A Policy Playbook for New York&apos;s Next Mayor: Growth, Opportunity, and Safety. An Educational Plan for the Next Mayor. Issue Brief
Author: Domanico, Ray
Date: 2021-00-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Public Schools,Urban Schools,Educational Policy,Equal Education,Educational Improvement,Access to Education,Educational Finance,School Choice,School Effectiveness,Elementary Secondary Education

New York City's public school system unraveled last year in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. Before the pandemic, criticisms of the public schools typically centered on performance measures: Were enough students meeting state benchmarks? Was success evident across all racial, socioeconomic, and ability groupings? Today, foundational concepts--such as the importance of compulsory school attendance and the collection and dissemination of basic measures of average daily attendance, class grades, and test scores--have been abandoned. A national study found that the city's hybrid approach to schooling (which the system began to move away from in late November) is delivering less than half the instructional time required by the state in normal years. Within even that limited offering, attendance was abysmal, and the quality of remote instruction was low. The available data show that attendance numbers for black and Hispanic youngsters are poorer than those for white and Asian students. As a result, there seems to be no doubt that the city's handling of its schools during the pandemic will widen the achievement gap between white and Asian students, on the one hand, and black and Hispanic students, on the other--a sad coda to the eight-year term of Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose educational program promised &quot;Equity and Excellence for All.&quot; The de Blasio administration entered office defining the core problem facing the schools as one of inequity rather than overall performance, and it introduced a set of centrally planned program initiatives meant to address that inequity. Uniformity was emphasized over both responsiveness to local communities and nimble program design and operation. As many of these centrally mandated programs failed to produce the desired equitable results, the administration turned to a more redistributionist approach, in the belief that the success of some students was coming at the expense of others. By attacking merit-based admissions, the administration not only alienated immigrant parents but also higher-income parents with the ability to choose options outside the district school system. It also ignored some facts: half the white children in New York City are enrolled in private and religious schools, and 30% of black children are enrolled in either public charter private or religious schools. When the new mayoral administration takes office in January 2022, it will inherit a school system facing large-scale financial challenges and the glaring mistrust of many parents. The new mayor will also face large numbers of parents considering whether they can continue to raise their families within the city. On the positive side, New York City still has many fine-to-excellent district, charter, religious, and independent private schools; it just needs more. Ultimately, New York's new mayor will need to respect and honor the educational choices made by parents who continue to see the city as a place to raise their children. This report offers recommendations on how the new mayor can address the very real problems of low-performing schools, not by redistributing the seats in good schools but by growing the number of good schools.