Changes will cascade through New York City’s public schools in the next school year. Full in-person instruction will likely resume. Large and, until recently, unexpected influxes of State and Federal education aid will be available. And on Jan. 1 a new mayor will take control of the schools. A major new report from the Center for New York City Affairs, released today, frames these challenges and opportunities. We asked Tom Liam Lynch, CNYCA’s education policy director, about it.

Urban Matters: Since 2002, New York City’s public schools have for the first time operated under direct mayoral control. That has come under two mayors – Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio – with rather different philosophies and agendas. What can the next mayor learn from what each achieved – and each didn’t?

Tom Liam Lynch: Trying to answer that question is why we wrote the report we did. It’s too tempting for new administrations to define their education agenda in opposition to, or without acknowledgment of, what others have done.

I worked inside the City Department of Education’s central office under both mayors. Bloomberg’s administration understood systems and accountability. While I disagree with quite a bit of his agenda, he was able to effect change at scale. They completely reorganized the school system. They emphasized systemwide changes, like creating a “marketplace” for school choice, leveraging technology to accelerate change, and deemphasizing direct curriculum and teaching support in favor of achievement and performance data. And at the DOE under his administration, it was always clear what was expected and who to speak to if you wanted to get something done.

De Blasio’s administration understood the importance of curriculum and instruction in ways Bloomberg did not appear to, as well as the role that culture and community play when trying to tackle poverty to improve schools. They tried to double down on neighborhoods, putting schools at the center of locally driven reform. They dismissed the importance of a technology strategy and focused on providing curricular and instructional resources and guidance to schools. But working in his administration also felt less organized and fraught with fiefdoms.

Interestingly, they would likely both say they empowered families, but in different ways. Bloomberg focused on giving families a choice of where to send their children to schools. De Blasio focused on deepening the connections between home and school and expanding early childhood education.
The next mayor will need to combine aspects of both reform efforts to create a more equitable school system.

UM: Your new report analyzes data on everything from standardized test scores to school safety to show the trajectory City schools have taken over the past 20 years. What’s the bottom line?

Lynch: Actually, the report shows how hard it is to say anything useful using the most common measures. Take achievement scores. The State made major adjustments to standardized tests more than once over the last 20 years; every time they moved the goal posts, student scores dropped. Yet the dominant discourse around school success is rooted in those scores as a measure of progress. Something similar happens with graduation rates; there are a whole host of ways to inflate them.

So, the data we use to assess education don’t tell us as much as we think they do. The next mayor has to establish other measures to get a more useful picture of what sustained impact looks like.

On the other hand, there is a basic statistic every New Yorker should know about our schools: 73 percent of New York City students experience poverty. Nearly three-fourths of all children. If you are a parent or child who has not experienced poverty, you have an incomplete picture of what the real challenge is for city and school officials. And that can cloud how we frame the “problem” of public education. All education reform conversations should start with simple facts that check our respective privilege and experiences – starting with poverty.

UM: In recent years, some of the highest-profile education battles in New York have concerned gifted and talented (G&T) programs in elementary schools and academic “screens” in secondary school admissions. Are these the right fights to have?

Lynch: I have a child in public school and have experienced the feeling of helplessness and outrage as my wife and I navigated the admissions process for elementary and middle school. But in talking about creating a more equitable school system, gifted and talented paths and screened schools get too much of the wrong kind of attention.

Concerns about G&T and academically screened schools are valid insofar as they contribute to systemic inequity and erode trust in the community school down the block. But when too much attention is put on policies that ultimately benefit only a small portion of families, loud though they might be, we run the risk of watering a few trees at the expense of the forest.

The next mayor has to start with a definition of equity that demands all schools become high-quality. In the short-term, yes, refresh policies around G&T and screened schools toward that goal, but with an understanding that in the long-term we want families become more confident in the schools in their own neighborhoods because they are phenomenal. Then there will be less demand for G&T and screens over time.

UM: What major challenges will students and teachers face in a post-pandemic school year – and how can City leaders help them?

Lynch: There is a lot of concern around learning loss, mental health, and social-emotional learning. I suspect with new funding coming from the Federal and State government, there will be no shortage of short-term efforts to address such concerns: tutoring, counselors, workshops for teachers, and so on.

Those are important and necessary interventions, but they are insufficient. They must be undertaken with an eye toward equity as all, not some. That starts with high-quality curricula; the City needs to invest in designing culturally responsive curricula and instructional practices at scale. The de Blasio administration started this work with initiatives on what they called “culturally sustaining and responsive education,” as well as a strategy for school and systemwide reform called the “Framework for Great Schools.” My advice: redouble investment in those initiatives in collaboration with school and district leaders, in a way that is unafraid to spotlight what meaningful culturally responsive pedagogy looks like.

The City also needs a robust strategy for online and blended learning – in service to the goals of equity and achieving 1,800 high-quality schools. Technology in education should never be for its own sake. For example, the DOE should stand up a citywide virtual school that makes online classes available to students throughout the system. Just because a school doesn’t offer a class in critical race theory or Mandarin or AP computer science shouldn’t mean a student can’t take that class online for school credit.

UM: Your report argues that we shouldn’t be satisfied with just “getting back to normal” in the schools – that Covid-19 exposed underlying problems that need to be fixed. What would a better school system look like – and what would it take to bring that about?

Lynch: A better school system starts with a straightforward bold definition: Equity means all 1,800 schools are of high quality, not some. That is the North Star. Everything else must align to that definition.

Once the North Star is established, not just on paper but in hearts, the City should embark on a collaborative effort to assert what high-quality culturally responsive curricula and teaching looks like, jumpstart local creation of resources and professional development toward that end, and bring online and blended learning models to scale citywide. And “collaborative” does not just mean teachers and school leaders. We should see students, parents, and other stakeholders brought into that work. Great schools need great teachers, great teachers need great curricula, great curricula need to be culturally responsive and intellectually rigorous. The more voices represented in that work the better.

Photo by InsideSchools.