart the formula. Panel member Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, who is an appointee of Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, said she voted to approve because the panel received a commitment from the chancellor to review the formula. Still, Salas-Ramirez wants a commission with experts who can conduct a financial analysis of the formula.

Tom Sheppard, the lone elected member of the panel who voted no, said he was torn over how to vote but couldn’t ignore what he heard from the community. He, like Salas-Ramirez, said he wants a commission with financial analysts.

“That said, please don’t take my no vote to mean that I am uninterested in fixing this — I am very much interested in fixing this,” he said.

Christina Veiga contributed.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Adams makes his case for mayoral control of NYC schools to Albany — from City Hall

2022-05-10T00:14:08+00:00

This piece is a collaboration between Chalkbeat and THE CITY.

With fewer than a dozen working days left until the legislative session concludes in Albany early next month, Mayor Eric Adams is making his pitch asking lawmakers to extend his control over New York City schools before it expires at the end of June.

But he’s doing it from afar, after scrapping a planned trip to Albany. Privately, some fellow Democrats have griped over Adams’ absence in the halls of the state Capitol as he seeks a four-year extension of mayoral control, according to people familiar with the internal discussions.

Now, he’s promising to visit state legislators “in the next few weeks” to plead the case on why his administration should continue to oversee the city’s school system.

Adams had to cancel a rally planned for last week to drum up support for what’s the first-term mayor is calling “mayoral accountability” after a flight cancellation following a campaign-funded jaunt in Los Angeles, and weather criticism that he’s getting distracted as his administration tries to secure a key win.

He held that rescheduled rally on the steps of City Hall Monday morning, with schools Chancellor David Banks.

“The chancellor and I have laid out a bold new vision for our children and for the families that attend our public school system,” Adams said. “This is the first time in history where we have two men who grew up in the public school system with two different experiences — one dealing with a learning disability, another dealing with the Gifted and Talented program.”

Lawmakers will likely extend mayoral control, but may not give Adams exactly what he’s asking for. They are discussing some tweaks, including a one-year extension, a way for families to get involved in key decisions or coupling mayoral control with a study of its accomplishments in the two decades since its been implemented — something the principals union has been seeking.

“The likely outcome will be a system in which the mayor still has control, and therefore, we can hold him accountable for school success or failure, but a system that also provides a meaningful mechanism to bolster parental input,” said Queens Democratic Sen. John Liu, who chairs the Senate’s committee on New York City education. “That is the main issue — that parents feel they have no way to engage, that their suggestions and complaints aren’t even heard.”

‘Stability and Surety’

Well into the third school year defined by a pandemic that interrupted learning and thrust educators and kids into new forms of schooling, Adams argued that extending mayoral control is needed to provide some consistency.

“After two years of trauma to our students, uncertainty cannot be part of the curriculum. It needs to be stability and the surety that these young people are going to know what is going to happen in the upcoming school year,” the mayor said at Monday’s rally.

To be sure, the Adams administration faces multiple challenges over his next four years in office with the nation’s largest school system. Schools and educators are continuing to bounce back mentally and academically from the pandemic. While the education department has so far refused to disclose data from its own assessments of student learning gaps, national test scores released in July 2021 showed that the typical student was behind in reading and math, with steeper drops among Black, Latino and Native American students, as well as children in low-income schools.

Chronic absenteeism — when students miss more 10% or more school days — reached its highest levels this school year since at least 2000, according to education department data.

Enrollment has dropped by 6.4% since the 2019-2020 school year, when the pandemic started. Further dips in enrollment could push Adams to make controversial decisions on closing schools, though the mayor said recently that he’s not currently considering closures.

Adams did not share much insight into what his administration plans to do with an additional four years of mayoral control. Instead, he pointed to what he considered successes under past mayors: the creation of universal pre-K under former mayor Bill de Blasio and rising graduation rates. (Graduation rates have risen across the nation since the early 2000s for mixed reasons until the pandemic hit, and in New York, changes at the state level have helped boost those figures.)

Asked for specifics about what types of policies or items City Hall would pursue if granted mayoral control, spokesperson Fabien Levy reiterated Adams’ talking points about previous administration’s achievements, ideas that he said “are at risk without mayoral accountability.”

Education department spokesperson Nathaniel Styer pointed to an address in March by Banks, where the chancellor discussed his vision for expanding virtual learning options, changing how the system teaches students to read, giving principals more autonomy, and providing more exciting programs for students, such as career and technical education.

So far, the Adams administration has announced an expansion of the Gifted and Talented program (the opposite of what de Blasio wanted to do), broader summer programming and jobs for youth and a slew of decisions over COVID safety, such as providing more at-home test kits and lifting the mask mandate for K-12 schools.

What could changes to mayoral control look like?

Mayoral control of schools became part of state law in 2002 but has never been permanent, offering Albany officials a chance to exert some power over the state’s biggest metropolis. It forces mayors to make the trek north and plead for an extension, sometimes involving political bartering.

It’s been extended every few years with a sunset date. Mayoral control was last extended in 2019 under Blasio.

But even though it’s been continuously extended, it hasn’t always been easy.

De Blasio nearly lost the power when Black and Latino lawmakers in 2019 said that the then-mayor was unresponsive to their questions over mayoral control, prompting the mayor to make a last-minute trip to the state Capitol. In 2017, the deal to extend mayoral control was tied to an increase in the number of charter schools, a concession to Republicans who controlled the State Senate.

Although Democrats now control both chambers, lawmakers and political observers believe mayoral control will be extended, in part because there’s not enough political will or time to find a replacement for the system before the June 30 expiration, or to revert to the former system of 32 community boards.

But the governance system may not receive the four-year extension that Gov. Kathy Hochul and Adams have called for, covering Adams’ entire first term in office.

Liu said that it doesn’t appear likely that Adams will get a straight four-year extension.

According to Albany sources there doesn’t appear to be enough support among lawmakers to secure that win for Adams. Instead, lawmakers are still discussing how to forge a path forward, said State Rep. Michael Benedetto, a Bronx Democrat who chairs the chamber’s education committee.

“Right now we’re kind of in flux and we’re still searching for ideas,” said Benedetto, a former teacher.

An extension could be coupled with adding more members or watering down the mayor’s power over the 15-person Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP, a mostly mayorally appointed board that votes on major school policies and contracts.

A mayoral rubber stamp no more?

The mayor’s power primarily operates in two ways: He chooses the city’s schools chancellor, and he appoints a majority, or nine, members to the PEP. Borough presidents choose an additional five, and the city’s 32 parent councils elect a representative — a change that came about as part of the concession in extending mayoral control in 2019.

While this board has often been seen as a mayoral rubber stamp, Adams’ failure to choose all nine of his appointees has resulted in the rejection of two of his administration’s recent proposals. In a vote last month, the panel rejected the city’s school funding formula over concerns that it’s not equitable enough, raising concerns that schools would get late budgets for next year.

One of Adams’ choices for the board was forced to resign after the New York Daily News revealed her anti-gay writings. The administration has not yet replaced that seat.

Asked Monday why the Legislature should trust him with mayoral control since he’s failed in his duty to appoint all nine members, Adams said he wants to “get it right.”

“We have to get it right because when you lay a foundation, you don’t have to come back and revisit it all the time,” Adams said, adding that he expects the school chancellor to make an announcement about a new appointee in the coming days.

Many lawmakers, parent advocates and the city’s teachers union are interested in giving families more say in the system through the PEP. To achieve that, Liu said he’s heard several proposals, including adding more members to the PEP who would be elected by local parent councils or giving the mayor one appointment shy of a majority of the board. That would require the mayor to solicit the support of at least one non-mayoral appointee to get his proposals passed.

Liu has also heard proposals to give PEP members fixed terms so that they cannot be removed for any reason from the board. The teachers union has called for one-year terms.

Currently, the mayor and borough presidents can remove their appointees at any time, and must provide written public notice explaining the reasons for removal at least 10 days in advance. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Staten Island borough president at the time famously removed PEP members in 2004 after some opposed Bloomberg’s plan on how to promote third graders.

Some of those proposals seem like possibilities to State Rep. Jo Anne Simon, a Brooklyn Democrat who sits on the Assembly’s education committee, who said she would also support more PEP members who represent specific types of high needs students, such as those with disabilities and those who are homeless, as well as an audit of mayoral control’s impact on student learning over the past 20 years.

Since Adams has only been mayor for four months, a three-year extension would be better suited, said Benedetto, giving the mayor enough time to implement reforms but also allowing the Legislature to be a check.

“When we elect a mayor of the city of New York and we give them this power, we must be vigilant and continually look to see if they’re doing the right thing and how that plays out over a number of years,” Benedetto added.

“I don’t know if he will get everything he wants,” he said of Adams’ four-year extension. “People are usually optimistic on such matters but their optimism sometimes doesn’t come to be. So, will he get it? That remains to be seen.”

THE CITY’s Katie Honan contributed.

In surprising setback to Mayor Adams, education panel rejects NYC school funding formula

2022-04-28T04:13:45+00:00

The city’s Panel for Educational Policy voted Wednesday night against the routine approval of New York City’s school funding formula, raising significant concerns about school budgets for next academic year.

The panel’s rejection, stemming from longstanding concerns that the funding formula is outdated and inequitable, was a stunning setback for Mayor Eric Adams. With nine slots for mayoral appointees, the 15-member panel has generally operated as a rubber stamp for past mayors, but Wednesday night’s vote is the second rejection of administration policy in two months.

A vacant mayoral appointee position on the board may have played a decisive role in Adams’ failing to capture the eight total votes he needed to reauthorize the funding formula. Seven of Adams’ appointees voted yes, the five appointees from each borough president abstained, and the panel’s elected parent member voted no. A 14th panel member was absent. And Adams has yet to replace one of his own appointees to the board who was forced to resign last month after her anti-gay writing came to light.

City officials warned that the PEP’s failure to approve the funding formula could delay funding to schools as they plan for next year, and schools Chancellor David Banks characterized the situation as “deeply troubling.” The board could vote on the formula again next month, but any revisions would need to be posted 15 days ahead of its next meeting, which is May 18.

“This is deeply problematic but the vote has been cast,” Banks said, minutes after he urged the panel members to approve the proposal. “This vote essentially is going to throw some of our schools into a lot of trouble.”

Wednesday night’s vote was one that happens annually. Education department officials asked panel members to re-approve the city’s Fair Student Funding formula, a 15-year-old city blueprint designed to send more money to schools with larger shares of students with disabilities, those learning English as a new language, and academic struggles.

But the discussion took a turn when public comment opened up. NeQuan McLean, president of District 16’s Community Education Council, told panel members that he was on a 2019 city task force that had spent nine months coming up with changes to the formula, which has been long criticized for lacking weights for other student groups, such as those living in temporary housing, and sending more money to selective schools that tend to enroll lower shares of Black and Hispanic students. But the task force’s final report, McLean said, was never released by former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

McLean and other speakers urged the panel to vote no and instead work on improving the formula. Some panel members shared his concern. Even if the panel voted to reapprove the formula, they would still “disenfranchise” students who don’t receive extra weight, such as those who are homeless or in foster care, said Tom Sheppard, the panel’s parent council-elected representative.

“Will there be some disruption? Absolutely. In the long-term, will we address the needs of our students? Absolutely,” Sheppard said.

Others supported the idea of approving the formula, then spending time revamping it. Gregory Faulkner, a mayoral appointee, said he encouraged the panel to vote yes, then “come back and really dig in and do the work to really make this formula more equitable.”

Lindsey Oates, the education department’s chief financial officer, said that voting “no” could result in a delay of getting money to schools by mid-May, as officials did pre-pandemic, and could leave administrators to scramble. Oates said a big part of the budget process is “staffing for your school and programming your school,” including figuring out what programming a school can offer and making hiring decisions.

In 2020, the city released budgets to schools in July, Oates said, which resulted in a “major scramble” ahead of the fall.

When the department distributes late budgets, schools have had to to delay important decisions, such as hiring, to the summer, when school leadership teams are not meeting regularly, Oates said.

Nathaniel Styer, an education department spokesperson, said the city is committed to a “full review” of the funding formula. “But that review, for the sake of our students, cannot be rushed in a matter of weeks or months,” he wrote. “We are expecting the panel to come back to this issue in order to prepare for the upcoming school year.”

The vote immediately drew concern from some observers, including Dia Bryant, the executive director of Education Trust-New York, an advocacy group.

“School level leaders have an autonomy in NYC that’s unknown in almost any other district, and this will impact their ability to plan for the summer and the upcoming school year,” wrote Bryant, who is also a former city education department official. “These votes seem to be the result of people feeling unheard and a general misalignment between the needs of parents and families and actions being taken.”

The city’s Panel for Educational Policy is structured to give the mayor control of education department policymaking. But Wednesday’s vote was the second time since Adams took office that the board voted down one of the administration’s proposals. At last month’s meeting, an $82 million contract to provide schools with temporary staffing failed 6-5, with two mayoral appointees declining to support the contract. (They approved this contract on Wednesday night following more discussion about it with education officials.)

The PEP has occasionally bucked previous mayors’ wishes, though it is extremely rare. Under de Blasio, Adam’s predecessor, the panel voted against a small number of controversial proposals, including a pair of school closures and a contract that allowed for 4-year-olds to be tested to qualify for gifted programs.

Wednesday night’s vote is the latest in a growing list of missteps in Adams’ management of the PEP.

Adams did not immediately make appointments to the PEP when he took office in January, which meant that the regular meeting did not occur that month, a possible violation of state law. Then, City Hall refused to publicly clarify who had been appointed, even after the PEP began taking votes on policy issues.

Once the mayor’s full slate of nine members was formally announced last month, the Daily News revealed that one of them, Rev. Kathlyn Barrett-Layne, had written that being gay is a sin and equated it with pedophilia. Adams swiftly forced her to resign, though he has not yet named a replacement, a process that is expected to take weeks longer, a City Hall spokesperson said.

Those setbacks come at a particularly delicate moment as the mayor is seeking an extension of his control of the city’s school system. The state legislature has the final authority to grant Adams an extension of mayoral control, which expires at the end of June.

Who is David Banks? The top NYC schools chancellor candidate already has Eric Adams’ ear.

2021-11-05T16:50:04+00:00

When David Banks was tapped with a group of local leaders to advise the mayor on how to reopen schools in the fall of 2020, he asked nearly two dozen principals for ideas.

A former principal himself, Banks laid out their concerns in a detailed memo about staffing and the need for timely information about safety rules. He grew frustrated when, three months later, Mayor Bill de Blasio twice delayed the start of the school year, citing some of the same problems that many principals had seen coming.

“There are no easy answers...but the failure here has been a failure to anticipate the obvious,” Banks told the Wall Street Journal at the time. Some task force members said the memo reflected deep relationships with principals and an understanding of the urgent questions school leaders were asking across the city.

Now, as the pandemic disrupts a third school year in the nation’s largest school district, Banks could soon be directly responsible for the system rather than offering advice from the sidelines: He is considered to be at the top of New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams’ list for schools chancellor.

Adams has time to weigh his options before taking office on Jan. 1, and he could keep current Chancellor Meisha Porter in her role, though many observers expect him to appoint a new schools chief of his own. One thing is clear: As a key education advisor to Adams, Banks already is shaping the mayor-elect’s education agenda.

Banks, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is a natural choice to help Adams hone that agenda. He has a long track record as an educator, becoming the principal of a new Bronx school nearly a quarter century ago.

He helped launch the Eagle Academy, a group of public schools that boasts six campuses that almost exclusively serve boys of color, part of an effort to boost graduation rates and improve life outcomes for students who are often poorly served by the public education system. Banks now runs the foundation that helps provide training and support for those schools, such as college counseling, mentoring programs, and funding longer school days.

“He’s intensely, intensely passionate about this work, he’s deeply knowledgeable, and he’s also pragmatic,” said Mark Dunetz, president of New Visions for Public Schools, an organization that supports a network of district and charter schools. Banks is “the type of leader that I think a system as complex and large as ours needs.”

Banks, 59, has navigated shifting winds in education policy throughout his career. His profile rose during the Bloomberg administration, which was aggressively pursuing an education reform agenda — one that was gaining traction across the country — that called for closing low-performing public schools and opening new ones like Eagle Academy, and promoting the rapid growth of charter schools. Eagle Academy and Banks have won praise from some of the architects of that reform movement, including former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

Banks also has advanced ideas that have traction in progressive circles. None of his schools are charters, which have fallen out of favor among many Democrats, and he has advocated for the need to innovate within the strictures of union contracts. He was an early champion of infusing schools with culturally responsive curriculum and practices that celebrate Black and brown people, an idea that the New York City school system is now embracing.

“They were intentional about developing a positive self image in young people,” said Shael Polakow-Suransky, who was a senior education official in the Bloomberg administration and got to know Banks when they were both principals in the Bronx.

“They were way ahead of their time in terms of working on anti-racist approaches to education and doing it in a real, thoughtful, and sustained way.”

Eric Adams prepares to speak after voting at P.S. 81 in June.

Perhaps most importantly, Banks has a deep relationship with Adams, according to people who know him, and his family is intertwined in Adams’ world. Banks’ partner, Sheena Wright, a nonprofit executive who leads the United Way of New York City, is co-chairing Adams’ transition team. Banks’ brother, a former senior police official, is advising Adams on public safety issues, the Daily News reported. And Adams has been a booster of Eagle Academy, appearing in a recent documentary about the schools.

“I think there’s chemistry there that allows that relationship to flourish,” said Dennis Walcott, a former schools chancellor under Bloomberg and current president of the Queens Public Library. Walcott pointed to their common backgrounds: Adams and Banks, who are both Black, grew up in working-class neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn and attended the city’s public schools.

He added: “Their DNA has been shaped on the values of the boroughs, the value of working class communities, and the value of education and what it has meant for each of them.”

Working-class roots in Queens

The son of a police officer and a secretary, Banks credits his parents with keeping him and his two brothers out of trouble and setting them up for success. When their Crown Heights block saw an uptick in crime during the 1970s, including burglaries in their building, and gang members trying to recruit other boys in the neighborhood, his parents moved the family to Southeast Queens, according to Banks’ 2014 book, “Soar: How Boys Learn, Succeed, and Develop Character.”

