Mayor Eric Adams’s indictment ensures that New York City’s public schools will remain in a holding pattern for at least 15 months—a bleak prospect for a school system that has yet to recover from extended Covid shutdowns and faces a pivotal leadership change.
Two days before Adams’s indictment was made public, schools chancellor David Banks announced that he would retire at the end of 2024. In his announcement, he noted that he told Adams of his intentions at the beginning of the school year, which suggests that he may have known that something was amiss at Gracie Mansion.
Banks had put a succession plan in place, which resulted in the naming of his former aide, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, as incoming chancellor. Aviles-Ramos, who had worked her way up from teacher to deputy chancellor, knows the system’s challenges from the inside. She now faces a tough battle, and civic-minded New Yorkers should wish her the best as she navigates the city’s public schools.
But the mayor’s legal woes—and his increasing political irrelevance—are likely to make reform efforts more challenging. Even if Adams does not resign or is not removed by Governor Kathy Hochul, he is wounded, and unlikely to win the mayoral primary next June. If he is replaced, his successor will face almost immediate reelection. As a result, Democrats in the state legislature and city council will hold the upper hand in the determination of the school system’s budget and policies. For Aviles-Ramos—and the district’s schoolchildren—that is a recipe for disaster.
Twenty-two years ago, a Republican governor and state senate, along with a Democratic assembly, gave the mayor control over the New York City school system. The logic was simple: grant the city’s highest elected official the unilateral control that a huge and complex system required and leverage political accountability to deliver better performance.
In the years that followed, results proved that logic correct. The city’s schools leapt ahead of the rest of the state in annual New York exams—something that had never happened in anyone’s memory—and showed improvement in the national assessments. At the same time, the city embraced an expansion of charter schools, which outperformed their traditional district-run peers on average and brought greater educational opportunities to kids in poorer neighborhoods.
Then-mayor Michael Bloomberg and his administration did not record these gains simply by managing schools better. They changed the rules of the game, embracing competition with charter schools by offering space in Department of Education schools rent-free and holding district schools accountable for student performance through data-tracking. Bloomberg’s administration closed over 100 schools due to bad performance and created over 400 new district-run schools to replace them. At the beginning of his first term, only 18 charter schools operated in the city; by the end, there were 183, 112 of them holding classes in DOE buildings.
After Mayor Bill de Blasio repealed these reforms by halting the placement of charters in underutilized school buildings, ending the assignment of annual letter grades to schools, and attempting to stop merit-based admissions to select middle schools, however, the improvements slowed, and then ceased. Without rigorous accountability standards, multiple school options for families, and genuine competition among schools, the system slowly reverted to its pre-Bloomberg norm of indifference to student success.
When Eric Adams appointed Banks, I had high hopes. Banks was a product of the Bloomberg era of new school creation; he built his own network of high schools for young males in some of the nation’s poorest communities. I thought that he could reorient the system after de Blasio’s failures. He hasn’t lived up to expectations. Despite his experience with an educational start-up, Banks spent much of his tenure imposing centrally designed, one-size-fits-all learning programs, especially for reading. Sound reading instruction in the early grades is critical, of course, but no central program can substitute for school quality, especially in the introduction of new approaches. Banks also failed to restore enrollment in the Department of Education’s schools, which had declined sharply since 2020, back to pre-pandemic levels. Academic achievement levels are stagnant, and absenteeism remains close to its all-time high.
Lawmakers have only made these problems worse. Albany has responded by serving its patrons—system employees, not students. It enacted an ill-advised set of class-size mandates that apply solely to New York City and will force it to retain more teachers and build new schools, while ensuring that staffing and other costs increase even as enrollment declines. On top of that, the legislature’s measly two-year extension of mayoral control demonstrates lawmakers’ desire to return power to board-run school districts, where the teachers’ union and its supporters enjoy strong influence. The city council, for its part, is squandering scarce resources, demanding that no school’s budget be reduced.
Despite all this uncertainty, the way forward for New York City’s school system is clear. Upon a new mayor’s election, education officials need to use lower enrollments as an opportunity to consolidate schools, with an eye toward expanding strong ones and closing low-achievers. In whatever time she has, Chancellor Aviles-Ramos should champion the importance of education and the need for children to come to school regularly, put down their phones, and read. She must also respond to constituents’ demands for better performance from their local schools and for greater school choice by announcing a top-to-bottom, public review of the city’s lowest-performing schools
Critically, in the next election for mayor (and future ones for the city council and state legislature), Gotham voters should back those candidates who truly stand for the city’s students, rather than for special interests such as the teachers’ union. If they don’t choose wisely, the kids will be collateral victims of last week’s political hurricane.
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