Chalkbeat

NYC schools head toward first day without gradebooks and other software amid tech freeze

2026-08-26T20:27:04+00:00

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After intense backlash to its initial artificial intelligence policy, New York City’s Education Department ordered principals last month to halt software purchases while officials develop new guidelines.

But the city has yet to release a new policy or lift the purchasing freeze despite the approaching Sept. 10 start of school. Principals are increasingly worried they won’t have access to key software programs — including electronic gradebooks and platforms teachers use to communicate with families — for the first day.

Four public school administrators, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal, said they have been unable to make routine software purchases, even for programs they’ve used for years that do not rely on AI.

“Two weeks before the start of school, we’re not sure what we’re going to be allowed to have and not allowed to have,” said one Brooklyn high school principal. “It’s a huge pain.”

Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced the moratorium on software purchases in early July to give the city time to develop a stronger AI policy. An initial set of guidelines released in March ignited fierce pushback from families who said it did not do enough to limit AI, especially for young children.

Samuels later acknowledged the policy “missed the mark” and indicated the final guidance would include clearer limits. An Education Department spokesperson did not respond to questions for this story, including about when the guidance will be released or when software purchases may resume.

That uncertainty is causing headaches for school leaders, who often use basic education software tools that require annual purchase orders.

School leaders said they have been unable to renew subscriptions to digital hall passes or electronic gradebooks, raising fears the programs will not be available for students’ return.

Another administrator was unable to order software programs designed to help students who need more support in reading and math, including i-Ready, a major tech platform. Separately, the Education Department provides schools with access to i-Ready for required student assessments.

“I’m concerned about the operation of the school,” a second high school principal said.

Samuels initially suggested that software tools required for “mandated services or school opening needs” would be exempt from the pause, though multiple principals said they have not yet heard back about their requests to buy software during the freeze.

Some experts said the city has good reasons to be cautious about pressing ahead with education software tools, given concerns around student privacy, data breaches, and the proliferation of AI tools and chatbots added to products that schools have long used.

But Tom Liam Lynch, an expert who previously worked on education technology for the Education Department, said the city is behind the curve in developing a clear digital learning strategy.

“It’s really late in the game for the city to be figuring this out,” he said, noting the school system has struggled to adapt to AI.

He said that there are risks to releasing guidance so close to the start of the school. Principals typically plan well in advance of September and the last-minute technology policy could upend choices schools have already made about how to support teachers and students.

“Schools are unfortunately going to be in a position where they have to scramble with this,” he said. “That doesn’t lead to what you really want when it comes to quality pedagogy.”

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Kamar Samuels asks NYC schools to pause software purchases until AI guidance is final

2026-07-08T20:48:39+00:00

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New York City schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels asked principals this week to hold off on purchasing educational software until the Education Department finalizes guidance on artificial intelligence later this summer.

The software purchasing freeze is the most concrete step city officials have taken to limit schools’ access to AI and educational technology products amid growing pushback from families and educators over the potential harms for students.

Samuels made the request in a Monday email that was first Tweeted by independent journalist Susan Edelman and obtained by Chalkbeat.

“This necessary pause is part of our work to ensure proper protocols are in place while supporting our students and staff and making sure that any digital tool used in classrooms is properly assessed for safety and privacy,” Education Department spokesperson Nicole Brownstein said in an email.

The Education Department released its long-awaited initial AI guidance in March, sparking an outpouring of criticism that it did too little to curb AI use. Scores of parents and educators, along with more than half the members of the CIty Council, signed a push for an AI moratorium in city schools.

Samuels acknowledged in May that the city had “missed the mark” with its initial guidance and indicated that the final version would have more stringent rules on AI use, especially for younger students. Officials originally said the revised version would be released in June, but told the City Council last month that they were delaying it. The Education Department hasn’t given an updated timeline.

At the June hearing, Education Department officials struggled to answer questions about how many schools were using products with AI and which products they were using. With purchases largely made at the school level, they are not always tracked — an issue the state comptroller recently flagged as a significant concern. Officials have since sent out a survey asking schools which software products they use.

It’s not clear how many schools will be affected by the purchasing pause. Samuels noted that software required for “mandated services or school opening needs” would be exempt.

Several principals said the impact of the purchasing pause could be far-reaching at a time when school leaders are trying to get their plans in place for next year. Many schools rely on software programs for basic functions such as grades and attendance along with academic support.

Even when schools have used software programs for years, they often have to submit new purchase orders for the programs every year, making those programs potentially subject to the purchasing freeze.

One Manhattan principal, speaking on condition of anonymity to preserve their working relationship with district leadership, worried about the drastic changes so close to the start of the new school year and wished the Education Department could have finalized the guidance earlier.

“We have already built budgets, planned interventions, and made decisions about programs for next year,” the principal said. “Changing direction in July makes summer planning significantly more complicated and creates uncertainty about whether schools will have access to the tools they planned to use.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

What’s Mamdani’s agenda for K-12 education in NYC? 6 months in, it’s hard to say.

2026-07-07T21:43:20+00:00

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In his first six months in office, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has issued a steady stream of announcements and policy initiatives in the three areas that powered his affordability-focused campaign: childcare for kids 5 and younger, transportation, and housing.

But when it comes to K-12 public education — the largest operation under Mamdani’s control by both budget and headcount — the story has been quite different.