In their new neighborhood, Banks’ parents were determined to keep their children under their supervision and tried to make staying home as appealing as possible, buying pool and ping-pong tables and ensuring sleepovers happened at their house.

“They both sacrificed a lot of their own socializing, a lot of cocktails and card games and evenings out, for our benefit,” Banks wrote. “Moving to that block in Queens may have saved our lives.”

Banks enjoyed school growing up and had an early interest in teaching, though he decided to pursue a legal career. But within two years of graduating law school in 1993, he had enrolled in night classes and completed enough credits to be a school administrator. He became the assistant principal at P.S. 191 in Crown Heights.

Two years later, in his mid-30s, Banks would be given the chance to start a school from scratch. He wasn’t the most experienced candidate for the job, but his ambition and charisma impressed Richard Kahan, who at the time ran Urban Assembly, a nonprofit organization that was developing its first school and which now supports 23 schools across the city.

“He didn’t have anything like the experience or the track record of the others,” Kahan said, but “he was exactly the compelling person we wanted to hire.”

As the leader of the Bronx School for Law, Government, and Justice, Banks was excited by chances to promote hands-on learning. When a cigarette billboard went up across the street the school’s leaders designed a unit about it: studying the effects of nicotine in science class, estimating the distance from the school to the ad in math class, and researching tobacco laws in social studies class.

The school launched a letter-writing campaign to local elected officials, an effort encouraged by Porter, who then worked at the school and was mentored by Banks. City officials ultimately invited some of the students to a ceremony signing a law that banned cigarette advertisements close to schools. The ad on the billboard came down.

“That to me is what education is all about,” Banks wrote in his book, describing the episode as “the most successful month, educationally speaking, that I ever had.”

Building a network

Seven years later, Banks would get another shot at building a school from the ground up, a project that would mark the beginning of the Eagle Academy schools.

A civic group, One Hundred Black Men, was alarmed by a report that suggested a majority of the state’s prison population came from just seven New York City neighborhoods, including the South Bronx. The group, which counted Banks and his father as members, believed opening a school specifically for young men of color could help reverse those outcomes and improve their odds of graduating high school and going to college.

In 2004, with the support of then-Senator Hillary Clinton, the organization convinced the Bloomberg administration to greenlight the Eagle Academy for Young Men in the Bronx, according to Banks’ book. Banks would be its founding principal.

Jamal Trotman leaves his government class at Eagle Academy for Young Men II in Brooklyn in 2016.

The Eagle Academy was part of a movement under Bloomberg aimed at giving families in under-resourced communities a wider array of schools from which to choose.

The Bloomberg administration closed many low-performing large high schools, replacing them with smaller ones that could offer a more personalized education. And they helped turbocharge the proliferation of charter schools, which are publicly funded but generally free of union contracts that include strict tenure, seniority, and work rules.

Banks has long been friendly to the sector, according to charter leaders, but he has also argued for the importance of running schools under the auspices of the school district. None of the Eagle Academy schools are charters.

“We did not want to open as a charter,” Banks told the Buffalo News in 2014. “We wanted it to be a public school and show that you could have an innovative school in a traditional public system.”

The Eagle Academy schools have embraced strategies to reach boys of color who have traditionally not been well-served by the city’s public schools, including extended school days to keep students engaged and out of trouble after regular hours. The schools also run mentoring programs and cultivate relationships with business leaders to serve as role models and expose students to career possibilities they may not have considered.

Banks has prized parent engagement, something multiple observers said could give him credibility in school communities if he became chancellor. To encourage attendance at PTA meetings, Banks held them on Saturdays every other month, two-hour long events that included meals, information about the school, and also seminars on topics like job hunting, according to his book.

At one point, Walcott, the former chancellor, was invited to attend one of those Saturday meetings in the Bronx and was blown away by the attendance. “That place was jam packed,” Walcott said.

The schools have also prized strict rules and high expectations, Banks has written, and has deployed practices such as strict uniform policies that are reminiscent of charter networks such as Success Academy or KIPP.

“We talk about how dressing in the style inspired by prison clothing — no belt, sagging the pants — sends a message about how you see your own future,” Banks wrote. “Like it or not, the world takes them more seriously.”

Students are also sorted into “houses” named after prominent figures of color, such as Roberto Clemente, W.E.B. Du Bois, or Malcom X, partly as a way to build camaraderie. But if an Eagle Academy student failed to turn in homework assignments, for example, they could lose points for their house, a fact that would be displayed for the rest of the school to see, Banks wrote in his book. (An Eagle spokesperson did not say if that practice is still used, and not all Eagle schools use the same approaches.)

Since 2004, the Eagle Academy network has grown to include six schools serving students in grades 6-12 — one in each of New York City’s five boroughs and one in Newark, New Jersey. Under the de Blasio administration, which has generally resisted large-scale school closures and openings, opportunities for growth have been limited. The newest Eagle Academy opened on Staten Island in 2014.

The schools have been popular with some parents, including Tanesha Grant, whose 14-year-old son Mandell attends Eagle Academy for Young Men of Harlem. Grant said she was impressed by the school’s commitment to weaving Black culture and history in the curriculum; her son was recently learning about Langston Hughes. As a single mother, she appreciates that many of the teachers are men of color. And she also likes that her son doesn’t have to pass through metal detectors on his way inside.

“I appreciate that Eagle Academy doesn’t paint Black people and Black culture as always struggling,” said Grant. As a parent advocate, Grant has previously fought for culturally responsive materials in a wider set of schools, but at Eagle Academy, they are already woven in.

Still, there are some signs that success has been uneven. Three of the five New York City schools are considered among the lowest performing in the state due to low achievement and growth scores at their middle schools, based on data from the 2017-2018 school year. And some of its schools have posted higher-than-average rates of chronic absenteeism. (State testing, and the state’s accountability system, have been disrupted by the pandemic so there have been no adjustments to schools’ accountability status in recent years.)

But the schools have generally posted graduation rates that are higher than the city average. In 2019, the Eagle Academy schools in Brooklyn and Queens posted graduation rates of about 90%, far higher than the city’s average that year of 77%. The network’s Bronx outpost had a lower graduation rate, at 71%.

Aaron Pallas, a professor at Teachers College who has studied school performance, said the test scores are just one data point and may not reflect the overall quality of the schools. “One can’t ignore test scores,” he said. But “there is a particular orientation to helping young men of color develop and that’s not necessarily going to be reflected in the test scores.”

From 6 to 1,600 schools?

It remains to be seen whether Banks’ could quickly move from supporting a small network of six public schools to supervising the largest school system in the nation, with responsibility for 1,600 schools and nearly 150,000 employees.

Over the last 20 years, the city’s schools chancellors have had widely varying backgrounds. Some have had little education policy experience but had high-level government management positions, including Joel Klein, a lawyer who ran the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice and served as chancellor under Bloomberg.

More recently, de Blasio has selected leaders who have either had experience running big city school systems (Richard Carranza) or spent years rising up the ranks of New York’s education bureaucracy (Carmen Fariña and Meisha Porter).

Banks does not fall neatly into any of those categories; he has not supervised a large bureaucracy nor has he worked inside the system for long. The Eagle Academy Foundation, which Banks runs, aims to scale the Eagle model and support educators’ efforts around the country to reach students of color. (Its website says it has worked with 1,000 school leaders in 65 cities; an Eagle Academy spokesperson did not provide more details about the foundation’s work.)

“He would bring some knowledge of how the system works from the perspective of a school developer, but it seems like a potentially large step up in terms of the size and scale of running the city’s schools relative to what he’s been doing up until now,” Pallas said. “That’s not to say he can’t rise to the challenge, and no chancellor does it alone.”

Whoever takes the reins of the city’s school system will face enormous challenges, as the pandemic has interrupted student learning across three separate school years, with many students experiencing gaps in instruction and emotional trauma.

But there is also opportunity: The city is flush with nearly $7 billion in relief funding for education with more funding likely to come from the state. Adams has only revealed broad strokes of a schools agenda, perhaps allowing his schools chief to play a big role shaping it.

Banks sketched out some ideas of his own in the Daily News, including making better use of digital learning tools to give students access to experiences and educators outside their classrooms, investing in culturally responsive history curriculum, and moving away from an “overreliance” on standardized tests.

“We must not fall into the trap of doing more of the same,” he wrote. “We have never had a better opportunity, nor a more pressing need, to reimagine our school system.”

Summer school bus service expands for homeless students and those with disabilities — but don’t count on a bus ride home

2021-06-23T22:02:27+00:00

New York City officials are expanding summer school yellow bus service for homeless students and those with disabilities, but still have no plans to provide busing home at the end of the day.

The city’s summer school program, known as “Summer Rising” — which is open to all students for the first time — includes an academic portion for the first part of the day followed by afternoon enrichment, such as field trips and other camp-like activities.

For weeks, advocates have demanded that city officials provide round-trip yellow bus service at the day’s end to students who typically receive it during the school year. Without it, they argue that some of the city’s most vulnerable students, including those with disabilities who use wheelchairs or homeless students who live far from public transportation, would be shut out of a significant chunk of the summer enrichment program.

The afternoon enrichment wraps up at 4 p.m. for middle school students and 6 p.m. for elementary students. (The structure of the high school program varies.) The program is set to launch early next month.

City officials initially declined to provide yellow bus service to many homeless students and those with disabilities who typically receive it during the school year. And even for students who were eligible, officials said they would only be able to provide round-trip service for the academic part of the day, which creates a barrier for families that can’t arrange transportation at the end of the afternoon enrichment portion.

After pressure from advocates, the education department recently agreed to expand bus transportation — but again, only for the academic portion. Under the new rules, all students with disabilities and those in temporary housing who typically receive yellow bus service during the school year will be eligible for it this summer. About 50,000 students with disabilities and 5,000 homeless students typically receive busing during the school year; it’s unclear how many of them will participate in the summer program.

Students who stay for the full day can request a MetroCard for the trip home, including one for a caregiver to accompany them, education department officials said.

Advocates welcomed the rule change, but said the department’s decision not to provide bus service at the end of the full day violates state and federal laws that guarantee equal access to activities for students with disabilities and those in temporary housing.

“We are encouraged that the [education department] expanded the number of students who are eligible for bus service for the instructional part of the day,” said Randi Levine, policy director at Advocates for Children, which has raised concerns about the busing policies. But “if you’re forcing students with disabilities or students who live in shelter to leave hours before their peers, you’re not running an inclusive program.”

Levine said that if the city can’t offer bus service at the end of the day, they should pay for a car service.

Sarah Casasnovas, an education department spokesperson, said the city is planning to provide transportation options in addition to MetroCards for students with disabilities and those in temporary housing at the end of the full-day program. She did not indicate whether that would include a car service, saying that details would be provided “soon” even as the program is set to launch in less than two weeks.

Officials indicated that they could not provide bus service at the end of the school day due to “operational constraints and safety considerations” but did not offer any additional details about what that meant. They also did not answer questions about whether the bus policy violates the law. Asked how city officials were communicating the change to parents, they pointed to changes to the education department’s website, suggesting parents may not be directly informed of the new transportation option for the academic portion of the day.

Busing isn’t the only possible barrier for students to attend summer school. Some families and advocates have raised concerns about whether there will be enough specialized staff on hand to meet the needs of some students with disabilities. And the enrollment process for the summer program has also sparked confusion, as some families have been turned away from specific summer school sites or placed on waitlists.

Asked on Wednesday about the waitlist issue, which Chalkbeat first reported earlier this month, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he needed to gather more details about what is happening.

“I want to know more about that,” de Blasio said. “We wanted this to be something unlike anything you’ve seen before, and it’s going to be the permanent model going forward. Of course, we want kids with disabilities to be able to participate.”

What’s it like to serve on a CEC? A member explains the council’s role and why parents should care.

2021-05-07T20:03:23+00:00

This post is in collaboration with THE CITY’s civic newsroom.

Voting is underway for New York City’s 36 parent-led Community Education Councils, or CECs, and for the first time, all parents of children in education department-run schools can cast a ballot in the elections.

Jon Grabelle Herrmann, who is ending his two-year term on District 1’s CEC serving Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Village, described CECs as “a little corner of democracy where you can have a voice.”

The vast majority of public school parents have probably paid little attention to their district’s 11-member CECs, committees that are largely advisory except for their power to shape school zone boundaries. More recently, many CECs — such as Herrmann’s — have spearheaded efforts to pursue districtwide school integration plans.

The change in the voting eligibility — from three parent association leaders at each school to all parents and legal guardians with children in district schools — follows Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2019 bid to the state legislature to extend mayoral control over the city school system. In exchange for three more years, the state demanded additional avenues for parent involvement.

Families now get one vote per child, and each vote allows you to choose up to three seats on the council in your child’s district. (Pre-K families in standalone education department-run programs that are not part of a larger elementary school cannot vote.)

Additionally, there are citywide councils representing high schoolers, students learning English as a new language, students with disabilities, and District 75, which serves students with the most complex disabilities.

Families can vote online using their NYC Schools account or in-person at the sites linked here through May 11.

Over 12,000 parents had cast votes as of Thursday, education officials said.

Chalkbeat talked with Herrmann, a parent to a fourth grader and an eighth grader, about his experience on a CEC.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What does one do on a CEC?

There’s no real power other than you can disapprove zoning proposed by the Department of Education, DOE, though in District 1, there is no zoning. [Note: Districts 1, 7, and 23 have no school zones.]

But it’s a platform if you use it that way. We can take a stand on things.

We passed a resolution that called for raising revenues from wealthier New Yorkers to prevent school budget cuts. Especially if other CECs pass resolutions, it can create a drumbeat.

At least in our district, the superintendent attends every meeting. Elected officials or their representatives attend. So, it’s a small audience, but an important one. It’s a way for them to hear about the issues in our district.

Outgoing CEC member Jon Grabelle Hermann with his family.

What you think is the most important impact your CEC has had?

It’s fundamentally a community organizing platform. We’ve been helping to make connections between parents, students, and local organizations.

During the pandemic, we checked in on where laptops were getting distributed. We weren’t in charge of that, but we were holding people accountable. We did a turkey giveaway for the holidays. This week Naomi Peña [District 1’s CEC president] held an event focused on what to do if you’re looking to get an IEP [Individualized Education Program] for your child. None of that is required.

Why does it matter who serves on it?

It’s a layer of democracy. To the extent that members use their platform, it’s an extra set of eyes that represent the views of parents. And it’s a way for parents to be informed on issues that are hard to wrap your head around at the school level.

If you feel powerless because the whole system is under mayoral control, and there are no longer school boards, here’s a little corner of democracy where you can have a voice.

It’s also good, from a structural standpoint, that you can’t have more than one member from each school. You can meet people from other schools — that’s a bubble we don’t usually break.

Why does it matter that voting is different this year?

The benefit of the old system was that PTA leaders were pretty informed. To the extent that it’s now open to everyone, that’s great because it involves more people.

But the DOE is using this form of democracy to get people to use the NYC Schools Account system. It can be so hard to use that it defeats the purpose.

Not only do you have to have your kids’ student ID, you also have to have an authorization code that refers to something you got in the mail. It doesn’t say anywhere, ‘P.S. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, call your parent coordinator.’ But I did, and she told me that the account was under my wife’s name.

I know people can go in-person to vote, but we’re still in a pandemic. People might be reluctant.

So, the results will definitely reflect votes from a group with easy tech access, and I don’t know how it will affect the composition of the CECs.

Carranza to step down mid-pandemic after 3 years at helm of New York City schools

2021-02-26T17:26:13+00:00

New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza is leaving his post on March 15, a sudden departure in the midst of a public health crisis that has meant a tumultuous, draining year for the city’s roughly 960,000 students and their families — as well as the chancellor himself.

Meisha Ross Porter, the executive superintendent of the Bronx, will replace Carranza and become the first Black woman to lead the nation’s largest school system, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday.

Porter will take over a fraying school system, with many students having lost out on critical instructional time and facing mounting mental health needs. On top of that, many schools have seen significant enrollment drops, with the overall student population dropping 4% from the previous year, and as a result, many principals might start next year in serious debt.

Families and educators on both sides of the reopening debate — those who wished this year was fully remote and those who want their children back in classrooms five days a week — are frustrated with Carranza and de Blasio, and have blasted them for not having a clearer plan for September. But under the city’s system of mayoral control, de Blasio ultimately calls the shots, and his handling of the reopening saga has played a role in an exodus of education department insiders who said their expertise was shunned by City Hall.

Integration advocates have also repeatedly fingered de Blasio as the roadblock to more transformative school diversity efforts — something that may have played a role in Carranza’s sudden departure.

After losing 11 friends and relatives to the coronavirus, Carranza said he was leaving so he could grieve and focus on self-care, and he does not know what his next steps will be.

“I need time to grieve, and this city, this school system, deserves a chancellor who 100% is taking up the helm and leading the charge to bringing everybody back in September,” Carranza told reporters. “I’m proud and incredibly honored that I had the opportunity to do that to this point. At some point you have to heal your own heart if you can share your heart with others, and that’s what this is about.”

Porter, a New York City public school graduate, started out as a youth organizer in the Bronx’s Highbridge neighborhood and has worked for the education department for 20 years, serving as a teacher, principal, and superintendent in the Bronx. In 2018, Carranza appointed her to fill the new role of executive superintendent in the Bronx, overseeing the borough’s 361 schools.

“I am ready to hit the ground running and lead New York City schools to a full recovery,” Porter said in a statement.

Meisha Ross Porter, a 20-year veteran of the education department, will take over the nation’s largest school system.

Carranza took the reins three years ago, after leading Houston schools. He stepped into a contentious battle over integration in New York City, which is one of the most segregated systems in the country, by bluntly questioning the city’s admissions policies.

He was more outspoken than the mayor on wanting to overhaul the admissions system, and that may have played a role in the chancellor’s move. Carranza reportedly drafted a resignation letter after a recent disagreement with the mayor about the Gifted and Talented test for 4-year-olds, according to the New York Times. Black and Latino students are dramatically underrepresented in gifted enrollment, and the education department warned that administering the exams this year would only exacerbate disparities. (Ultimately, the mayor’s plan was upended by a surprise vote of the citywide Panel for Educational Policy, which narrowly rejected a contract to continue administering the test.)

