By Michael V. Cusenza
During his second State of Our Schools address on Tuesday, City Schools Chancellor David Banks posited that Big Apple centers of learning are more than sources of schooling—they are part of the epicenter of life education.
And that’s why Gotham’s didactic model is working, he said.
“Last year, I talked about the purpose of school: to build bright starts and bold futures for our kids. Today I want to return to this idea, to renew our focus on our ultimate goal,” Banks said as he delivered remarks at the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria. “We spend thousands of hours and billions of dollars educating our children—so it’s critical to ask: What are we preparing our kids for?
“In these times, the answer to this question can be fraught. Our children are entering a complex and difficult world. They will face a plethora of challenges, from existential crises like climate change to political and social division at home to conflicts raging all over the globe. It is easy to feel fearful about the direction our world seems headed, and daunted by the role schools ought to play amid these challenges.
“But in moments like this, it’s critical to stay focused on our mission: ‘to ensure that each student graduates on a pathway to a rewarding career and long-term economic security, equipped to be a positive force for change.’
“This mission goes beyond schooling. In NYC Public Schools, we are educating. There’s a difference! Schooling is simply going through the motions. It’s compliance. It’s kids “doing their work,” with no understanding of why. Education, on the other hand, is transformative. It prepares kids to think critically about everything that is going on around them, and it prepares them to take on the world, even a troubled world.”
In order to deliver on the promise of an ideal education for all students, Banks said the City has “been transforming our school system. When we returned to classrooms after the pandemic, many people said: we cannot go back to the way things were before. We need something totally reimagined. But first, you need the building blocks in place to set students up for success.”
“We have been doing just that:
- “From our unprecedented NYC Reads and NYC Solves campaigns to our college and career pathways programs;
- “From our comprehensive stance on mental health, including free teletherapy for teens and the on-site mental health support for every school, to our upstream approach to safety, including our safer access door locking initiative and Project Pivot, which is engaging hundreds of CBOs to help keep our kids safe;
- “From our newly created Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning to our gold-standard dual language classes and specialized autism programs;
- “From our state-of-the-art facilities and fields, to our dramatic increase in MWBE utilization, to Project Open Arms, which has welcomed over 45,000 of our newest New Yorkers with enrollment support, bilingual staff, social-emotional resources, and more.
For Banks, truly revolutionary education begins with the basics.
“[R]eading, writing, ’rithmetic,” he said on Tuesday. “There is nothing more important than this. If we want our kids to think critically about the world around them, that starts with reading. If we want them to calculate, engineer, and invent their way to solving our society’s problems, that starts with math.
“That’s why this year, we expanded NYC Reads to every elementary school—over 840 of them—and to every childhood classroom citywide, and why we launched NYC Solves in over 400 high schools and approximately 100 middle schools. All in all, over half a million students will be impacted by NYC Reads and NYC Solves this year.
“Picture this: starting now, if you walk into any 3-K or Pre-K classroom, anywhere in the city, the kids will be learning from the same curriculum, backed by evidence-based literacy strategies, strategies that we know build confident readers. Likewise, our older students in NYC Solves will be learning from consistent, high-quality curricula to become confident mathematicians. This is tremendous—and totally unprecedented in NYC. And because of this massive, unparalleled effort, this generation of NYC students will be able to focus their energy on reaching big goals, not simply doing remediation just to master the basics.
“I want to thank our principals, educators, center and home-based providers, staff members, and families, who are building these fundamentals every day in our schools and communities. I also want to thank our 45 incredible superintendents; please stand so we can give you a round of applause. And as we coach tens of thousands of educators, I want to thank Michael Mulgrew and Henry Rubio of the UFT and CSA for their shoulder-to-shoulder partnership.
“I’m proud that this work extends even beyond our schools; we are building a culture of literacy across our entire city. We’ve trained over 1,200 parents in the science of reading, making them NYC Literacy Ambassadors, and we’ve launched 21 Literacy Hubs in spaces like bodegas and barbershops.
This work we are doing matters for the children of NYC—and for the country. Right now, the entire nation is looking to New York City, and many are adjusting or reconsidering their own policies in response, including right here in our home state.
“And yet, there’s still lots of work to do. It’s important to remember: we aren’t after a quick uptick in test scores. We are laying the foundation for all our students to be on grade level by third grade, and that is long-term work, as we’ve seen in other states and districts that have successfully overhauled their literacy approach. I am confident we are on the right track, and that the effects of NYC Reads and NYC Solves will ripple across our city for years to come.
“After all, imagine a school system—and a society—where everyone can read and do math. Our economy would be stronger, our technology sector more innovative, our discourse more respectful, our society more democratic. That is how we fix a troubled world.”
Banks added that he continues to encourage parents, teachers, administrators, and students to embrace transformative education.
“I’m eager to continue building bright starts with our work on literacy and math, and to build bold futures through college and career pathways, civic engagement, and AI—because when our world is struggling, we need strong public education to chart our way forward,” the chancellor said.
