(Bloomberg) — New York City Mayor-elect Eric Adams named the first commissioner for his administration, choosing David C. Banks for schools chancellor.
Banks, 59, helped found the Eagle Academy Foundation, a network of public, all-boys’ schools that serve primarily low-income Black and Latino students. A native New Yorker who grew up in Queens, Banks will be responsible for ushering the nation’s largest district out of the pandemic, improving a 1 million-student system criticized as underperforming and navigating the tricky politics of education in a striving city.
“We spend $38 billion every year on this system and 65% of Black and Brown children never reach proficiency,” Banks said at a Thursday press conference outside P.S. 161 in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. “That’s a betrayal. There needs to be a transformation, and it will start at the top.”
Adams and Banks arrived at the school amid a rush of masked parents, guardians and children who were navigating their morning drop-offs. That process was complicated by the throng of press, security and handlers that came with the mayor-elect’s visit.
Banks posed for photos at the elementary school, which he once attended, in front of a sign welcoming him back.
A close friend of Adams, Banks is a longtime charter-school advocate. His partner, Sheena Wright, who runs the United Way of New York City, is the co-chair of Adams’s transition team.
Adams said at the news conference that Banks’s experience and upbringing made him different from the other candidates. Adams said that their relationship will carry through in their new roles.
“I didn’t have to do a national search and find someone who don’t understand our city,” Adams said. “For eight years, I questioned him. I asked him what he stood for.”
Banks will take over leadership during the city’s first pandemic school year fully in person. He will replace Meisha Ross Porter, who will step down ahead of Adams’s inauguration. She was appointed by Bill de Blasio less than a year ago.
Adams “has made a great choice to lead our schools,” de Blasio said on Twitter.
Porter spent the bulk of her career working in New York City public schools. As chancellor, she oversaw reopening and encouraged vaccination among families. She also expanded the city’s 3-K for All effort and led the planned revamp of a gifted-and-talented program that some said contributed to inequality in the system.
De Blasio and Porter announced plans to eliminate a test for 4-year-olds and implement a new, accelerated program in all elementary schools. Adams has said he will scrap de Blasio’s plan, arguing he can avoid the political and logistical fallout by keeping the program in place and widening it. Banks will have to implement that plan.
Banks also will have to contend with a pandemic that last year closed schools, bedeviling parents and damping the city’s economy. He was among a group of educators that advised de Blasio on how to reopen schools.
So far, cases in schools have stayed relatively low. As of the end of November, there had been only three full school closures and just about 2,800 classroom closures since the beginning of the school year, according to city Department of Education data.
“Whatever we have seems to be working, at least at the surface level, from what we can see,” said Noel Manyindo, associate professor at the City University of New York School of Medicine. “The challenge may arise as we get into the colder months, as we get into flu season and various holidays.”
(Updates with comment from Banks in third paragraph. An earlier version of this story had an incorrect reference to Porter as first Black schools chancellor)
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