De Blasio, speaking Friday on WNYC, denied that the decision was related to the gifted controversy. When asked if his departure was connected to disagreements with de Blasio, Carranza said he needed time “to take care of me.”

Along with the mayor, Carranza’s leadership has been criticized since the coronavirus pandemic forced school buildings to abruptly close in March 2020. Many educators faulted the mayor and chancellor for keeping buildings open too long in the spring and stifling information about possible cases among communities when school staff had to report to buildings as they prepared to transition to remote learning.

They’ve faced an uphill battle to regain educators’ trust. Following a chaotic summer of planning and major last-minute shifts — including two delayed starts to the school year and a reversal on the amount of live teaching for children on their remote days — the union representing principals and other school administrators issued a vote of no confidence in the chancellor and the mayor.

The return to in-person learning was also applauded by many as a serious feat considering the many logistical and labor roadblocks — ones that many other major school systems never overcame.

Yet many advocates criticized Carranza and de Blasio for missing the big picture for this year: while they focused time and money on reopening school buildings, roughly 70% of families ultimately chose to stay home full-time and participate in remote-only instruction. Many educators said the education department did not do enough to improve virtual instruction.

Other problems that have plagued the chancellor and mayor this year include a lack of devices for remote learning, questions about whether school buildings are properly ventilated, and whether the city’s Situation Room rapid response team is equipped to handle the weekly COVID-19 testing at schools.

Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew took a shot at the mayor, hinting that the chancellor’s hands may have been tied during the push to reopen schools.

“Richard Carranza was a real partner in our efforts to open school safely,” Mulgrew said in a statement. “Too often he had to fight behind the scenes to keep the needs of students, staff and their families ahead of politics.”

The timing of Carranza’s departure didn’t surprise some observers, as de Blasio’s second and final term will conclude at the end of the year, and many of the leading candidates to replace him have already said they plan to select a new chancellor to lead the education department.

Despite the complexity of school reopening and the difficulty of transitioning to a new chancellor in the middle of a crisis, it is clear much of the decision making is being run through City Hall, said Josh Starr, a former schools superintendent in Connecticut and Maryland and CEO of PDK International.

“The mayor’s clearly calling all the shots, and given that the mayor is on his way out, you’re going to have a new mayor and new chancellor,” he said. “It’s a political cycle.”

Carranza was the mayor’s second choice to run the school system after de Blasio’s first pick, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho of Miami-Dade County, backed out on live television. The mayor made it clear he wanted a caretaker chancellor who would continue the policies put in place under former chancellor Carmen Fariña. She had spent more than 50 years in the education department and her tenure was marked largely by undoing the legacy of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

One of Carranza’s first big moves was to shake up the education department bureaucracy by appointing new executive superintendents. He also pushed for implicit bias training for educators, earning him the appreciation of educators who rallied publicly in his defense, in the face of backlash in right-wing media and from some educators who said the sessions were hostile or uncomfortable.

His tenure began with hope for many parent advocates, who accused the education department of shutting them out of decisions affecting their local districts. He appointed Hydra Mendoza, a former colleague from Carranza’s time in San Francisco, as deputy chancellor to work with local advocates. Parents said they finally felt they could partner with the education department to address families’ concerns. But that relationship has steadily soured not long after Mendoza stepped down, following a string of other top-level departures that accelerated over the past year.

Despite reinstating the Chief Academic Officer position, educators have said that change has been slow to reach the classroom under Carranza’s leadership. His vision for improving instruction and supporting struggling schools has remained foggy. After the mayor ended his controversial and expensive turn-around program known as Renewal, there hasn’t been a clear strategy put in its place.

Richard Carranza climbed the steps of Tweed Courthouse, the education department headquarters, on his first day as chancellor.

His impact on school integration is limited to mainly advocacy for change — an important shift in rhetoric under a mayor who previously refused to even say the word “segregation,” but one that ultimately led to few, if any, top-down reforms. Some community driven efforts, however, have gotten off the ground. One of the most notable is in Brooklyn’s District 15, which overhauled middle school admissions policies.

Many integration advocates saw the pandemic as an opportunity to more aggressively pursue changes in the city’s admissions systems, which are blamed for helping to drive segregation. Ultimately the city only pursued one-year changes that are likely to have a limited impact on the demographics of who attends school together.

The most high profile integration push under the mayor and chancellor, to overhaul how students are admitted to the city’s elite specialized high schools, arguably backfired by galvanizing opposition from local parent volunteer councils all the way up to new citywide organizations who have fiercely fought school diversity efforts.

Several high level education officials have departed since last summer, including second-in-command Cheryl Watson-Harris, the mayor’s senior education advisor Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, and senior department official Ursulina Ramirez. Miranda Barbot, Carranza’s press secretary, recently announced her departure.

Porter, who was praised by many educators she’s worked with, drew some criticism in 2019, when the schools watchdog received a complaint that she had enlisted subordinates to fundraise and organize a party to celebrate her promotion. The office later dropped its investigation.

Alex Zimmerman contributed reporting.

Rating teachers in a pandemic? NYC officials are crafting plans to conduct evaluations.

2021-02-09T20:55:05+00:00

New York City officials are figuring out how to evaluate educators this school year, even as typical performance measures have been upended by the pandemic.

After New York became the epicenter of the country’s coronavirus outbreak last year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order in June pausing a state law that mandates school and district leaders formally assess teachers and principals each year.

Despite ongoing disruptions to classroom learning, the governor has not yet issued a similar order this school year, though a Cuomo spokesperson said the governor is still considering it. The state’s education department said they plan to ask the governor to put the evaluation law on hold, but have not yet done so.

In the meantime, New York City’s education department, in consultation with union officials, is drafting a revised evaluation plan to account for the pandemic. City officials did not release any specifics regarding their plans, saying that they were not yet final and will require state approval.

The evaluations offer a formal opportunity for administrators to provide feedback with the goal of improving teaching. That could be especially important this year as educators have had to adapt to unfamiliar platforms and methods of engaging students. These assessments also play a role in whether or not to grant teachers tenure and may also be used as grounds to fire educators. (In practice, very few teachers are denied tenure or terminated due to poor ratings.)

But implementing a revised evaluation system in the remaining four months of the school year could be tricky to pull off, and is already generating pushback from some educators and advocates. They point to the challenge of implementing the two key measures in a teacher’s rating — student assessments and in-person classroom observations — which have both been disrupted.

“Given the situation that we’ve found ourselves in over the past year, the unevenness of the experience of both educators and students makes it very difficult to employ the traditional instruments to evaluate educators,” said Paula White, executive director of the teacher advocacy group Educators for Excellence. “It’s very dicey.”

Traditional classroom observations were not crafted with virtual instruction in mind, and most educators are teaching remotely. The evaluations often pay close attention to the level of meaningful interaction and discussion among students, who may not be working as closely in socially distanced or remote classrooms, and the city has not communicated clear standards about what quality remote teaching should look like.

Complicating matters, many teachers have seen their classroom assignments shift this year, whether they’ve gotten new students or had to switch from in-person to remote, as high schools are fully virtual and middle schools buildings are reopening at the end of this month after being closed for three months.

Collecting student assessment data, the other main ingredient in teacher evaluations, is also a challenge. Some schools use state test scores, such as reading and math tests given in grades 3-8, which the state is seeking to cancel, or the Regents high school exit exams, a round of which have already been canceled. Schools may choose from a list of alternative assessments in lieu of those exams, but administering those tests remotely could prove difficult and the results could be unreliable, especially if a significant slice of students don’t take them.

Still, spinning up virtual evaluation systems in the pandemic is not without precedent. In Newark, for instance, district and union officials hammered out a framework for conducting virtual observations, which could include assessments of how effectively teachers are using online “breakout rooms” to target instruction or using screen-sharing to display high-quality work.

In New York City, union officials have also participated in negotiations over the evaluation process, though they have emphasized that deploying a revised system at this point in the school year is not ideal.

“We are being held to the state law for teacher evaluation even though we are already halfway through the school year and our members have so much else on their plates,” officials at the United Federation of Teachers wrote to school-based chapter leaders this month. “The UFT’s goal in its talks with the DOE was to make sure the evaluation plan reflected the unique circumstances and challenges facing teachers this school year.”

A city education department official said “timelines will be adjusted accordingly” to make sure there is enough time for evaluations to be conducted.

Regardless of the formal evaluation system, many school administrators have been providing informal feedback to teachers.

“Evaluations are just part of what’s going on in a school — that’s something that should have been happening,” said Matt Brownstein, an assistant principal at P.S. 330 in Queens.

Still, he worries about whether formal teacher assessments could be fair this school year. Administrators often look for signs of engagement by watching whether students are tracking their teachers, for instance, or based on informal conversations with students in the class. That is difficult to pull off remotely — and in person, a teacher might struggle with engagement if there are just one or two students in the room.

“We can get information by looking at practice, and we can get information by looking at assessments,” Brownstein said. “But to use it to judge teachers in the traditional way is unfair.”

NYC school buildings can stay open even if coronavirus positivity rate tops 9%, Cuomo says

2021-01-04T23:35:51+00:00

The state will not force New York City school buildings to shut down if the citywide coronavirus positivity rate exceeds 9%.

Reversing a state policy established over the summer, school buildings can now stay open so long as coronavirus testing shows there is less virus present in schools than in the surrounding community, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday.

“If their schools are below the level of positivity in the community then they can keep the schools open,” Cuomo said. “It is up to the local school district to make that decision.”

Cuomo’s announcement means there is no longer a single threshold for shutting down school buildings citywide, which puts the onus on Mayor Bill de Blasio to decide whether to stick to his current strategy of shutting down individual school buildings and classrooms when cases pop up or consider another citywide shutdown.

The governor’s decision to scrap the state’s closure threshold comes as the city’s coronavirus positivity rate has increased in recent weeks, though it has not yet reached the state’s original 9% threshold. State data put the city’s positivity rate over a seven-day average at 6.24%, though city data put the number at 9%. (City and state officials use different methodologies to calculate the city’s positivity rate but, the state figure is what would have determined whether school buildings would shutter.)

De Blasio briefly closed school buildings in November when the city’s positivity rate reached 3% and has since only reopened preschool programs, elementary schools, and schools serving students with complex disabilities.

Michael Mulgrew, head of the city’s teachers union, has generally supported de Blasio’s approach to school reopening that focuses on building-level closures, despite alarm among some of his members about rising infection rates. But in a shift, he is now urging officials to shut down school buildings if the city’s positivity rate crosses 9%, according to the state’s figures.

“Using that state measure, if the community infection rate in the city hits 9%, the safe thing to do is to close the schools, even if the in-school rate is lower,” Mulgrew said in a statement Monday afternoon. “Safety comes first.”

Cuomo’s decision to withdraw the state’s 9% closure threshold will also allow him to sidestep a potentially difficult fight with Mulgrew, which could force de Blasio to bear the brunt of yet another controversial decision about whether to keep school buildings open.

Benjamin Linas, an epidemiologist at Boston University, said it may be possible to keep school buildings open safely even as the citywide positivity rate reaches 9% or beyond.

“There has been some transmission in schools across the country, but not a lot, even in places that have very high COVID” infection rates, Linas said.

Still, he added: “I think you have to be honest that we’re learning as we go and we could be wrong. That’s why it’s smart not to carve this in stone and [be] ready to move as the data change.”

City officials have touted relatively low infection rates in school communities as evidence that school buildings are generally safe; the city’s protocol calls for randomly testing 20% of students and staff in school buildings each week. Since buildings reopened in December, the city conducted about 100,000 tests in schools, with 0.68% coming back positive, de Blasio said.

State officials provided few details about how school districts should determine whether infection rates in schools are larger than the surrounding community, which could lead to building shutdowns, at least in theory.

However it’s unlikely the positivity rate in schools, as determined by random testing, would eclipse the citywide rate. The citywide rate includes many people who are symptomatic and more likely to have the coronavirus while the random testing is likely only picking up asymptomatic cases, as students and staff are instructed to stay home if they’re sick and may seek testing elsewhere.

The latest round of uncertainty about whether the mayor should consider citywide closures will not affect most students, as all middle and high schools are fully remote and many other families have opted out of in-person learning. Some advocates and educators have argued the city has not invested enough in improving remote instruction.

De Blasio has suggested that rolling out vaccines to educators could hasten the return of in-person instruction and said Monday that teachers should receive vaccines as soon as this month. But state officials ultimately determine when teachers will be eligible for vaccines, and the city’s efforts to use the shots it already has have been sluggish.

“New York City is pushing to have school staff included in vaccine distribution this month, and has set-up a gold standard to keep our schools safe,” Miranda Barbot, an education department spokesperson, said in a statement. “We’ll continue to closely monitor metrics, including in-school testing.”

Will your NYC school offer 5 days a week of in-person classes? For many principals, space and staff hurdles persist

2020-12-10T01:19:11+00:00

East Harlem mom Rosa Diaz was elated to learn that her 4-year-old son would be able to go to school in person five days a week.

For months, he has been attending in-person classes at P.S. 171 just a couple days a week, and his less-structured remote days seemed to set back his ability to recognize letters of the alphabet.

And since Diaz and her husband work outside the home during the pandemic, it has been difficult to ensure their babysitter was logging the boy into his remote sessions. So when the opportunity arose for daily in-person learning, “I was like, ‘Yay, excellent, he needs it,” Diaz said.

But even as city officials press school leaders to offer five days a week of in-person instruction, many students will likely remain stuck with a mix of in-person and remote learning, which can be hard on students and working families. That’s because some schools remain pressed for space and enough teachers to staff two different learning environments at once — all while principals must juggle a complicated mix of scheduling variables.

The push for more in-person instruction comes as New York City reopens school buildings for students in grades pre-K through five, as well as those in District 75, serving children with more complex disabilities. Schools were shuttered citywide last month after the city’s coronavirus positivity rate reached 3%.

When announcing that these schools would reopen, Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed that “most” campuses opening this week will eventually offer five days a week of in-person learning, though he made that declaration before principals were formally surveyed about whether it would be logistically feasible at their individual schools.

Rosa Diaz’s three children wait for the bus to P.S. 171.

So far, 161 elementary schools, or roughly 15%, are offering at least some of their students five days a week of in-person instruction. Department officials said they expect that number to climb as schools get a clearer picture this week of how many students will actually return to classrooms.

“We will be able to deliver,” de Blasio said Wednesday after being pressed on the relatively small number of schools offering daily instruction in person. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Parents who have been offered more days of in-person instruction said they’re thrilled for the return to a more normal schedule instead of the hybrid model, in which students were on campus one to three days a week in most cases and learning remotely the rest of the time. The change won’t affect most families, though, as the vast majority have opted instead for fully remote learning, and there are no plans to allow them to switch back to in-person instruction before a vaccine is widely available.

For principals, pulling off a shift in scheduling in the middle of the school year is a complex task, especially as it could require reassigning students to different classroom teachers. School leaders may not have enough staff or space to offer more in-person teaching, or they may face resistance from educators who don’t want to return to buildings for daily instruction due to the citywide rise in coronavirus cases.

Different students at the same school might receive varying amounts of in-person instruction, depending on those constraints. Diaz’s 9-year-old daughter, for instance, who attends the same school as her son and has also struggled with remote learning, was not offered five days a week of in-person instruction. (Their older son is in middle school, which, along with high schools, are not yet open for in-person instruction citywide.)

That has left some parents disappointed and some principals fielding questions from families who thought their schools would be able to shift more quickly.

“Initially the expectation was out there that most schools would be able to do this, which I think left principals in the inevitable position to be the bearer of the news that in a particular school it wouldn’t work out,” said Mark Cannizzaro, head of the union that represents school administrators. He added that superintendents have begun checking in with principals and asking for explanations if their school indicated that they couldn’t offer five days a week of in-person classes.

But many schools have been able to pivot, finding creative ways to spin up five days a week of in-person classes. At P.S. 145 in Manhattan, principal Natalia Russo quickly sussed out where they could put slightly larger classes to accommodate more students in the building at once.

“We looked at the shared spaces and the gym and the cafeteria were two spaces that we decided we could use to best fit the classes that had the largest enrollment,” she said, noting that fewer than 40% of the school’s students have opted for in-person learning. Over about 72 hours, teachers moved desks, cubbies, and books to make those spaces feel like classrooms and reassured parents that open windows would offer plenty of ventilation.

“It was so clear and transparent, and just thoughtful,” said Sasha Stashwick, whose 5-year-old son is enrolled at the school and is now attending in person every day. “It was a pretty joyous scene at drop-off.”

Other schools are still weighing all of the variables to determine if five-day-a-week instruction is feasible. Schools have been instructed to switch students to remote learning if they don’t show up in person this week without an excuse, which means principals may not yet have a full count of how many students they’ll need to accommodate in person and whether they’ll have the staff for expanded in-person learning. Meanwhile, some students are returning to in-person classes after the city offered one window in November to switch from fully remote learning.

Janet Huger, principal of the East New York Elementary School of Excellence in Brooklyn, said she’s still assessing whether she can offer more in-person days at her school — or even if most parents want it. About 65% of the families at her school have opted for fully remote learning.

“A lot of parents were a little skeptical of the five days because they weren’t sure about the health risks,” partly because students would spend significantly more time in the building, Huger said. (City officials have also ramped up random testing in schools and will now bar most students from buildings if they don’t consent to it.)

Huger said she is also looking into whether five days a week of in-person classes would require assigning students to different classroom teachers, which she fears could be disruptive.

“Now you’re going to give a child a new environment again?” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

NYC gave families one more chance to choose in-person learning. Few did.

2020-11-20T21:15:26+00:00

After Mayor Bill de Blasio gave parents just one more chance to opt for in-person classes for the rest of the school year, only about 35,000 additional students are set to return, which will leave school buildings emptier than officials had hoped.

In total, about 335,000 students will be eligible to return to classes in person, or roughly a third of the city’s nearly 1 million district school students. It’s not clear when that will happen: The city’s public school buildings were shuttered Thursday due to a rise in coronavirus cases, and a reopening date has not been set.

The figures are a major blow to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has forcefully argued that opening school buildings is essential, especially for low-income parents of color who make up the vast majority of enrollment. But roughly half of Black and Hispanic families have kept their children learning from home full-time and are significantly less likely to say that they plan to return to school buildings compared with their white peers, who appear to be returning to school buildings at the highest rates, according to city data.

