When the nation’s largest school system shuttered last spring, the one million students that had flooded its classrooms were abruptly sent home. Tens of thousands of teachers had just a few days to collect their papers and prepare for online classes before schools were mostly emptied. But in the absence of children and educators, there was a vast and often unseen force of essential school staff that never left New York City’s 1,800 school buildings.
A network of staffers — including cooks, custodians, maintenance workers and nurses — became part of something like a wartime effort to keep city schools clean, functioning and ready to eventually welcome children back.
As this disrupted school year draws to a close, parents, educators and students are looking forward to the return of normal schooling in September. But the city would not have been able to safely reopen schools at all without the grueling, dangerous work done by employees in cramped basement offices, boiler rooms and kitchens.
Eliza Shapiro
The nation’s largest school system is transforming how it teaches students to read, as classrooms across the U.S. confront a literacy crisis that saw test scores hit record lows during the pandemic.
New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks said the broader decline in scores has played out in New York, with many students at city high schools struggling to read more complex words, such as “phenomenon.” They are graduating unprepared for college and the workforce, he said, and lacking in basic literacy skills needed for adulthood.
To address the issue, the city this fall will adopt mandatory, phonics-based reading curricula for its 800 elementary schools, in a move to instruction that favors decoding words using letters and a rigorous approach to phonics. Mr. Banks is set to announce the plan Tuesday.
It is the first time the 1-million-student district has mandated how teachers will conduct reading lessons, Mr. Banks said. The change marks a shift from a teaching approach known as balanced literacy, which encouraged the use of cues and word memorization rather than the sounding out of words based on their letters. The city has favored balanced literacy for the last 20 years.
Ben Chapman
At a two-hour House hearing on antisemitism in public schools on Wednesday, the New York City schools chief, David C. Banks, made one thing very clear: He was ready to fight.
Mr. Banks, a native New Yorker who leads the nation’s largest school district, in a Democratic stronghold, emerged as a main target of the House Republicans who called the hearing. They sought a repeat of prior congressional hearings that helped fell two Ivy League college presidents and exacerbated a crisis for another.
But Mr. Banks turned it into a moment of his own — taking an unyielding, fiery tone, denying accusations that his district had responded poorly to hateful incidents and, at times, unapologetically speaking over and pushing back against members of Congress.
Troy Closson and Sarah Mervosh
New York City will offer new curriculum materials on antisemitism and Islamophobia in its public schools and train principals and teachers on how to have difficult conversations about politically charged issues, officials said on Monday in response to criticism that the system has done too little to address the Israel-Hamas war.
In higher education, colleges like Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania have faced a backlash over their responses to the war. A speech announcing the new effort by the city’s schools chancellor, David C. Banks, illustrated how difficult it has been for K-12 leaders to stay out of the fray.
“The way through this moment is not to malign our students or to impose our own ideologies on them — or to bury our heads in the sand,” Mr. Banks said on Monday. “We must educate our students, and sometimes our staff.”
He added: “We cannot and will not have schools where students feel like they can do whatever they want without accountability for their actions.”
