The teachers are back in their classrooms and pupils are back in their seats, and we hope it’s another full and uninterrupted academic year (albeit just 178 days long, thanks to the screwy calendar) of learning and exploring and growth. After the awful setbacks of COVID, youngsters badly need not only to catch up in math and reading, but to tend to their psychological wellbeing.
The nation’s largest public school system has 1,800 schools of wildly different quality responding in different ways to the reform impulses of the current chancellor and mayor. This is the third administration and therefore the third significant shift since mayoral control took hold in 2002, with the process proving predictably uneven.
Mayor Adams and Schools Chancellor David Banks this year have a chance to begin leaving a truly significant imprint on a whole generation of youngsters, as rollout begins of a new research-informed approach to literacy.
The new approach should work — provided there are no significant mistakes in implementation, a big if given the seminal importance here of teacher training. But this one should be personal for Banks, who has dedicated his career to helping young Black men make academic progress, and to Adams, who struggled with dyslexia as a child. Consider it a test of their executive chops.
Teachers are also at the core of a second major shift underway, and this one is far more problematic. This year begins the phase-in of a massively expensive state law forcing the city to reduce class sizes. The bill forces the city to spend billions upon billions of dollars on a change that is of dubious academic value compared to many other interventions.
Rigid requirements will result in the hiring of more educators in wealthier and whiter schools and fewer in higher-poverty schools serving predominantly children from disadvantaged backgrounds
The mandate is being used as a weapon by the teachers union to claim more classrooms and crowd out colocations with high-performing charter schools. The best thing would be for the law to just go away. Since it won’t, we cross our fingers and hope for the best.
Meantime, schools across the city will have to do their best to serve the children of the influx of asylum seekers while keeping the education of longtime students on track, a heavy lift. As a city of immigrants where overall enrollment has been declining of late, New York has far more tools to do this than anywhere else — but it still may not have enough, particularly if they’re not deployed in an intelligent and coordinated fashion.
And 2023-24 brings one more significant change that could go well or poorly. The doors of school buildings, starting this year with elementary schools, will be locked after the school day begins to prevent dangerous people from getting inside. Visitors will have to buzz, talk to a safety agent through a camera and intercom, show ID and get let in.
Of course if all this works smoothly and it prevents even one tragedy it’s hard to argue with, but we lament the further distancing of parents from their children’s classrooms. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of 1,000 visitors are late kids, parents and guests who arrive on off-hours and the like. Do they need another headache?