“I wanted to open schools because kids needed it. Families needed it. I believe we could do it safely,” de Blasio said in a radio interview Friday morning before the data was released. “We did do it safely.”

It’s possible that the number of students learning in person will fall since parents can opt for fully remote learning at any time. Some families may be wary of returning to classrooms as the city struggles with another wave of the pandemic, even as experts have indicated the schools are relatively safe and have reported relatively few coronavirus cases. Officials did not immediately say whether they would give families another chance to choose in-person learning later in the year, given the latest round of building closures.

The numbers also underscore that the fate of this school year will hinge on the quality of remote teaching, which has received considerably less attention and resources than the logistics of safely reopening physical buildings and the distribution of technology. Even under the mayor’s hybrid model, most students are learning from home on any given school day. Meanwhile, the city has not developed a clear strategy for improving remote learning, according to educators, experts, and union leaders.

City officials are still scrambling to make sure students are able to connect with their teachers virtually. At a City Council hearing Friday, education department officials said that they have ordered about 100,000 internet-enabled iPads for students who still don’t have them, but they won’t arrive for another four to five weeks due to supply issues. And students who live in shelters have also struggled with lack of Wi-Fi and problems connecting with the city’s internet-enabled devices.

There is some good news for the students who decide to return to school buildings. Due to lower-than-expected numbers of students opting for in-person learning, officials said students could spend more time in their classrooms than originally anticipated. Most students in the hybrid model have been attending school one to three days a week, due to social-distancing guidelines, and learning from home on the other days.

“We will be working with schools to increase the number of days blended learning students are in buildings,” education department spokesperson Katie O’Hanlon said in a statement, “and we’re excited for these students to join their peers when we reopen.”

De Blasio pushed to reopen school buildings. Only about a quarter of students showed up for in-person instruction.

2020-10-26T18:07:08+00:00

Only 280,000 students attended in-person classes in the first month of school, Mayor Bill de Blasio revealed Monday, far fewer than the city previously suggested.

The number translates to a little more than a quarter of students showing up to school buildings, based on last year’s enrollment of about 1 million students. Last week, education department officials had claimed that 46% of students were returning to school buildings. The latest numbers show that about 180,000 fewer students actually did.

The difference could be explained by a number of factors. Students could be learning exclusively from home in far larger numbers than they’ve reported to the education department.

The education department and the mayor have long misrepresented the numbers of online versus hybrid learners. The city has only asked parents to answer surveys if they want to opt their children into remote-only instruction and seemed to assume that parents who didn’t answer affirmatively wanted to return to school buildings.

Enrollment could also have dropped, with students leaving the system for charters offering more live instruction online, or private and parochial schools that are offering more days of in-person instruction. Others may have opted for homeschool, left the city, or dropped out altogether. The city has still not released total enrollment numbers for this school year, but other large cities have seen significant dips.

It’s also possible that many students haven’t had any interaction with their schools. Officials did not immediately say how many students had failed to engage with their schools even a single time.

De Blasio acknowledged that the in-person learning number was “a work in progress,” and that he wanted to see more students coming to buildings.

“A lot more kids could be attending in person,” he said, “and we want to make sure that their families know and they know the school is safe.”

But under a new policy, families will only have one opportunity — from Nov. 2 through Nov. 15 — to switch from fully remote learning to the hybrid model where students attend school in person one to three days a week in most cases. Previously, families could switch to in-person learning periodically throughout the school year.

Meanwhile, daily attendance sank to 85.3% so far this year, compared to daily attendance around 92% before the coronavirus pandemic.

“That’s not a bad number, but we want that number to go up,” de Blasio said.

The attendance figures provide an important first glimpse into the academic fallout of being at the world’s epicenter of the health crisis. The mayor had not only argued that the quality of in-person learning can’t be matched through remote instruction, he also diverted significant time and money towards reopening school buildings.

The city’s data shows that in-person students were having a tougher time showing up that those who are full remote, with only 82.9% of students are showing up for in-person classes each day, and just under 85.5% of students are logging in to virtual classes.

The city’s attendance figures come with some caveats. Schools appear to be using differing criteria to determine whether a student is “present” for online learning and the education department has emphasized “flexibility,” given that some students may struggle to log in at certain times because of their parent’s schedules or because they lack access to computers or the internet. Education department officials also suggested as late as last week that schools are still figuring out exactly how to tabulate who is present and who is absent.

“We have an entirely new system for recording and tracking attendance that some schools are still adjusting to and corrections need to be made on a daily basis,” education department spokeswoman Miranda Barbot told Chalkbeat on Friday.

School shutdowns in NYC coronavirus hotspots could go on for weeks, but nearby restaurants and bars remain open

2020-10-19T22:24:00+00:00

Just days after New York City reopened all its school buildings, 124 public schools in coronavirus hot spots were ordered shut for at least 14 days. Those two weeks are now almost up, but it remains unclear whether officials will green light their reopening.

Mayor Bill de Blasio signaled that the closures, which affect schools in certain parts of Brooklyn and Queens, are likely to extend beyond this week. But the decision ultimately rests with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has not publicly offered a timeline or criteria for loosening restrictions and has often overruled or contradicted the mayor.

“It looks like another week or two of work, overall,” de Blasio told reporters Monday referring to the restrictions, including school closures. He also suggested some areas, particularly central Queens, could see restrictions lifted first and “it is possible that we could see some action later on this week.” (The shutdown orders also impact charter and private schools. City officials have not said how many of those schools are affected.)

De Blasio has been one of the nation’s biggest proponents of reopening schools, and New York is a national test case for reopening a large urban school system, in large part because of low infection rates across the city.

Even as the city’s schools have reopened over the past month, there is little evidence so far that they are causing new infections. Just 28 of over 16,000 tests administered in schools have come back positive since Oct. 9, a positivity rate of 0.17%, according to new statistics released Monday. (The seven-day average citywide positivity rate is 1.6%, de Blasio said, though some virus clusters are posting rates that are two or three times higher, state data show.)

The low positivity rate on campuses has amplified frustration over the school closures among many parents and public health experts. Bars, restaurants, and houses of worship have been allowed to stay open in the city’s virus hotspots with some additional restrictions while schools have been completely shut down. (At the same time, some ultra-Orthodox yeshivas have defied public health orders and remained open.)

“Prioritizing outdoor dining over schools doesn’t make sense,” said Uché Blackstock, an urgent care physician who has treated coronavirus patients and has two children in city public schools. Schools “have the societal value — we should be working toward keeping them open.”

The city’s hotspots are defined by color-coded zones: red, orange and yellow, with all schools in red and orange zones completely shuttered. Bars and restaurants may continue outdoor dining in orange zones and may offer takeout in red zones. Houses of worship are allowed to continue indoor gatherings with a cap of 25 people in orange zones and 10 in the more-restrictive red zones.

Public health experts said there isn’t clear evidence that neighborhood-level restrictions will have a significant impact on the virus, especially as people travel between neighborhoods frequently and many teachers and students travel outside their neighborhoods to go to school.

“I understand where they’re coming from — what there’s really no will for right now is a general closure,” said Benjamin Linas, an epidemiologist at Boston University. “But it’s not clear it’s going to be effective as a public health strategy.”

Bill Neidhardt, a City Hall spokesperson, defended New York City’s decision to propose restrictions at the neighborhood level, including schools, and noted that the city’s teachers union supports the approach. About 7% of the city’s roughly 1,600 district schools are closed.

“It’s the most conservative, cautious approach that brings significant reduction of activity in the cluster zones,” he wrote in an email, “despite that we have not seen significant COVID spread in schools.”

Still, many parents remain upset by the closures and point out that it’s not clear when their children, now learning remotely full-time, will be allowed to return to school buildings or how those decisions will be made.

Jessica Dowshen, a parent at P.S. 139 in Brooklyn, said her third grade son has experienced only one day of in-person classes since school buildings reopened because the school is at the edge of an orange zone and was forced to shut down two weeks ago.

“He misses human interaction because it’s just not the same in a Zoom session,” Dowshen said.

Steven Mazie, whose seventh grade daughter attends M.S. 839 in Brooklyn, which is also in an orange zone, said the switch back to remote learning was smooth but that he remains frustrated about the mayor and governor’s approach. He pointed out that the boundaries include many schools that have largely been virus free.

“It just feels like we’re bouncing around between the mayor’s and the governor’s competing or sometimes overlapping orders,” Mazie said. There’s a “lack of sense and rationality behind it.”

These 169 NYC school sites will be closed on Thursday for at least 2 weeks

2020-10-08T01:20:01+00:00

An additional 33 New York City public schools are affected by closures starting Thursday, due to coronavirus upticks in the surrounding neighborhoods, the education department announced Wednesday night.

In total, 124 city-run schools are impacted, following a previous wave of shutdowns that started this week. The campuses will remain closed for at least two weeks.

Schools that were shuttered on Tuesday will remain closed, according to the education department, despite conflicting directives from the state.

Students at the affected schools will transition to learning fully online.

The campuses span more than 20 ZIP codes and include much of Brooklyn and parts of Queens. As some schools are spread across multiple sites, including many pre-K programs and those for students with disabilities, a total of 169 city-run sites are closed. Some schools might have one site that may open and another that must be shuttered.

Another 308 public school sites will be required to conduct weekly testing of students and staff because they are in areas bordering the coronavirus hot spots.

News of the latest shutdowns came after Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued a tangle of last-minute restrictions prompted by a rise in coronavirus cases. On Monday, the governor approved school closures across entire ZIP codes, only to release another set of maps, outlining restrictions and school closures in areas experiencing increases in coronavirus infections. But the state maps did not neatly match the city’s.

Sixteen schools that are part of the city’s list of closures were not in the state’s restricted areas. Still, those schools will remain closed.

The closures come as a blow to students, educators, and families who began returning to classrooms just two weeks ago, when New York City, home to the country’s largest school system, became the first major district to reopen classrooms for in-person learning. To account for social distancing, students attend classes about one to three times a week and learn from home the rest of the time.

On Tuesday, about 200 private schools and 100 city-contracted child care and pre-K programs were ordered to close. The education department did not say how many more such schools and programs are required to shut down as of Thursday.

Below is a list of the schools that will be closed for at least two weeks.

School	DBN	Address	ZIP code	Zone Color
P.S. 198 Brooklyn	22K198	4105 FARRAGUT ROAD	11210	Yellow
P.S. 277 Gerritsen Beach	22K277	2529 GERRITSEN AVENUE	11229	Yellow
P.S. 201 The Discovery School for Inquiry and Research	25Q201	65-11 155 STREET	11367	Yellow
Ezra Jack Keats Pre-K Center at 83-30 Kew Gardens Road	28Q335	80-30 Kew Gardens Road	11415	Yellow
Brooklyn School of Inquiry	20K686	50 AVENUE P	11204	Yellow
The Academy of Talented Scholars	20K682	50 AVENUE P	11204	Yellow
P.S. 97 The Highlawn	21K097	1855 STILLWELL AVENUE	11223	Yellow
Pathways to Graduation	79Q950	67 09 KISSENA BOULEVARD	11367	Yellow
Pathways to Graduation	79Q950	50 AVENUE X	11223	Yellow
P370K @ PB70	75K370	50 AVENUE P	11204	Yellow
P721K @ JOHN DEWEY HS	75K721	50 AVENUE X	11223	Yellow
P721K @ ROY CAMPANELLA OTC	75K721	64 AVENUE X	11223	Yellow
John Dewey High School	21K540	50 AVENUE X	11223	Yellow
I.S. 096 Seth Low	21K096	99 AVENUE P	11204	Yellow
I.S. 228 David A. Boody	21K228	228 AVENUE S	11223	Yellow
P.S. 105 The Bay School	27Q105	420 BEACH 51 STREET	11691	Yellow
P.S. 179 Kensington	20K179	202 AVENUE C	11218	Red
District 20 Pre-K Center at 1668 46th Street	20K768	1668 46 Street	11204	Red
P.S. 209 Margaret Mead	21K209	2609 EAST 7 STREET	11235	Red
P.S. K134	22K134	4001 18 AVENUE	11218	Red
P.S. 207 Elizabeth G. Leary	22K207	4011 FILLMORE AVENUE	11234	Red
P.S. 222 Katherine R. Snyder	22K222	3301 QUENTIN ROAD	11234	Red
J.H.S. 157 Stephen A. Halsey	28Q157	63-55 102ND STREET	11374	Red
P.S. 175 The Lynn Gross Discovery School	28Q175	64-35 102 STREET	11374	Red
P.S. 196 Grand Central Parkway	28Q196	71-25 113 STREET	11375	Red
P.S. 196 Grand Central Parkway	28Q196	112-15 71 ROAD	11375	Red
P.S. 206 The Horace Harding School	28Q206	61-02 98 STREET	11374	Red
P.S. 220 Edward Mandel	28Q220	62-10 108 STREET	11375	Red
The Academy for Excellence through the Arts	28Q303	108-55 69 Avenue	11375	Red
The SEEALL Academy	20K180	5601 16 AVENUE	11204	Red
P.S. 192 - The Magnet School for Math and Science Inquiry	20K192	4715 18 AVENUE	11204	Red
P.S. 099 Isaac Asimov	21K099	1120 EAST 10 STREET	11230	Red
P.S. 226 Alfred De B. Mason	21K226	6006 23 AVENUE	11204	Red
P.S. 238 Anne Sullivan	21K238	1633 EAST 8 STREET	11223	Red
P.S. 164 Queens Valley	25Q164	138-01 77 AVENUE	11367	Red
P.S. 131 Brooklyn	15K131	4305 FT HAMILTON PARKWAY	11219	Red
P.S. 048 Mapleton	20K048	6015 18 AVENUE	11204	Red
P.S. 164 Caesar Rodney	20K164	4211 14 AVENUE	11219	Red
P.S. 153 Homecrest	21K153	1970 HOMECREST AVENUE	11229	Red
P.S. 199 Frederick Wachtel	21K199	1100 ELM AVENUE	11230	Red
P.S. 215 Morris H. Weiss	21K215	415 AVENUE S	11223	Red
P.S. 216 Arturo Toscanini	21K216	350 AVENUE X	11223	Red
P.S. 193 Gil Hodges	22K193	2515 AVENUE L	11210	Red
P.S. 197 - The Kings Highway Academy	22K197	1599 EAST 22 STREET	11210	Red
District 20 Pre-K Center at 1423 62nd Street	20K768	1423 62nd Street	11219	Red
Brooklyn's Daily Discovery Pre-K Center at 2202 60th Street	21K840	2202 60 Street	11204	Red
Brooklyn's Daily Discovery Pre-K Center at 385 Avenue W	21K840	385 Avenue W	11223	Red
Brooklyn's Daily Discovery Pre-K Center at 10 Bouck Court	21K840	10 Bouck Court	11223	Red
The Joan Snow Pre-K Center at 1340 East 29th Street	22K853	1340 East 29 Street	11210	Red
P.S. 121 Nelson A. Rockefeller	21K121	5301 20 AVENUE	11204	Red
P.S. 105 The Blythebourne	20K105	1031 59 STREET	11219	Red
P.S. 160 William T. Sampson	20K160	5105 Fort Hamilton Parkway	11219	Red
P.S. 255 Barbara Reing School	22K255	1866 EAST 17 STREET	11229	Red
Coop Tech	79M645	8-21 BAY 25 STREET	11691	Red
ReStart Academy	79M973	1830 Coney Island Avenue	11230	Red
Pathways to Graduation	79Q950	8-21 BAY 25 STREET	11691	Red
Pathways to Graduation	79Q950	1600 AVENUE L	11230	Red
P036K @ P192K	75K036	4715 18 AVENUE	11204	Red
P077K @ P164K	75K077	4211 14 AVENUE	11219	Red
P231K @ P180K	75K231	5601 16 AVENUE	11204	Red
P231K @ P215K	75K231	415 AVENUE S	11223	Red
P231K @ P238K	75K231	1633 EAST 8 STREET	11223	Red
P811K @ EDWARD R. MURROW HS	75K811	1600 AVENUE L	11230	Red
P256Q @ P253Q	75Q256	1307 CENTRAL AVENUE	11691	Red
Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School	20K505	5800 20 AVENUE	11204	Red
Edward R. Murrow High School	21K525	1600 AVENUE L	11230	Red
James Madison High School	22K425	3787 BEDFORD AVENUE	11229	Red
North Queens Community High School	25Q792	141-25 77TH ROAD	11367	Red
Frederick Douglass Academy VI High School	27Q260	8-21 BAY 25 STREET	11691	Red
Queens High School for Information, Research, and Technology	27Q302	8-21 BAY 25 STREET	11691	Red
J.H.S. 223 The Montauk	20K223	4200 16 AVENUE	11204	Red
J.H.S. 234 Arthur W. Cunningham	22K234	1875 EAST 17 STREET	11229	Red
Andries Hudde	22K240	2500 NOSTRAND AVENUE	11210	Red
I. S. 381	22K381	2500 NOSTRAND AVENUE	11210	Red
M.S. 053 Brian Piccolo	27Q053	10-45 NAMEOKE STREET	11691	Red
Knowledge and Power Preparatory Academy VI	27Q282	8-21 BAY 25 STREET	11691	Red
Village Academy	27Q319	10-45 NAMEOKE STREET	11691	Red
Urban Assembly School for Leadership and Empowerment	20K609	4200 16 AVENUE	11204	Red
Academy of Medical Technology: A College Board School	27Q309	8-21 BAY 25 STREET	11691	Red
P.S. 197 The Ocean School	27Q197	825 HICKSVILLE ROAD	11691	Red
P.S. 253	27Q253	1307 CENTRAL AVENUE	11691	Red
Wave Preparatory Elementary School	27Q362	535 BRIAR PLACE	11691	Red
District 20 Pre-K Center at 550 59th Street	20K768	550 59 Street	11220	Orange
District 20 Pre-K Center at 1258 65th Street	20K768	1258 65 Street	11219	Orange
Brooklyn's Daily Discovery Pre-K Center at 1215 Avenue X	21K840	1215 Avenue X	11235	Orange
The Joan Snow Pre-K Center at 1139 Coney Island Avenue	22K853	1139 Coney Island Avenue	11230	Orange
BKLYN COLL ACAD (BRIDGES TO K)-K	75K077	350 CONEY ISLAND AVENUE	11218	Orange
P811K @ I014K	75K811	2424 BATCHELDER STREET	11235	Orange
P811K @ CONNIE LEKAS SCHOOL	75K811	2525 HARING STREET	11235	Orange
P.S. 024	15K024	427 38 STREET	11232	Orange
P.S. 094 The Henry Longfellow	15K094	5010 6 AVENUE	11220	Orange
P.S. 130 The Parkside	15K130	70 OCEAN PARKWAY	11218	Orange
P.S. 130 The Parkside	15K130	713 CATON AVENUE	11218	Orange
P.S. 169 Sunset Park	15K169	4305 7 AVENUE	11232	Orange
P.S. 230 Doris L. Cohen	15K230	1 ALBEMARLE ROAD	11218	Orange
M.S. 839	15K839	713 CATON AVENUE	11218	Orange
The School of Creativity and Innovation	15K896	736 48TH STREET	11220	Orange
J.H.S. 062 Ditmas	20K062	700 CORTELYOU ROAD	11218	Orange
P.S. 69 Vincent D. Grippo School	20K069	6302 9TH AVENUE	11220	Orange
J.H.S. 220 John J. Pershing	20K220	4812 9TH AVENUE	11220	Orange
P.S. 100 The Coney Island School	21K100	2951 WEST 3 STREET	11224	Orange
P.S. K225 - The Eileen E. Zaglin	21K225	1075 OCEAN VIEW AVENUE	11235	Orange
I.S. 303 Herbert S. Eisenberg	21K303	501 WEST AVENUE	11224	Orange
Rachel Carson High School for Coastal Studies	21K344	501 WEST AVENUE	11224	Orange
Abraham Lincoln High School	21K410	2800 OCEAN PARKWAY	11235	Orange
William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School	21K620	25 BRIGHTON 4TH ROAD	11235	Orange
J.H.S. 014 Shell Bank	22K014	2424 BATCHELDER STREET	11235	Orange
P.S. 139 Alexine A. Fenty	22K139	330 RUGBY ROAD	11226	Orange
P.S. 203 Floyd Bennett School	22K203	5101 AVENUE M	11234	Orange
P.S. 254 Dag Hammarskjold	22K254	1801 AVENUE Y	11235	Orange
Origins High School	22K611	3000 AVENUE X	11235	Orange
Professional Pathways High School	22K630	3000 AVENUE X	11235	Orange
P.S. 889	22K889	21 HINCKLEY PLACE	11218	Orange
M.S. 890	22K890	21 HINCKLEY PLACE	11218	Orange
High School for Arts and Business	24Q550	105-25 HORACE HARDING EXPY N	11368	Orange
Robert F. Kennedy Community High School	25Q670	75-40 PARSONS BOULEVARD	11366	Orange
P.S. 139 Rego Park	28Q139	93-06 63 DRIVE	11374	Orange
J.H.S. 190 Russell Sage	28Q190	68-17 AUSTIN STREET	11375	Orange
Forest Hills High School	28Q440	67-01 110 STREET	11375	Orange
P053K @ ABRAHAM LINCOLN HS	75K053	2800 OCEAN PARKWAY	11235	Orange
K053 @ K130	75K053	713 CATON AVENUE	11218	Orange
P370K @ P100K	75K370	2951 WEST 3 STREET	11224	Orange
P370K @ THE JIM THORPE SCHOOL	75K370	3000 WEST 1 STREET	11224	Orange
P370K @ WILLIAM GRADY HS	75K370	25 BRIGHTON 4TH ROAD	11235	Orange
P771K @ I303K	75K771	501 WEST AVENUE	11224	Orange
k771 @ k014	75K771	2424 BATCHELDER STREET	11235	Orange
P771K @ P225K	75K771	1075 OCEAN VIEW AVENUE	11235	Orange
P177Q @ P139Q	75Q177	93-06 63 DRIVE	11374	Orange
P177Q @ J190Q	75Q177	68-17 AUSTIN STREET	11375	Orange
P721Q @ JOHN F KENNEDY JR SCHOOL	75Q721	57-12 94 STREET	11373	Orange
P.S. 095 The Gravesend	21K095	345 VAN SICKLEN STREET	11223	Orange
P.S. 219 Paul Klapper	25Q219	144-39 GRAVETT ROAD	11367	Orange
The Queens College School for Math, Science and Technology	25Q499	148-20 REEVES AVENUE	11367	Orange
P.S. 205 Clarion	20K205	6701 20 AVENUE	11204	Orange
P.S. 177 The Marlboro	21K177	346 AVENUE P	11204	Orange
P.S. 119 Amersfort	22K119	3829 AVENUE K	11210	Orange
School of Science & Technology	22K152	725 EAST 23 STREET	11210	Orange
P.S. 194 Raoul Wallenberg	22K194	3117 AVENUE W	11229	Orange
P.S. 217 Colonel David Marcus School	22K217	1100 NEWKIRK AVENUE	11230	Orange
P.S. K315	22K315	725 EAST 23 STREET	11210	Orange
P.S. 361 East Flatbush Early Childhood School	22K361	1957 NOSTRAND AVENUE	11210	Orange
P.S. 165 Edith K. Bergtraum	25Q165	70-35 150 STREET	11367	Orange
P.S. 104 The Bays Water	27Q104	26-01 MOTT AVENUE	11691	Orange
Lighthouse Elementary School	27Q106	180 BEACH 35 STREET	11691	Orange
District 20 Pre-K Center at 2165 71st Street	20K768	2165 71st Street	11204	Orange
The Joan Snow Pre-K Center at 3610 Glenwood Road	22K853	3610 Glenwood Road	11210	Orange
P.S. 206 Joseph F Lamb	22K206	2200 GRAVESEND NECK ROAD	11229	Orange
P.S. 099 Kew Gardens	28Q099	82-37 KEW GARDENS ROAD	11415	Orange
P.S. 176 Ovington	20K176	1225 69 STREET	11219	Orange
P.S. 247 Brooklyn	20K247	7000 21 AVENUE	11204	Orange
The School For Future Leaders	20K310	942 62ND STREET	11219	Orange
ReStart Academy	79M973	120-55 QUEENS BOULEVARD	11415	Orange
Pathways to Graduation	79Q950	15-44 Hassock Street	11691	Orange
Pathways to Graduation	79Q950	2800 OCEAN PARKWAY	11235	Orange
P077K @ BROOKLYN COLLEGE CAMPUS	75K077	2900 BEDFORD AVENUE	11210	Orange
P256Q @ P043Q	75Q256	160 BEACH 29 STREET	11691	Orange
P255Q @ TOWNSEND HARRIS H.S.	75Q255	149-11 MELBOURNE AVENUE	11367	Orange
P993Q @ P499Q	75Q993	148-20 REEVES AVENUE	11367	Orange
West Brooklyn Community High School	15K529	1053 41ST STREET	11219	Orange
Midwood High School	22K405	2839 BEDFORD AVENUE	11210	Orange
Brooklyn College Academy	22K555	2900 BEDFORD AVENUE	11210	Orange
Brooklyn College Academy	22K555	350 CONEY ISLAND AVENUE	11218	Orange
John Bowne High School	25Q425	63-25 MAIN STREET	11367	Orange
Townsend Harris High School	25Q525	149-11 MELBOURNE AVENUE	11367	Orange
The Christa McAuliffe School\I.S. 187	20K187	1171 65 STREET	11219	Orange
J.H.S. 227 Edward B. Shallow	20K227	6500 16 AVENUE	11204	Orange
J.H.S. 278 Marine Park	22K278	1925 STUART STREET	11229	Orange
P.S. 043	27Q043	160 BEACH 29 STREET	11691	Orange
P.S. 253	21K253	601 OCEANVIEW AVENUE	11235	Orange

