As the school year opens for an American education system facing multiple crises, one education leader is staking out a curious stance. He is sublimely optimistic.
Public schools in the United States lost more than one million students between 2019 and 2022. The deluge of cash relief distributed during the coronavirus pandemic is drying up. And in a politically polarized era, fresh fights over what students learn in class are continuing to emerge.
But David C. Banks, the New York City schools chancellor, whose national profile rose this spring after his unyielding testimony at a House hearing on antisemitism in schools, argues in a recent interview that the state of urban education is not so bad.
All the woes of urban school districts can be found in New York, a diverse city that is contending with a major influx of homeless migrants. But in a departure from Mayor Eric Adams’s warnings that the migrant crisis is upending city life, Mr. Banks described the arrival of immigrant children as a boon.
As many states retreat from the teaching of race and identity in schools amid rising controversies, the chancellor doubled down on the value of those lessons in New York.
And he said that the rise of artificial intelligence did not represent an alarming threat of chatbot-enabled cheating, but a chance to transform education for the better.
As half of American adults say the education system is heading in the wrong direction, Mr. Banks argued that the “No. 1 thing” his administration had achieved was starting to rebuild faith in public schools.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
New York City has enrolled nearly 40,000 new migrant children since July 2022. Are schools feeling the strain?
For some of the schools, the migrants coming here has been a godsend because we’ve lost so many other kids. Some schools were being threatened with whether we’re going to be able to keep the doors open.
I push back on a lot of the kind of negative politics that people talk about with migrants. This is a city of immigrants. I mean, that’s the uniqueness of New York.
We never make it easy for immigrants who are coming. But they find their way. And the same thing is going to happen here.
Many schools spent the earliest stages of the migrant crisis meeting basic needs. Now what do teachers and principals tell you is their biggest challenge in supporting new arrivals?
We’ve got over 5,000 teachers who are either bilingual or English-as-a-new-language teachers who are doing everything that they can possibly do. We need more.
If you want to see New York City schools at their best, look at how these teachers have responded to the migrant crisis. It’s incredible. They’ve partnered kids with other kids who are serving as buddies for them. They’ve got mentors from older grades.
So I don’t hear a major cry from schools.
This administration has championed expanding popular programs to win back families, and celebrated last year’s enrollment uptick. But New York City has 186,000 fewer children and teenagers today than it did in 2020, and birthrates are on the decline. What does that mean for the future of the school system?
New York City is a very expensive place to live in. But we didn’t go from one million to 100,000. We still have over 900,000 kids and families.
Some of these things are happening beyond anything that I can do. There was a huge migration of Black folks back to the South. It’s more affordable for them to be in a place like South Carolina. Nothing I can do about that.
A big part of my job is to make the case for why we think the public schools would be a great place for you and your family. For years, the Department of Education used to play defense on media, the narrative. And I think we’re doing a better job with getting that word out.
Cities across the country, though, are losing students and the funding that comes with them as families move out of urban areas. How can districts survive what feels like a make-or-break moment for public education?
Schools need to stay very focused on being excellent. These other things that are happening, so many of them are out of the control of school folks.
I could give you all kind of talking points, what I call edu-speak. “We need to promote equity.” You want to know the biggest equity agenda for me? It’s teach the kids to read. Nobody should be going to a school where only 10 percent of the kids can even read. That’s ridiculous.
The centerpiece of your agenda is overhauling how reading is taught. What else makes up your vision for the system?
One of the things you’re going to hear from me quite a bit next year is our position around A.I. and what it’s going to do. We’re getting ready to announce our advisory council of some of the leading thinkers around A.I. I think it can really dramatically affect how we do school in the first place.
Say more.
The immediate stuff is really around personalized tutoring and support. How you can have almost your own bot that can be a personal assistant to you.
But as it relates to the student experience, I think we are just beginning to even conceive of how dramatic a change A.I. can actually make. I don’t even know what it means just yet. But I’m leaning in and I’m studying.
Politicians and parents are fighting over how schools teach about race, gender and sexuality. One student’s education in California might look far different from another’s in Florida. What’s New York’s role as that gap grows?
It’s deeply disturbing to see those things. The teaching of African American history as an example is something that I believe in deeply.
If you want to offer children a full totality of an educational experience in America, how can you do that without talking about how Black people fought, bled, died, sacrificed, fought in every war in this country’s history and helped to build this nation?
Imagine the people who are like, “I never knew any of that” sitting in the position to determine what books are going to be in the schools.
You took a defiant approach to your congressional testimony on antisemitism in May. Tensions are expected to rise again as students return to schools and campuses. Did going on the defensive in Washington leave you vulnerable at home?
People were very happy to hear what I had to say — in the way in which I said it — because they felt as though a lot of those interrogators in Congress were very unfair and in many ways, bullies.
They got the president of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania to resign their positions. But because they were bullies, people root on the other side and say somebody has got to fight back. My pushback came from a place of authenticity. It wasn’t a strategic thing. It’s just who I am.
We’re less than three months away from the national election. Former president Donald J. Trump says he will crack down on transgender women playing women’s sports and on the teaching of race if re-elected — issues you’ve spoken out against in New York. How concerned are you for schools?
Ultimately, I go back to the fact that education is still within the full purview of the states. The federal government’s biggest role is they write the checks. If he was talking about withdrawing dollars, that’s a whole other level. But his political admonition — I don’t think it will have great sway here in New York.
If Trump were to be elected president, Trump could not tell us in New York City that you can’t teach about Black history anymore. He doesn’t have that kind of authority.
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