NYC school closures in coronavirus hotspots

Source: NYC Department of Education

As NYC sprints to reopen schools, several senior education officials have headed for the exit

2020-09-28T19:05:31+00:00

As New York City scrambles to reopen school buildings for hundreds of thousands of students this week, a handful of top officials charged with making that happen have left the education department in quick succession.

Three of those officials — Chief Operating Officer Ursulina Ramirez, Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark, and senior advisor Alison Hirsh — have announced in the past three weeks their plans to leave. All three have been involved in the city’s efforts to reopen schools, which has been delayed twice in the past month. Following the drumbeat of departures, and a swirl of rumors, the education department’s press secretary took the unusual step Friday of publicly denying that schools Chancellor Richard Carranza also planned to step down.

Goldmark, who has emphasized that her leave will be temporary, and Ramirez have been important players in carrying out the education department’s reopening strategy, focused on a wide portfolio of issues ranging from jump-starting the city’s school bus infrastructure to figuring out how to create enough space for socially distanced classes.

Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark

The back-to-back exits come at a precarious moment for the education department, which is scheduled to reopen school buildings to students in elementary, middle, and high schools this week. The reopening effort was further complicated on Sunday when the principals union indicated they have no confidence in the mayor and chancellor’s plans and demanded the state seize control of the city’s schools.

“We need real leadership and certainty in these times,” said Paula White, the executive director of the advocacy group Educators for Excellence in New York and a former education official in New Jersey. “When you have this level of churn at the top it just adds further chaos at this crucial moment.”

Some insiders and observers said broader frustration with the mayor’s mishandling of the reopening process has played a role in the exodus of senior education department officials, three of whom previously worked directly with de Blasio.

An official familiar with the recent slate of departures said de Blasio’s handling of school reopening was a factor. Much of the reopening effort has been run through City Hall, and top education department officials have felt minimized in key decisions. The mayor has also ignored advice from his own advisory group of experts who were asked to offer input on how to reopen schools. When concerns bubble up about issues such as inadequate staffing, which had been a cause of concern for weeks and ultimately contributed a last-minute delay to the school year, the mayor has been dismissive, the official said.

“There are roadblocks in City Hall and it’s difficult to make decisions and just articulate what some of the challenges are without being called bureaucrats,” said the official, who is not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity. “People are really demoralized.”

Still, it is not uncommon for New York City officials to be prime candidates for a range of in-demand education jobs, given their experience managing the nation’s largest school system. And the desire to begin lining up other jobs has intensified since de Blasio is term-limited and his successor will be elected next year, with a new mayor likely replacing many senior education officials.

The latest round of departures began in June, with two senior officials leaving to run other school systems. Cheryl Watson-Harris, the department’s second-in-command, became the superintendent of a Georgia school district. She was replaced by Donald Conyers, a nearly 40-year veteran of the department.

Human resources chief Tomás Hana decamped for the top job at a school district in Pennsylvania, and the position was filled on an interim basis by Vicki Bernstein. That role may take outsized importance, as the education department scrambles to hire thousands of teachers in response to a staffing crisis, created in part by an agreement with the city’s teachers union, and which contributed to the delayed start to the school year.

Former First Deputy Chancellor Cheryl Watson-Harris

In September, Ramirez, the chief operating officer, left for a nonprofit job that has yet to be announced after working at the education department for almost seven years. Hirsh, who had worked at the education department for only three months after departing City Hall in June, also resigned this month. Ramirez and Hirsh, who both previously worked for de Blasio, will not be replaced, officials said.

And this week, Goldmark, a top education department deputy who previously worked at City Hall for six years, announced she would take a leave of absence to “do everything possible to ensure a Democratic victory” in the presidential election by working on the Biden campaign. An education department spokesperson, Miranda Barbot, said in a statement that Goldmark “has not formally been placed on leave” and did not elaborate on when the leave would begin or whether anyone would take over her role while she’s gone.

“We have incredibly strong leaders with dedicated teams at all levels of the [education department] who are focused on our common goal of a safe and successful school reopening,” Barbot wrote. “We have tremendous confidence in our staff as we begin this school year.”

Former Chief Operating Officer Ursulina Ramirez

Some said the string of departures was unlikely to cause immediate damage to the city’s reopening efforts, as a bureaucracy as large as the education department has plenty of managers who can fill in.

“We generally have a deep enough pool of people to do what we need to do,” said Mark Cannizarro, head of the union that represents school administrators. “Time will only tell whether or not things could have been done any differently or better with them remaining here.”

Even if it’s unclear whether their departures will have an immediate effect on day-to-day operations, it could create political problems. The mayor has alienated many parents and educators in recent months, despite many experts saying New York City is in a good position to reopen from a public health perspective and offering some in-person learning has potentially significant educational upsides.

The revolving door of senior staff could feed the perception that de Blasio’s plans are insufficient and provide fodder for critics, said Josh Starr, a former New York City schools official and current head of PDK International, an association for educators.

“There is a symbolic effect and you can’t deny that,” Starr said. “It continues to deteriorate the credibility in the overall administration.”

More NYC teachers can work remotely, including those with vulnerable family members

2020-09-26T00:34:59+00:00

In a reversal of education department policy, New York City educators will now be allowed to work remotely if they are teaching students who are learning from home, according to a new agreement reached Friday between the city and the teachers union.

The deal also gives priority for remote positions to educators living with family members who are at higher risk for coronavirus complications. That had been a major concern among some teachers who worried about transmitting the coronavirus to vulnerable relatives.

The agreement attempts to address a staffing crunch by allowing schools to skirt some of the very rules established in a previous deal with the teachers union. But it also brings a whole new set of complications.

Announced Friday night, the seven pages of requirements outline yet more changes for school leaders and families to navigate at the last minute. Students at every grade level will be allowed to return to school buildings next week, leaving principals with little time to make needed adaptations.

And there could be more changes in store: The agreement refers to yet another round of work guidance that is “forthcoming.” That guidance is expected to outline certain work duties that can be performed online for teachers who have in-person responsibilities.

Also included in the agreement: parent-teacher conferences will be conducted online, unless an in-person meeting is requested.

All teachers — except the roughly 23% percent of those with medical accommodations — have been reporting to their school buildings since Sept. 8. On Monday, most students started the first full week of instruction from home, and at least 46% of students have so far opted to learn from home full-time.

Many families whose children signed up for remote learning were surprised to see teachers, often in masks, delivering remote instruction from classrooms.

Teachers argued it made little sense to report to buildings to teach students learning online. “These common-sense policies will help keep our school communities safe while enabling you to do your work,” teachers union president Michael Mulgrew wrote to members on Friday.

The education department will extend the work-from-home preference, which kicks in Oct. 5, “first to those who reside with someone on the CDC medical accommodation list,” said Danielle Filson, a spokesperson for the education department, in a statement after this story was published. “This will help to reduce the number of occupants in school buildings, minimize congestion on public transportation, and give principals the ability to make decisions that best fit their school communities.”

Principals have some leeway and can require up to 20% of teachers with remote assignments to come into school buildings “with reasonable advance notice.” The agreement doesn’t say how much notice is enough.

Schools are also now allowed to adopt schedules and teacher assignments that don’t fit neatly into the union’s previous agreement. That deal was nearly impossible for many schools to follow.

Some schools, for instance, are planning to have students learn on virtual platforms even when they’re in school buildings or are asking educators to teach a mix of in-person and remote students during different periods of the day. The original agreement between the city and union discouraged this, demanding separate teachers for those who are physically in school and those who are learning from home. Now, principals could have more flexibility.

But the process for getting work-arounds approved could prove time-consuming if there is disagreement between the principal and teachers. The steps for doing so are laid out in a 12-page memo, and requires at least 55% of union members to vote in favor. If union members and administrators cannot come to an agreement, they can ask their superintendent and the school’s district union representative to help find a resolution.

The deal does not allow for much flexibility around one hot button issue: live-streaming classes. It bars principals from requiring teachers to broadcast their classes to a mix of students who are in person and remote, something Mulgrew and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza have insisted would lead to subpar teaching. But teachers can choose to livestream classes.

While some of the changes may be well-received, the agreement adds another hurdle if schools have to reassign teachers after they’ve already met their students. The school year started Sept. 16 and students in all grades will be allowed to attend in-person classes by Oct. 1. Principals may be forced to scramble once again to re-work their schedules to accommodate new waves of teachers who are eligible to work from home.

Mark Cannizzaro, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the union that represents principals, was furious that the education department did not brief school leaders on the agreement, with many learning details from teachers at their schools Friday evening.

“To do this at the 11th hour is unacceptable,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’re getting all too used to that.”

He added that principals urgently need guidance about how decisions will be made regarding expanded accommodations to work from home due to family members’ medical issues. “If they can’t make those accommodations and someone has a real need, the principal is in a real difficult spot,” Cannizzaro said. He noted that it is still unclear whether there will be enough teachers on hand for in-person classes next week.

Such accommodations will only be considered at schools that need to fill more full-remote teaching positions, according to the agreement.

School kicked off more than a week ago, and the latest move follows weeks of scheduling conundrums, a staffing shortage, and two delays for reopening buildings in the nation’s largest school district.

One principal in Queens, who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said the late agreement makes his job “1,000 times harder.” He said he was relying on teachers working with remote students to help with student arrival and dismissal, which now involves temperature checks and health screenings.

Teachers with remote students also made up half of his “building response team,” a group of staffers coordinating the school’s virus response protocols, such as ensuring safe morning entry. With fewer educators on campus, he’s concerned it will take longer for students to make their way inside, cutting into their instructional time.

By 7:30 p.m. Friday night, three teachers had emailed him asking to work from home, he said.

“I am ready to quit,” he said.

Marilyn Ramirez, a chapter leader and bilingual special education teacher at High School for Media Communications in Washington Heights, said Friday her colleagues’ group chat was “going off” with happy texts about the new agreement — especially the ability to work from home if students are also at home. Overall, she thought the agreement was an indication that city officials were “listening now.”

“I just wish that we — we, meaning the DOE — would have thought about this from the beginning, like maybe gotten teachers and principals involved in the planning, and then that way all of these concerns could have been addressed a couple of months ago,” Ramirez said.

Amid coronavirus upheaval, NYC considered overhauling how 164 schools are supervised. Now officials are backing off.

2020-07-21T22:40:22+00:00

After backlash from principals and nonprofit leaders, the city’s education department has backed off a plan that would have overhauled the way roughly one-third of public high schools are supervised.

At issue are 164 schools in the city’s “Affinity” network, which include schools that exclusively serve new immigrants, deploy alternate assessments in lieu of state exit exams, or have a career focus. City officials were considering a plan to break up the network, reassign the superintendents who oversee it, and disband the central office that provides logistical support and training for Affinity schools.

The education department has decided to leave the network largely intact after parents, school leaders, and partner organizations expressed alarm over the plan, which would have changed the schools’ supervision structure just as they’re scrambling to reopen their doors after buildings were shut in March due to the coronavirus.

The Affinity schools will be supervised by the same set of superintendents, a major sticking point among those opposed to the reorganization.

“Your voices mattered — and they were heard!” wrote the Affinity office’s executive director, Carolyne Quintana, in a memo sent to members of the network and obtained by Chalkbeat. Schools “may continue to do important and challenging work with the guidance of superintendents they know and trust.”

However, the citywide office that had provided support for Affinity schools will be closed and the schools will be reassigned to an existing network of borough-based support offices. Quintana’s memo indicated those staff members may be allowed to move to the borough offices and keep working with the same schools, though it’s unclear if that will happen in every case.

Each Affinity school is supported by nonprofit or university partners, such as New Visions, Outward Bound, Urban Assembly, and CUNY, giving groups of schools the ability to collaborate on curriculum and teacher training, and to share best practices — relationships that will go unchanged for now.

“We’re grateful that our structure was largely preserved,” said Kristin Kearns-Jordan, the CEO of Urban Assembly, which partners with 21 Affinity schools, many of which have career-oriented themes, such as criminal justice or emergency management. “We are hopeful that [the city] will maintain our contracts,” given the city’s bleak financial picture and uncertainty about whether the federal government will fill the gap, she added.

It’s not entirely clear what the education department hopes to accomplish by dissolving the Affinity support office, whose staff helps schools with budgeting, human resources, special education compliance, and more.

Nathaniel Styer, an education department spokesperson, previously suggested that changes could be a cost-saving measure, but did not answer questions about how much money dissolving Affinity’s support office will save, whether any staff will be laid off, or when the changes will formally take place.

“We are answering the call of our valued Affinity school leaders and partner organizations for consistent supervision and support as they provide students with a high-quality education during the critical academic school year ahead,” Styer wrote in an email.

The Affinity network is a vestige of a support system that was conceived under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg; schools were given the option of joining one of dozens of support networks, some of which were affiliated with nonprofits and universities.

But under Mayor Bill de Blasio, those networks were dissolved and local superintendents were given new authority to directly supervise schools. The Affinity network escaped elimination during that reorganization, retaining a separate network of support with their own superintendents, partly thanks to pushback from politically connected nonprofit leaders.

One Affinity school principal, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the department made the right decision to avoid disbanding the network.

“It’s a win-win,” the principal said. “The DOE gets to say that Affinity has been abolished and no longer exists, but we get to stay with the people who have been helping us in this crisis, which is our superintendent’s team.”

NYC may overhaul how one-third of its high schools are supervised, upsetting some principals

2020-06-26T22:05:50+00:00

More than a third of New York City’s high schools might lose their superintendents and be scattered to new supervisors across the system under a possible restructuring plan, Chalkbeat has learned.

The proposal is already generating backlash among the 164 schools in the city’s “Affinity” network, which include schools that exclusively serve new immigrants, deploy alternate assessments in lieu of state exit exams, or have a career focus.

Many of their principals rely on partnerships and collaborations with like-minded schools even as they’re scattered across the city. The schools are supported by deep relationships with nonprofit or university partners, such as New Visions, Outward Bound, Urban Assembly and CUNY, giving the schools the ability to collaborate on curriculum, teacher training, and share best practices.

But unlike most of the city’s schools, which are overseen by geographically-based superintendents, Affinity schools are supervised by a separate set of centralized superintendents and have their own citywide support office, which provides help with school budgets, hiring, and training opportunities.

Now, city officials have quietly been discussing breaking up the network, reassigning the superintendents, and disbanding its central support office, according to a draft of a letter from Affinity principals that was obtained by Chalkbeat.

“We are deeply concerned that the substance and timing of this reorganization will be deeply damaging to our schools and the students and families we serve,” the principals wrote, noting that many of their schools post higher-than-average graduation rates. “The relationships that have been built between superintendents, partners, and coaches who support us are crucial and have allowed our schools to work together within the superintendencies to improve teaching and learning.”

Multiple people connected to the Affinity schools, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there had been little discussion about the possible changes or why they were being considered, with some wondering whether it was an attempt to save money.

Many expressed worry that shifting the schools’ supervision comes at a precarious moment, as schools grapple with resuming in-person instruction this fall and face massive staffing and logistical challenges.

Education department officials did not dispute that changes were in the works, and hinted that there might be budget considerations.

“No decisions have been made and we will be transparent with school communities with up-to-date information as soon as it is made available,” Nathaniel Styer, a department spokesperson, wrote in an email. “With our extraordinarily difficult budget environment, everything is on the table while our goal is to minimize the impact on student learning.”

Longer term, some observers said a shakeup could make it challenging for schools within the network to collaborate and ultimately make good on their missions.

“It’s going to be much more difficult for them to continue a network of like schools,” said Norm Fruchter, a consultant at NYU’s Metro Center who has written about the Affinity network. “If they now are reporting to a local superintendent, how are they going to manage to reach out and work with other schools in their network?”

There are also longstanding power dynamics at play. Under the Bloomberg administration, schools were given the option of joining one of dozens of support networks, some of which were affiliated with nonprofits and universities. But under schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, those networks were dissolved and local superintendents were given new authority to directly supervise schools.

But there was one important exception: The Affinity schools were allowed to retain a separate network of support with their own superintendents after some politically-connected nonprofit leaders exerted pressure. That may give hope to some that the current reorganization could be blocked.

“In some ways, that was the crux of the debates around the dissolution of the [network structure] and the tradeoff of a geographically-based system and one that was based on a substantive connection between schools,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Teachers College. “Carmen decided she wanted something that was as close to geographically-based as possible.”

Some parents said they have started to get wind of a possible shakeup and are worried that it will weaken the schools. Kemala Karmen, whose 10th grade daughter attends a high school that uses alternative assessments in lieu of state exit exams, said she is nervous about possible changes.

The Affinity network “allows for professional communities to develop, and that directly affects my children,” she said. “Why would you take away what’s working for these schools?”

Here’s what reopening NYC schools could look like this fall, according to a memo from Carranza

2020-06-10T03:28:21+00:00

New York City schools Chancellor Richard Carranza on Tuesday hinted at what restarting schools could look like in the fall: personal protective gear, trauma-informed approaches to teaching, a hybrid of in-person and remote learning, and phased-in start dates.

That is according to an email sent to principals and other school leaders, which was shared with Chalkbeat.

The public health landscape in September remains uncertain, the letter emphasized, meaning that many crucial logistical questions still don’t have answers.

“We can’t predict what will be true in September, but as of now we are anticipating that social distancing will remain in effect,” the chancellor wrote.

The city will provide schools an additional $10 million to pay teachers and principals to work during the summer on their reopening plans, according to an education department spokeswoman. There were no additional details about where the money is coming from as the education department faces drastic cuts next fiscal year — with individual school budgets taking the brunt of the cuts.

The chancellor’s letter does not offer a date for reopening school buildings for the city’s 1.1 million students, though Carranza noted that the city is “wholeheartedly” moving toward reopening in September. In response to the coronavirus pandemic, students have been learning remotely since March 23.

When campuses do open, Carranza signaled that students’ schedules are likely to be upended, with the possibility that not all students will return on the same date. The chancellor also signaled that “split schedules” could be coming, in which students travel to school intermittently and participate in remote learning on alternate days. The city’s teachers union has also suggested that as a possibility.

Buildings will likely need to limit the movement of students and educators inside, outside, and within the building, the chancellor said. The education department will also need to figure out how to safely operate school buses and school food operations while adhering to social distancing guidelines. (The letter does not address public transportation, which many staff and students use to get to and from school, though the transit authority is ultimately controlled by the state.)

Carranza says schools must consider several factors for reopening: health and safety, social-emotional and mental health, blended learning options, staggered opening dates and split schedules, limiting movement in buildings, more cleaning, busing, and meals — all while planning for a September opening date.

New York City and some 700 other districts in the state can only reopen with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s blessing, the governor has said. Districts must submit detailed reopening plans to the state in July for approval. Cuomo will ultimately decide when and how schools can begin to open up, though it’s unclear when exactly he’ll act.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has launched a 45-member panel to advise him on how to reopen school buildings. Carranza said the education department will consult parents, students, and staff on its reopening plans.

Read Carranza’s full letter here.

Carranza’s top deputy expected to land superintendent job in Georgia

2020-06-05T01:28:25+00:00

New York City’s second in command in the education department is expected to head to Georgia to lead the DeKalb County school district, just outside of Atlanta.

Cheryl Watson-Harris, who currently serves as first deputy chancellor, was named the sole finalist for superintendent, the DeKalb district announced Thursday. She is expected to be appointed on July 1, pending a 14-day waiting period that is mandated by Georgia law. During that time, she’ll meet with the public in virtual meetings.

In an email she sent to some colleagues, which was obtained by Chalkbeat, Watson-Harris said she was “delighted about this opportunity” and that she knows “this is my next calling.”

“I hope this is not goodbye, but a so long and the opportunity to do great things for children in a new space,” she wrote.

It’s not guaranteed that she’ll be appointed. Just weeks ago, it looked like the position would go to former New York City Chancellor Rudy Crew, who currently leads Medgar Evers College. But the school board, expressing concerns about his age and past allegations against him, backtracked and declined to offer him a contract.

In New York City, the education department acknowledged last week that Watson-Harris had been job hunting since December, after it became public that she had applied for a superintendent position in Florida.

She is set to leave the country’s largest school system just as it faces some of its greatest challenges, amid the coronavirus pandemic and resulting budget squeeze. Those difficulties coincide with widespread civil unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a black Minnesota man who died under the knee of a white police officer.

DeKalb’s announcement of her selection credits Watson-Harris with devising the city’s new school support system under schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, which includes supervising nine newly created executive superintendent positions and managing the department’s somewhat opaque efforts to improve schools. Those reforms have garnered criticism from some who say they have added bureaucracy, been poorly defined, and do not include clear metrics for improving schools.

Carranza, who appointed Watson-Harris as his right-hand in 2018, called her looming departure “bittersweet.”

“We are so grateful for all Cheryl has contributed to advancing equity and excellence for New York City’s 1.1 million public school students,” he wrote. “We wish her the best in this incredible new endeavor and know the students of DeKalb County would be lucky to have Cheryl as their leader.”

Watson-Harris rose quickly through the ranks of the city’s education department, serving in two different stints here that were broken up by time spent as a principal and senior education official in Boston. Upon her return in 2015, she was responsible for just one of the city’s school-support centers in Brooklyn and went on to supervise all seven of them. At one point, she had been rumored to be under consideration to become chancellor.

DeKalb County serves about 100,000 students, fewer than Watson-Harris oversaw in Brooklyn, the role she held prior to joining the education department’s central offices. Most of those enrolled are students of color: almost 64% are black, about 17% are Hispanic, 11% are white, and just over 6% are Asian.

DeKalb school board Chair Marshall Orson touted Watson-Harris’ experience and “her commitment to equity for all students.”

“Cheryl Watson-Harris is part of the next generation of outstanding leaders in public education,” he said. “She fits the criteria desired by the DeKalb community.”

Carranza’s No. 2 at the education department is job hunting outside NYC

2020-05-28T20:28:33+00:00

The chancellor’s right-hand at the New York City education department is looking for a new gig.

Cheryl Watson-Harris was briefly one of more than 20 candidates vying to become superintendent of Sarasota County schools, which enrolls about 44,000 students on the west coast of Florida, according to a copy of her application that had been posted on the district’s website.

But she withdrew from the running Thursday afternoon, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. A spokesperson for the New York City education department said Watson-Harris “is pursuing other opportunities, a process we understand to have begun in December.”

Florida has unusually broad public records laws, while New York City’s education department is notoriously difficult to pry documents from. Her resume, cover letter, and letters of recommendation had been posted online, alongside the other candidates.

Hours after receiving questions from Chalkbeat about her application, Watson-Harris withdrew from consideration, according to John Reichert, a consultant with the Florida School Boards Association who is helping to lead the superintendent search.

“That was just a personal choice,” Watson-Harris told the Herald-Tribune.

Watson-Harris currently serves as second-in-command of the country’s largest school system and led New York City’s transition to remote learning after the coronavirus outbreak, according to her May 17 cover letter. Chancellor Richard Carranza tapped her for a newly created first deputy chancellor position shortly after he took the reins in 2018. Watson-Harris has been responsible for overseeing the chancellor’s new approach to supporting and supervising schools.

Watson-Harris set her sights elsewhere as the city’s education department is facing enormous uncertainty brought on by the coronavirus, along with a looming budget crisis that will likely be felt for years to come. With school buildings shuttered for at least a third of the academic year, it is unclear when students will be able to return. Watson-Harris has been a key player in the department’s response to the outbreak.

In a statement provided through the education department before removing herself from the running in Sarasota, Watson-Harris said it was time to weigh her options.

“I’ve learned so much in my time here. As my daughter graduates high school and my son looks to begin high school in the fall, and as I evaluate personal and family obligations, this is a time for my family to make difficult decisions for our future,” she said. “If I were to accept a job elsewhere, I would do everything to make sure our 1.1 million NYC school children and my colleagues have the support they need for a successful transition.”

She did not respond to a Chalkbeat request for comment after withdrawing her interest in the Florida position.

Her application for the Florida job signals that a reshuffling at the education department might be on the horizon. In New York City, the mayor controls the school system, and Mayor Bill de Blasio is wrapping up his final term. In the short history of mayoral control, each new city leader has shaken up the leadership at Tweed, the education department’s central offices. That means many senior officials may be looking now for their next steps.

Aaron Pallas, department chair of education policy and analysis at Teachers College at Columbia University, said it’s likely that Watson-Harris is simply looking to take on her own leadership role.

“My sense is that she’s still well respected, that she’s managed the responsibilities that she’s had effectively. The [department of education] is sprawling, and complicated, and hard to manage — and there’s certainly not a perception that things are falling apart,” Pallas said.

But, he added, there’s no specific initiative identified with Watson-Harris “that people are clearly happy about.”

Her rise through the New York City ranks has been swift, moving quickly from being responsible for just one of the city’s school-support centers in Brooklyn, to supervising all seven. She had been rumored to be in the running to become chancellor after former schools chief Carmen Fariña retired.

In a recommendation letter for the Sarasota position, Carranza praised Watson-Harris for her ability to implement systems that keep individual students and schools in mind.

“She believes that change is possible, within our control, and a moral imperative,” he wrote. “These internal beliefs undergird everything she does.”

Watson-Harris described herself as “an equity-warrior, impactful leader, and champion for children” in her cover letter. She pointed to her management of nine executive superintendents, and a reorganization of how superintendents and borough-level school support offices work with each other as key accomplishments. Spearheaded by Carranza, those changes have raised eyebrows among some critics who say they have been expensive and the benefits of additional superintendents are unclear.

Although Carranza — and Watson-Harris — have embraced “advance equity now” as a mantra, there have been few dramatic policy changes under their leadership. The mayor, who sets the department’s agenda, has largely been content to stick with ideas he rolled out during his first term.

Watson-Harris has largely avoided controversy while in New York City — but not completely. Questions were raised about how her two children ended up in coveted schools after moving to the city in the summer of 2015. The city’s competitive application process typically makes it difficult for transfer students to snag seats at sought-after campuses. In a lawsuit filed by three white women claiming reverse discrimination by the education department, a former top official charged that she was leap-frogged by Watson-Harris for the first deputy chancellor position, even though Watson-Harris lacked the required license.

“The children in New York City — 70% of whom are black and brown children — get to see senior level administrators that look like them,” Carranza said when asked about the lawsuit. “And they happen to be extremely well-qualified individuals who at any moment could get tapped to lead their own school system anywhere across this country.”

DeVos guidance could shift $38 million in federal relief from NYC’s public schools to private ones, advocates say

2020-05-20T00:15:45+00:00

As states decide whether to follow controversial federal guidance that would send additional pandemic-related support to private schools, one advocacy group says the new recommendation could cost city public schools millions of dollars.

The Education Law Center, which is funded in part by national and state teachers unions, says the federal guidance would “significantly diminish the resources available to public school districts” to strengthen remote learning, and is asking the state to reject the guidance, David Sciarra, the center’s executive director, wrote Tuesday in a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Just over $1 billion in federal pandemic relief is set aside for schools in New York state — including $717 million for New York City schools, with some portion going toward services for private school students, such as tutoring and after-school programming. If the state follows Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s guidance on how districts should direct money to support private schools, New York City’s public schools could lose an estimated $38 million, according to the Education Law Center, which used state data to calculate the amount.

At issue are federal CARES Act dollars, which are supposed to help schools deal with costs linked to the pandemic, such as buying laptops for students so they can learn from home. Federal officials decided on how much money each district would get largely based on the Title I formula, which sends extra dollars to districts with many low-income students.

With businesses closed, New York State expected a massive revenue shortfall when it developed its budget in March. Instead of using the federal dollars to bolster state money for school districts, Cuomo and lawmakers cut state dollars in a way that effectively canceled out CARES Act funds. That approach left the biggest financial burden on school districts with high-shares of low-income students.

In normal times, school districts use Title I funds to support services for low-income private school students. On April 30, DeVos issued guidance that said private schools should receive CARES Act services based on the school’s total enrollment, not just based on the number of low-income students it serves. That means that private schools, many of which are also suffering financially, would receive a larger than anticipated share of the federal relief dollars because they generally enroll a smaller share of low-income students, compared to public schools.

The U.S. Department of Education has defended its guidance, saying that it follows the law’s intent of helping both public and private schools. The Education Law Center disagrees, as do many other public school advocates. The center points out that the CARES Act calls for funding to be distributed “in the same manner” as Title I dollars.

“The Secretary seeks to accomplish her objective by instructing public schools to not only set aside funds for low income private school students, but also students in every income bracket, including the most wealthy,” Sciarra wrote. “By allowing even the wealthiest students in the most expensive private schools to receive services paid for with CARES Act funds, New York would divert millions that could be used by [school districts] to meet the critical needs of low income students.”

Private schools have to opt in to receive such services and it’s not clear how many, or which ones, will do so.

New York officials have not yet said whether they’ll follow DeVos’s guidance. Freeman Klopott, a spokesperson for the governor, said the state education department will decide how districts should allocate CARES Act dollars. The state education department, however, is still finalizing the application that districts must fill out to receive their portion of the federal relief money, a spokesperson said Tuesday. Information about how districts should account for private schools will be released when the application is complete, the spokesperson said, though it’s not known when that will be.

Some states have already made decisions. Kentucky and Tennessee, for example, will follow the federal guidance, while Indiana has told districts to ignore it and prioritize funding for schools serving a large number of students from low-income families.

The New York City education department did not respond for comment, though spokesperson Katie O’Hanlon recently told Chalkbeat that the department had “initial concerns about its impact given an already difficult financial landscape.”

A recent analysis found that private school enrollment is much higher in the wealthiest parts of the city.

New York City private schools would receive an estimated $88 million in CARES Act relief if the district distributed resources based on the number of low-income students, the Education Law Center projects. That would rise to $126 million if the state decides to adopt DeVos’s guidance, according to the center.

That estimated loss to city schools is relatively tiny — the education department’s current budget is $34 billion — but it would come as the city is already clamoring for more dollars amid a budget crisis where the state has effectively nullified the federal aid. The mayor has proposed nearly $830 million in cuts for schools through next fiscal year as city officials work to finalize a new budget, and cuts from the state are expected this month if more federal dollars don’t come through. New York City schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has said the department is “at the bone” and can’t find additional savings, though some have been pushing the department to slash pricey contracts and central office employee salaries.

Sciarra, of the Education Law Center, believes districts could individually decide whether to follow DeVos’s guidance, but his organization prefers states make the final call.

“We would rather [that] than have districts deal with this on their own because it might be difficult for districts to decide individually not to follow guidance by the U.S. Secretary of Education,” Sciarra said in an interview. “They may be worried about that — they may feel they don’t have the authority to do that.”

These 267 NYC schools were honored as ‘Recognition Schools’ for their academic performance

2020-04-23T20:21:21+00:00

New York City is home to 267 of the state’s highest-performing schools, according to state accountability measures.

These so-called “Recognition Schools,” which state officials announced on Thursday, must have shown high academic achievement and substantial progress over the 2018-2019 school year. Of those in New York City, 35 are charters, and the rest are district schools.

In Manhattan’s District 2, one of the most affluent school districts in New York City, with about half of its students from low-income homes, 41 schools made the list — the highest of any other city district. By contrast, the Bronx’s District 9 and Brooklyn districts 14, 16, 18, and 32, where from 70% to 92% of students come from low-income families, each had one school on the list.

This is the second year that school progress is being measured under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which has given states more freedom to decide which schools are performing well and which ones are struggling.

“These are exemplary public schools that demonstrate that all students can achieve at high levels with the right supports and resources,” Board of Regents Chancellor Betty A. Rosa said in a statement.

To be considered top-performing, schools must already be in “good standing” with the state, meaning they cannot have been identified recently as needing improvement. Under the state’s accountability framework, schools are rated from Level 1, the lowest, to Level 4, the highest, on several different measures. Elementary and middle schools must earn a Level 4 on academic performance and progress for all students, while high schools must earn 4s for their academic performance and graduation rate.

Schools cannot earn the lowest score on any other indicator: progress on state tests; chronic absenteeism; English proficiency among students learning English as a new language; and college, career, and civic readiness for high schools.

Schools cannot have any subgroups of students, such as English language learners, that were identified last school year as needing extra support.

And at least 95% of students at these “Recognition Schools” must have taken a state reading or math exam, in accordance with the federal law.

Schools can appear on the list year after year. Last year, 277 city schools were recognized. Of those, 147 were recognized again, while 130 didn’t make this year’s list, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. This year, 120 schools were recognized for the first time under the new accountability framework.

This year, a total 582 schools across the state made the list.

See which New York City schools made this year’s list below.

Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee contributed reporting.

Searchable database created by Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee

Memo ordering NYC schools to keep coronavirus cases quiet is under investigation

2020-04-15T02:10:30+00:00

This story was originally published on April 14, 2020 by THE CITY.

The Special Commissioner for Investigations for city schools is probing the Department of Education’s bid to squelch coronavirus infection information in the chaotic days before schools were closed.

The investigation comes in response to a report by THE CITY revealing an internal memo advising school officials to not report cases of teachers or staff who tested positive for COVID-19 or were likely infected to the city health department.

Following the story, Councilmember Robert Holden (D-Queens) asked Special Commissioner for Investigations Anastasia Coleman to look into the origin of the memo — and whether it contributed to the spread of the virus within schools before Mayor Bill de Blasio reluctantly announced on March 15 that schools would be shuttered.

Councilmember Robert Holden (D-Queens) Photo: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY

In an interview Tuesday with THE CITY, Holden said he believes the March 10 memo was intended to help cover up the scope of the spread of the virus within the city public education system to justify keeping schools open amid an avalanche of pressure.

“A lot of teachers were calling us and saying, ‘Why aren’t the schools closed? We have some staff who are infected,’” Holden recalled.

“This is the DOE’s M.O., this is how they operate. They were trying to cover up. They were saying to us, they want to cover this up, we don’t want to cause mass hysteria,” he said.

🔗A Wave of Deaths

On March 30, SCI investigator Hector Rivera notified Holden, “I am assigned and investigating the allegations of negligence by the Department of Education, regarding the COVID-19 cases in the city schools.”

On Tuesday, Regina Gluzmanova, an SCI spokesperson, declined to discuss the investigation, stating, “SCI is in receipt of the Council Member’s letter and will not comment any further on an open investigation.”

The Department of Education confirmed this week that 50 public school staff, including 21 teachers, have died of COVID-19 illness since the pandemic hit the city.

As pressure mounted last month to shut the schools, de Blasio resisted the call, saying he feared the closure would hurt families who need their children to be in school while they’re working.

On March 4, THE CITY reported on a teacher who’d returned from a coronavirus hotspot in Italy and was displaying symptoms of the virus but couldn’t get tested. Days later de Blasio agreed that teachers, first responders and city health care workers with likely symptoms and travel histories should get tested.

At the time, the United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew criticized school officials for dragging their feet on testing teachers. As the days passed, Catholic schools closed, and one private school after another followed suit.

Then on March 10, with public schools still open, DOE management sent staff an internal memo advising them on how to handle the growing crisis. The memo specified that the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which was tracking the spread, should not be contacted.

“At the moment, there is no reason for any school to call DOHMH to report potential or confirmed cases,” the memo states. “DOHMH is receiving information…about positive test results strictly from laboratories. We can support our colleagues at DOHMH by keeping their phones clear to speak with laboratories.”

🔗‘An Abundance of Caution’

Confronted about this at a news conference, Chancellor Richard Carranza defended the memo, stating, “With increasing numbers of people coming out, what we don’t want to do is inundate the Department of Health with these cases.”

Five days later, de Blasio announced the shutdown.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza with Mayor Bill de Blasio Photo: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY

“Look at how many staff have died,” Holden told THE CITY Tuesday. “Leaving these classrooms open for that many days was dangerous.”

On Tuesday, Miranda Barbot, a spokesperson for Carranza, said: “When school buildings were open, we received confirmations directly from the State Health Department, and our guidance ensured the city’s Department of Health’s lines remained open for New Yorkers.

“We immediately notified communities when there was a confirmed case by the State Health Department, which happened once, and out of an abundance of caution we closed six other sites that had self-reported cases.”

De Blasio, Cuomo remain at odds over decision to keep schools closed for rest of school year

2020-04-12T16:50:55+00:00

Mayor Bill de Blasio doubled down Sunday on New York City’s decision to close its school buildings for the rest of the year, a day after the governor implied it was not de Blasio’s decision to make.

“Keeping schools closed will protect New Yorkers. Period,” de Blasio said at a Sunday morning press conference. He added that he and Chancellor Richard Carranza “are confident in the decision that we made,” given that the city is the epicenter of the country’s coronavirus epidemic.

De Blasio’s attempt to project finality comes after a day of mixed messages that frustrated New Yorkers. But clarity did not win the day: About an hour later, Gov. Andrew Cuomo refused to back down from his stance that the city’s schools may actually reopen this year.

“We’re not going to reopen any school until it is safe from a public health point of view,” Cuomo said. “Am I prepared to say what we will be doing in June? No.”

The conflicting comments from city and state leaders will likely stoke confusion in the nation’s largest school system, which educates over 1 million students, even as a closure for the rest of the academic year remains the most likely outcome. The school year is scheduled to end on June 26.

The back-and-forth began Saturday morning, when the mayor announced the city’s school buildings would shut down for the rest of the academic year — a call he said was made after consulting with aides, public health experts, and union officials. Just hours later, Cuomo said that was just “the mayor’s opinion.”

The governor acknowledged Sunday that de Blasio’s stance is “not unreasonable,” but said the decision to keep school buildings closed should be made in concert with neighboring states and counties.

“We have to have a coordinated approach on the reactivation, if you will. Schools, business, workforce, transportation — it all has to be coordinated,” Cuomo said, adding that decisions should be made with officials from New Jersey, Connecticut, and surrounding New York counties.

The disagreement over school closures is far from the first time the mayor and governor — both Democrats — have publicly clashed over a major public policy decision.

Statewide, Cuomo has ordered schools to be closed until at least April 29. Schools that want to be closed beyond that must get special permission from the state, according to the order.

De Blasio brushed aside concerns about his authority to close schools on Sunday. “To me, this is not about legal or jurisdictional questions, this is a moral question,” he said.

He also acknowledged that the city only notified the state of its decision on Saturday morning — suggesting there had not been close coordination with the governor before the city made the announcement.

Still, de Blasio implied he was uninterested in squabbling publicly with the governor. The mayor praised Cuomo’s leadership and said the two have been in close communication throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

“I respect the governor. I think the governor has done a very good job during this crisis,” de Blasio said.

Former NYC education official charged with sex crimes lied about prior job trouble, probe finds

2020-02-24T23:40:07+00:00

David Hay, the former deputy chief of staff to Chancellor Richard Carranza who is now facing child enticement and child pornography charges, lied on official city questionnaires about being pushed out of a previous job, a city investigation revealed Monday.

As a result of the city probe into Hay’s hiring, Special Commissioner of Investigation Anastasia Coleman is recommending five policy changes to how the education department vets job candidates. Those recommendations include requiring the department’s Office of Personnel Investigations to contact every candidate’s previous employer from at least the five years before their application, regardless of how they answer questionnaires about their past work.

The investigation found that Hay never acknowledged on official city paperwork that he was asked to resign from a previous job in Wisconsin over concerns about his principal’s license and improper spending — an omission that can lead to criminal charges, the report said. SCI has sent their findings to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr.

Coleman’s investigation did not expose any evidence of inappropriate sexual conduct in his previous jobs, her report said. In a news release, Coleman said her office’s investigation revealed “areas in need of improvement” when it comes to the education department’s vetting process for “high-level titles and sensitive positions.”

Hay held central office positions in New York City and did not teach.

Hay, 39, was charged last month in Wisconsin with attempting to lure a teenage boy — who was actually an undercover police officer — to a hotel and with possessing child pornography. He has pleaded not guilty. Hay was fired Dec. 30, the day after his arrest in Wisconsin, according to the SCI investigation.

Questions soon arose over how Hay was screened before he was hired. He joined New York City’s education department as a “confidential strategy planner” in 2016 and was later promoted. He was required to go through two background checks — one with the education department, and one with the city’s Department of Investigation, or the DOI. The education department review, which includes a fingerprint check, was completed. But the vetting process with the DOI remains incomplete because the agency says it is facing a massive backlog of cases to review.

Coleman’s office launched an investigation into how Hay was vetted, interviewing two Wisconsin superintendents for whom Hay had worked. Both said they had not heard of Hay demonstrating any “sexually inappropriate conduct.” However, investigators discovered Hay was forced to resign from one Wisconsin school district in 2011 because he had failed to update his principal’s license and was found to have improperly used a school credit card, in part for personal expenses such as lunch and gas, Coleman’s report said.

Investigators found that Hay was facing a hearing in 2011 over being fired as principal of a school in Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine district following the allegations about his license and improper spending, confirming a January report in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel newspaper. According to documents and SCI interviews, Hay submitted his resignation before the hearing and reached an agreement with district leaders that says the school system asked for his resignation. The agreement also bars the district from sharing any information with future employers except for his salary and dates of employment.

Years later, as part of his 2016 background check in New York City, Hay was required to answer questions about his past employment, including an online questionnaire with the education department. When he was promoted a year later, he filled out another questionnaire with the Department of Investigation and a second online questionnaire for education officials. Investigators found that he had made “more than a dozen false statements” by answering “no” to questions designed to catch red flags about work history, such as, “Have you ever been asked to resign from employment?” Hay also answered “no” to similar questions on surveys tied to teaching licenses in Wisconsin, the report said.

Katherine Rodi, the education department’s executive director of employee relations, told investigators that Hay should have answered “yes” to at least one of the questions about his past employment.

Coleman’s report noted that the city’s education department never contacted the Kettle Moraine district, but because of his agreement with district leaders, they wouldn’t have been permitted to reveal that information anyway. And since Hay’s employment with Kettle Moraine was more than five years before he applied for a job in New York City, city officials would not have contacted the district unless he answered the questionnaires truthfully or if they got a tip from “another source,” Coleman wrote.

Hay went on to work at Tomah Area School District, another Wisconsin district, where an official did contact Kettle Moraine but said she received “limited” information and was told Hay did nothing “illegal or immoral” in his time there.

“Mr. Hay passed a criminal background check, was immediately fired when he was arrested, and SCI found no wrongdoing on behalf of the City,” Miranda Barbot, a New York City education department spokeswoman, said in an emailed statement. “We followed all protocols and procedures and will adopt SCI’s recommendations to ensure our hiring processes are as thorough as possible.”

Lawmakers press Carranza on special education and school safety, as chancellor pleads for more state funding

2020-02-11T23:58:00+00:00

Testifying before state lawmakers Tuesday, New York City schools Chancellor Richard Carranza was peppered with questions about special education, school safety, and integration efforts. When asked about expanding services or giving more to individual city schools, his responses typically boiled down to one thing: more state funding.

“This is another reason why $1.1 billion owed to children of New York City makes it difficult to scale toward the needs of students,” Carranza said in response to a question about the school system’s piloting of a dyslexia screening tool at two Brooklyn schools.

That $1.1 billion figure is how much city officials say is owed to New York City under a 12-year-old state formula, known as Foundation Aid, that sends extra dollars to high-needs districts. That funding has never been given to districts at the levels initially promised, state education officials, lawmakers, and advocates have long contended. (However, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said there is no longer a legal obligation for the state to provide Foundation Aid at those levels, and his administration has pointed to annual funding increases for the city.)

In his budget proposal for next fiscal year, which starts in April, Cuomo has proposed about $11.5 billion for New York City schools — close to 2% more than what the city got from the state last year. State funding currently represents 36% of the education department’s budget, with the remainder coming from city and federal sources.

Still, Cuomo’s proposal would leave a $136 million gap in what city officials project they’ll need from the state next fiscal year, according to testimony Monday and Tuesday from both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Carranza. That figure is tantamount to what it costs to employ 400 social workers or guidance counselors, they said.

As Cuomo’s budget proposal gets debated, lawmakers will hash out their own draft. Then, negotiations — done largely behind closed doors — will produce a final budget, which must be approved by April 1 and is effective through March 31, 2021.

But the conversation on Tuesday about New York City’s education system often veered from the topic of budgeting. Here are a few highlights from Carranza’s testimony.

Special education

Several lawmakers questioned Carranza about the district’s struggle to meet special education needs, including on the buckling impartial hearing process, through which families can lodge complaints about whether their children’s mandated services are being delivered.

Brooklyn Democratic Sen. Andrew Gournardes noted the roughly 10,200 unresolved complaints that families have filed. Nearly 70% are past the legal deadline for a resolution. That backlog is now the subject of a class-action lawsuit.

“It raises the question of how urgently the department is taking this issue,” Gournardes said.

Carranza said the city is “on a track to clear that backlog by the end of the school year.” An education department spokesperson later clarified that he was not referring to the entire backlog of delayed cases, only those that the education department has already agreed to settle, but have still not been processed, and were filed last school year or before that.

He also said the city is working “hand in glove” with Albany on the state-issued compliance assurance plan, which details a broad range of problems with the city’s special education system.

“I can assure you, sir, that this is a priority for us, that we are in the weeds really undoing and redoing [the system] to serve the community,” Carranza told Gournardes.

Both Carranza and a couple of lawmakers highlighted the city’s struggles to open enough pre-K seats for students with disabilities: Nearly 2,000 such students could go without a seat this spring. Part of the reason is stagnant state financing for private pre-K providers, which educate the majority of preschool students with disabilities who require specialized classrooms.

Without a higher reimbursement rate from the state for such providers — known as 4410 schools — Carranza said they could be forced to “close their doors because they simply can’t pay the bills.”

“It’s a perfect storm: 4410 schools closing with more students being identified for needing support,” Carranza said. The city has opened 1,000 seats for students with disabilities in public pre-K programs in the past two years but has not made up for lost seats elsewhere in the system.

Assemblymember Helene E. Weinstein, another Brooklyn Democrat, asked why the city is still fighting Carter Cases, which allow parents of children with special needs to be reimbursed for certain private school placements, after the mayor promised in his first term that the city would fight parents less over them. Spending for Carter Cases has grown from $222 in 2013 to $540 million this fiscal year.

Carranza said, ideally, all children with special needs could be served in public schools. But “in the meantime, as we work to make that a reality,” the school system must resolve parent pleas to send their children to school elsewhere. The de Blasio administration has made it easier for families to get tuition reimbursements.

“The north star would be that parents would not have to see the need of going outside of the school system — the DOE — to get the services they need for their students,” Carranza said, referring to the city education department.

School safety

Carranza was asked repeatedly about what he’s doing to address concerns over school safety from school leaders, parents, and students, and whether the system is embracing the right discipline efforts.

The chancellor faced criticism in recent weeks after he left a heated Queens town hall where parents raised concerns about school safety issues, including sexual assault. Carranza sparred with politicians on Twitter over why he left and emphasized that school officials were working directly with parents to address concerns. He later apologized for how the matter was handled and offered to meet with the parents.

In the summer of 2019, the mayor announced a range of new discipline reforms, including curbing lengthy suspensions and limiting student arrests for low-level offenses. Last month, the principals union said the reforms have led to more unruly schools, and administrators have struggled to embrace the changes.

“I understand that the administration would like to focus on intervention and restorative justice, and that’s OK, but it’s not OK when you have parents and teachers and administrators around the city saying they don’t feel safe,” said Assemblymember Nicole Malliotakis, a Staten Island Republican.

Carranza said he didn’t agree that “all parents, all students, all administrators” feel unsafe. The school system works with the police department when, for example, students are accused of serious crimes. Restorative justice practices, which attempt to get to “the root” of a problem, are reserved for less serious offenses, Carranza said.

“But a student that is mouthy, a student that is disrespectful, a student that isn’t paying attention — when you suspend that kind of a student, you’re treating a symptom,” Carranza said.

Integration

In one testy exchange, Queens Democratic Sen. John Liu asked Carranza, “Do you think you might have some issues in the Asian-American community?”

Carranza has faced backlash from some Asian-American New Yorkers over various policy decisions — most notably, for his support of getting rid of the admissions test for specialized high schools in order to diversify those schools. Since a majority of admissions offers go to Asian students – 51% last school year — some Asian-American families believe scrapping the test would elbow their children out. Some feel Carranza and the mayor haven’t done enough to understand their concerns and have called for Carranza’s firing.

Carranza pushed back and said he’s “working hard to bridge the divide” with Asian-American families, and that he would welcome Liu’s help. Liu, who oversees the Senate’s New York City education committee, said he’s offered help “many times, but you’ve never taken me up on it.”

Later, Manhattan Sen. Robert Jackson, a Democrat, said he thought Carranza is an inclusive leader, and encouraged the chancellor to “hang in there,” and “listen to what people have to say.”

Carranza doubled down on his support for repealing Hecht-Calandra, the part of state education law that governs the specialized high school admissions test. Repealing that law would effectively allow the city to set admissions policies for its three largest specialized high schools.

“Get out of the school board business,” Carranza told the room of lawmakers. “You have bigger fish to fry.”

Liu, who doesn’t support the plan to repeal the law altogether, questioned why the city couldn’t change policies at its five other specialized high schools not named in Hecht-Calandra. Carranza said it wasn’t clear the law allows them to do so, and that those schools don’t want to be a “bifurcated” system of schools with and without the test.

NYC’s 2019 graduation rate inches up to 77%

2020-01-16T16:01:15+00:00

New York City’s graduation rate inched up as the percentage of students who earned diplomas reached 77.3%, according to state data released Thursday.

That figure, which represents students who entered high school in 2015 and graduated by August 2019, is a 1.4 percentage-point increase from the prior year.

Graduation rates have grown steadily since 2005, when fewer than half of city students earned diplomas in four years. The uptick mirrors national trends, but may have little to do with how much students are learning. In New York, for instance, the state has made it easier for students to earn diplomas, in part, by creating more pathways to graduation.

Interim Commissioner Shannon Tahoe maintained that these changes have not watered down the rigor of its requirements to exit high school. The Regents supported these changes because “different types of kids have different types of ways” they can demonstrate proficiency in school, she told reporters.

[Related: How did your school fare? Find out here.]

While officials touted the latest numbers, stubborn disparities remained between racial and ethnic groups and students of different abilities.

In New York City, the graduation rate among black students was 11 percentage points lower than white students. For Hispanic students, it was 13 percentage points lower than white students. The graduation rate for students with disabilities was 53%, and for those learning English as a new language, it was about 41%.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza acknowledged those gaps, but also noted the city’s progress.

“For the sixth consecutive year, we have achieved a record high graduation rate of 77.3%, and this year we are seeing that success grow across every borough and every demographic,” Carranza said in a statement. “We’re going to continue to focus on narrowing the achievement gap and ensure that we are seeing both equity and excellence in action in our schools every day.”

New York City was “on track” to achieve its goal of an 84% graduation rate by 2026, Carranza noted.

The state’s graduation rate is nearly at that mark, at 83.4%. Charter schools across the state trail slightly, with 80.8% of students earning diplomas.

Meanwhile, New York City’s dropout rose slightly to 7.8% from last year’s 7.5%. Statewide, the rate at which students dropped out of school essentially remained flat at 6.1%. City officials said slight uptick, in part, was due to an increase in students attending Young Adult Borough Centers. Those centers serve students who have fallen behind in credits to earn their diplomas in four years and are counted by the state as dropouts, according to the city.

Aaron Pallas, chair of education policy and analysis at Columbia’s Teachers College, noted the particularly stark differences in which students earn diplomas with an advanced Regents designation. That distinction requires students to earn high marks on additional Regents exams, including math, science, and a foreign language.

Statewide, only 12% of black students and 17% of Hispanic students earned advanced designation, compared with more than 47% of white students.

“To the extent that it is a proxy for just having learned more, that will have implications for access to four year colleges and access to better job opportunities” Pallas said. “The graduation rate is a minimum threshold. You can no longer count on a high school diploma as a passport to a job that can provide a stable and secure living.”

Of students who graduated on time, nearly 30% did not meet CUNY’s standards for college readiness in English and math. That’s about 3 percentage points better than the previous year’s graduating class.

Across the state, about 13,200 students — an increase of about 15% from last year — took advantage of alternate graduation requirement options the state has approved in recent years. That includes substituting a social studies exit exam for another one in math, art, or career and technical education, and a newer option to take assessments in four languages other than English. In New York City, 3,743 chose an alternate pathway, up 52.5% from the previous year. Nearly a third of those students took exams in another language, compared to just 170 the year before.

Among other changes that have eased graduation requirements, in 2016, the state made it easier for students to appeal low scores on Regents exams. In New York City, 3,459 graduates successfully used an appeal, about 20% more than the last graduating class. Those changes have likely contributed to rising graduation rates.

The requirements that New York students must fulfill to graduate from high school are expected to change in the next few years. The state Board of Regents is undertaking a major discussion on what students should know before graduating from high school, which could include an overhaul of the state’s vaunted Regents exams.

Ashley Grant, a staff attorney for child advocacy group Advocates For Children New York, said the “troubling” disparities in graduation rates between students of different races and abilities illustrate why the state should be rethinking diploma requirements.

“It will be critical that the State Education Department and the Board of Regents keep these opportunity gaps a central focus as the state re-examines graduation requirements over the next two years,” Grant said.

The Regents are expected to consider changes by 2022.

Christina Veiga contributed to this report.

NYC Schools Deputy Chief of Staff arrested, accused of using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime

2019-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

David Hay, the deputy chief of staff to schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, was arrested Sunday on charges of using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime, officials said.
Hay was taken into custody at a Milwaukee airport following an ongoing investigation, according to authorities in Wisconsin. The arrest was first reported in the New York Times.
Hay, 39, was booked into Wisconsin’s Winnebago County Jail, on Dec. 29, according to a statement from the Neenah Police Department. The arrest was part of an ongoing undercover Internet Crimes Against Children investigation, authorities said.A spokeswoman for the New York City education department said Hay was immediately terminated and added that he “had no regular contact with students in his role.”

“These allegations are incredibly disturbing and absolutely unacceptable. We took immediate action removing Mr. Hay,” spokeswoman Miranda Barbot wrote in an email. “We referred this to the Special Commissioner of Investigation and we will fully comply with any investigation.”

Hay, a former principal at a Wisconsin high school, now resides in Brooklyn. He earned a doctorate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and was hired by New York City’s education department in 2016 under then-Chancellor Carmen Farina, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In his role as chief of staff, Hay was a key behind-the-scenes advocate of the chancellor’s agenda, including implicit bias training. He was a point person on assessments and standardized testing, as well as the department’s Renewal turnaround program. Hay was frequently on hand at high profile school visits and press conferences.

Hay could not be reached for comment Monday, and it was unclear if he had obtained an attorney.

Alex Zimmerman contributed to this article

Yet another top departure in Albany: New York’s interim education commissioner is leaving

2019-10-18T17:02:39+00:00

Beth Berlin, the state’s interim education chief, is leaving the department next month, marking the fourth high-level departure this year from the agency.

Berlin, who has worked for the department for six years, is leaving for a “new opportunity,” Chancellor Betty Rosa and Vice Chancellor T. Andrew Brown said in a statement. This was the second time she filled in as commissioner as the department sought someone to fill the role permanently.

“There were challenges in trying to find balance between my personal and professional life,” Berlin wrote in a letter to state education officials obtained by Chalkbeat. The mom of three, who lives near Albany, wanted to “rebalance” her time with her husband and children, she wrote.

“I recognize there are challenges before the Board and Department,” she added, “and I will miss being a part of the team to address those obstacles.”

Berlin was appointed interim commissioner last month after the departure of MaryEllen Elia, who had served as commissioner for four years. Elia’s departure came after two of her top deputies also left their posts.

The department declined to say where Berlin was heading. As when Elia departed, Rosa and Brown said they would “take a more active role in the activities of the Department during this time of transition.”

Education observers said they were surprised by the announcement.

“I think it’s a setback for the day-to-day workings of the department and the implementation of the Regents’ vision,” said David Bloomfield, an education policy professor at the CUNY Grad Center and Brooklyn College.

Chuck Dedrick, executive director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, said Berlin’s abrupt departure is “very concerning to us.”

“Over the last few months so many people have left and there are so many vacancies,” he said.

Dedrick added that he hopes the Regents take their time finding a replacement. “The mistake, in my opinion, would be to hurry the search and get a candidate in who isn’t necessarily the best.”

The Regents plan to appoint a new acting commissioner by Nov. 15, which is Berlin’s last day. To help find a new permanent education commissioner, they plan to issue a request for proposals to hire a search firm, Friday’s statement said. Last month, Chancellor Betty Rosa said the Regents would be “taking our time” in their search.

“Through Ms. Berlin’s leadership, the Department has excelled in a number of areas,” said the statement from Rosa and Brown, “and the Board of Regents appreciates Ms. Berlin’s steady hand, calm manner and thoughtful counsel that she provided day in and day out.”

Survey says: NYC teachers look forward to work, but many are still undecided about the chancellor’s leadership

2019-08-08T21:06:42+00:00

A major change in New York City education leadership did not substantially shake the confidence of teachers, students, and parents in the city’s schools.

But nearly a third of teachers say they haven’t yet made up their mind about whether Chancellor Richard Carranza is doing a good job after arriving last Spring, according to the most recent city education department survey, released Thursday.

The annual survey — the second-largest after the U.S. census, the city has said — asks teachers, students, and parents for their opinions about their own schools and the school system as a whole. The city then uses the answers to identify school-level trends that might require intervention.

The 2019 survey results are notable mostly for their stability. Parents still say they most want more extracurricular activities and lower class sizes; students still say they feel safe at school; and teachers — or 83% of them, at least — still say they look forward to coming to work every day.

And parents and teachers alike still say they are mostly satisfied with the city schools chief after his first full year in the role. Carranza became chancellor in April 2018, so last year’s survey asked for feedback on the tail end of Carmen Fariña’s tenure.

Three quarters of parents expressed satisfaction with Carranza, and just over half of teachers did, too. (In contrast, Fariña, who was widely known in New York City before becoming chancellor, posted a 60% approval rating among educators after her first year.)

But nearly a third of teachers said they “don’t know” whether Carranza — who came to the city from Houston — is doing a good job.

Since the survey was conducted this winter and spring, Carranza has come under fire for his focus on racial justice issues, as well as for requiring all department employees to undergo anti-bias training. It’s not clear how widely city educators hold those concerns, and some staff members have been forceful in their support of Carranza.

Paula L. White, the executive director of the advocacy group Educators for Excellence in New York, said that many teachers are “encouraged” by Carranza’s approach — which has also included a long-awaited reform of the discipline code towards less punitive measures and more emotional supports for students. But in such a large, slow-moving system, they’re still waiting to see how his priorities trickle down to the classroom.

“What we need now is implementation, and I think teachers will have a much clearer view where he stands as a chancellor after the implementation occurs,” she said. “And if it doesn’t occur soon, then I would say dissatisfaction will probably rise.”

Want to see results from your school? Find them here.

Christina Veiga contributed to this report.

NYC officials are behind schedule on installing GPS on school buses before the new year

2019-08-08T13:32:19+00:00

This story was originally published on Aug. 8 by THE CITY.

The Department of Education is running late on a legal mandate to equip every yellow bus with a GPS device by the first day of school, THE CITY has learned.

The City Council in January passed legislation requiring a GPS in all 9,500 yellow buses by the time the 2019-2020 school year starts, on Sept. 5.

The sponsor of the legislation, Councilmember Ben Kallos (D-Upper East Side), noted the DOE hasn’t awarded a contract yet to provide the devices on buses that serve 150,000 students.

“It’s really not that hard… Putting GPS on things and showing it on an app is like the most basic technology for any app on this planet at this point,” said Kallos. “With a month left before school starts, they’re cutting it dangerously close and I don’t believe they’ll get it done in time.”

DOE officials said they’re finalizing a contract with one of the nine vendors that submitted bids in March, but don’t have a timeline for completing the project.

“Our priority for GPS is installing the right system on all our buses as quickly as possible,” said Miranda Barbot, a DOE spokesperson.

Avoiding Past Nightmares
About 6,000 buses serving special education students were equipped with a built-in model of GPS systems in 2017, but that data doesn’t get shared with families.

The new legislation charged the DOE with implementing a portable GPS-device system in all 9,500 school buses — and with making arrival time information available to education officials and parents.

While City Council members have been advocating for mandatory GPS tracking of yellow buses for years, the issue gained new urgency last year after a series of alarming snafus.

The mishaps included routing and bus delay nightmares that plagued the start of the 2018-2019 school year, and a mid-November snowstorm that kept some students with special needs from arriving home until 4:30 a.m. the next day.

Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said during a DOE budget hearing at the City Council in March he was more concerned about getting the GPS “right” than meeting what he termed an “arbitrary” but “important” deadline.

“I will not publicly state that it will be done by September because that would mean just accepting what we currently have in place and trying to make it work,” he said at the time.

“We’re going to do it right and that may mean that we may not make the September deadline. But it means that when we implement it, it will be the best in class and the best in market, because I think that’s what our residents deserve.”

The Houston school district formerly headed by Carranaza has been monitoring the locations of its yellow buses using GPS since 2009.

Mom Seeks ‘Peace of Mind’
Manhattan mom Eliyanna Kaiser testified at a City Council hearing last year that her twin autistic sons had spent three hours on a bus to Hell’s Kitchen from their Upper West Side school over the summer.

But she told THE CITY that it’s the daily headaches of buses missing-in-action that would make GPS devices valuable for parents.

“It would make our lives so much easier and safer if I could know where the bus was,” said Kaiser, who works for a law firm that handles special education issues.

“If the bus is running late — even very, very late — I could know where my children are because I can see where the bus is. That brings a peace of mind that’s very important.”

This story was originally published by THE CITY, an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.

NYC parent leaders seek — and receive — new assurance about Chancellor Carranza’s future

2019-07-11T21:41:51+00:00

Following sharp criticism from some City Council members and the recent resignation of a senior appointee, Chancellor Richard Carranza and his future with the education department were on the minds of parent leaders assembled Thursday for their monthly meeting.

After hearing a flurry of concerns, Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council member Sheree Gibson decided to ask deputy chancellor Hydra Mendoza point blank if Carranza was leaving the post he’s held since last year.

Mendoza “was surprised and emphatically stated that’s not true,” Gibson said, adding that the deputy chancellor said Carranza “is a fighter.” Asked whether the chancellor was resigning, a spokeswoman for the education department press office said, “It’s not true.”

Mendoza’s unequivocal response was the latest in the back-and-forth from elected officials, department staffers, and parents over Carranza’s policy initiatives, hiring practices, and focus on racial bias in the school system.

As parents worried about the chancellor’s fate, Carranza’s Twitter account shared a July 3 letter signed by members of the Brooklyn Black Elected Officials Coalition showing their steadfast support and citing “egregious resistance” to the chancellor’s priorities. Coalition member Walter Mosley, a state assemblyman, said the group started drafting the letter last month in response to the lack of movement on the city’s plan to diversify the specialized high schools, as well as the ongoing criticism of Carranza.

“Chancellor Carranza should be commended for his new initiatives, as he is seeking to make New York City public schools equitable by challenging the current racial disparities in discipline, segregation and ensuring culturally relevant education,” the letter said.

It was not immediately clear what prompted the sudden wellspring of concern about Carranza’s tenure, though a group of city lawmakers have previously questioned the chancellor’s performance and suggested that he should be fired if he “continues to divide this city” with “contentious rhetoric” about race.

That letter was largely symbolic — only the mayor has the authority to hire and fire the schools chancellor — though it represented an unusual rebuke. In public, Mayor Bill de Blasio has stood by the schools chief, saying Carranza “isn’t going anywhere.”

Gibson said she inquired about the chancellor’s status partly because parent leaders are “quite aware of the firestorm going on around him. We don’t want our parent representatives to be blindsided themselves” — or for unfounded claims to spread.

The letter from Brooklyn’s black elected officials was just the latest display of public support for a chancellor who, in recent months, has encountered fierce pushback on his leadership style and priorities. He has also come under fire for hiring practices, followed by the abrupt departure this month of Abram Jimenez, the department’s Senior Executive Director of Continuous School Improvement, after questions were raised by The New York Post about his employment history.

Some parent leaders and advocates said the scare over Carranza’s tenure may serve as encouragement to keep up their defense of his leadership.

Others said they weren’t so sure how the situation would play out, given the Department of Education’s notoriously opaque nature.

“I’ve been a parent since ’94 in the DOE,” said Celia Green, a co-chair of the advisory council, “and you know to take nothing for granted.”