Out of the hundreds of press releases Mamdani sent out since his term began, just 11 relate to K-12 education, according to a Chalkbeat analysis. Only one announced a new policy affecting what happens inside classrooms serving more than 800,000 elementary- to high school-age students. And even the new policy — expanding a reading and math curriculum overhaul launched under his predecessor Eric Adams — largely continued work already underway.

Other press releases related to winter storms, street safety outside schools, and the opening of new schools that started under a previous administration.

Mayoral press releases are an incomplete measure of Mamdani’s record and agenda on K-12 education, and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels has introduced several initiatives of his own. But some longtime education watchers — including Mamdani supporters — said the dearth of attention to K-12 schools and absence of concrete policy proposals one-eighth of the way through Mamdani’s first term raises questions about how he will manage a core function of the city’s government.

“He’s the first mayor that I’ve seen … to have so little apparent interest in our public schools from K-12,” said Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters and a longtime education advocate. She argued that Mamdani could use his “progressive values to really make a difference in our schools,” adding that overseeing public schools “is a very critical part of his responsibilities.”

In many ways, the lack of focus on K-12 schools during Mamdani’s first months in office is not a surprise. Education didn’t figure prominently into his mayoral campaign, which focused on his key priorities and largely avoided political fights that could distract from those efforts. Some observers suggested that an aggressive push to make the K-12 system more equitable — a political minefield for progressive politicians — may feel too risky when Mamdani is still shoring up support for his core agenda.

Keeping up his “laser focus” on expanding free childcare — a broadly popular policy — could pay political dividends by providing economic relief for families while also better preparing children for K-12 schools, said Shael Polakow-Suransky, president of Bank Street College of Education and a former deputy chancellor under Michael Bloomberg.

“That is where the political capital on education will need to be spent over the next few years, if they’re going to deliver on that promise and actually get the educational benefits,” he said.

Polakow-Suransky and others familiar with the Mamdani administration’s education plans said the quiet start on K-12 policy may be a deliberate effort by Mamdani and Samuels to gather input before making potentially disruptive changes.

But other observers noted that while Mamdani still has time to make his mark on city schools, his current approach risks further entrenching a status quo marked by deep problems and inequities.

“The absence of any identifiable priority is a worry,” said David Bloomfield, a professor emeritus of education leadership, law, and policy at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center.

The longterm benefits of an improved K-12 school system take years to materialize, Bloomfield noted, unlike the more immediate benefits of Mamdani’s policy priorities.

“He seems to feel that what’s in place is good enough,” Bloomfield said.

Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for Mamdani, disputed the idea that he has focused less on K-12 education in his early months than predecessors.

“Change isn’t measured by the number of press releases we send out. It’s measured by whether people’s lives are better because they were invited to shape the policies that affect them,” she said. The administration is preparing to “share our broader vision for public schools” by holding listening sessions and gathering community feedback, she added.

What has Mamdani done so far, and how does it compare to past mayors?

Mamdani offered few sweeping education promises on the campaign trail, but did stake out several positions that set him apart from his competitors, including ending mayoral control of city schools and removing kindergarten entry to the city’s gifted and talented program.

Neither has come to pass.

Mamdani reversed his position on mayoral control shortly before taking office. He also backed away from a campaign promise to quickly comply with the state’s class size law, instead asking for an extension to save money this fiscal year.

He has not advanced proposals to change the gifted and talented program or offer prospective new teachers tuition assistance, as he pledged during the campaign. He has made some efforts to reduce the Education Department’s astronomical contracts budget, but those efforts have been complicated by scrutiny over allegations that Samuels violated contracting rules in a previous role. He also continued a pandemic-era policy launched under Bill de Blasio and continued by Adams to spare schools with declining enrollment from budget cuts.

Most longtime education observers said Mamdani has focused noticeably less on K-12 education than his immediate predecessors, Adams, de Blasio, and Bloomberg — though several noted that those mayors’ education agendas didn’t fully come into focus during their first six months in office.

Adams issued 21 press releases related to K-12 education during his first six months, including announcements expanding the gifted and talented program, introducing dyslexia screening, and rehiring district superintendents, a Chalkbeat analysis found. His most recognizable education policy, NYC Reads, was announced more than a year into his tenure.

Bloomberg made controversial and sweeping reforms of the K-12 school system a centerpiece of his agenda. De Blasio, like Mamdani, initially emphasized childcare, but nine months into his tenure launched a major effort to flood struggling schools with additional resources.

Matt Gonzales, a longtime school integration advocate who served on Mamdani’s education transition team, said preserving programs for vulnerable students in the recent budget agreement between Mamdani and the City Council was a significant early policy achievement. He also argued that introducing new policies in the middle of a school year could be disruptive.

“I want all the big pronouncements and priorities laid out ASAP,” he said. But “there’s a real need to stabilize the system … and then move a vision for education in this new school year.”

What does Mamdani’s quiet start on K-12 education mean for schools?

While the Mamdani administration hasn’t offered a detailed public agenda for K-12 schools, officials have negotiated the budget and an extension of the state’s class size law deadline, said Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Columbia University Teachers College. (The Education Department issued a press release with a quote from Mamdani detailing the new class size plan).

He added that making meaningful change in a system as sprawling as New York City is difficult and that “on the ground level, a lot can continue in a positive way without high-level policy pronouncements.”

But if outcomes such as test scores and graduation rates slip, Mamdani may face “pressure to do more,” he said.

Some advocates hope Mamdani will focus on increasing racial and socioeconomic integration, and merging underenrolled schools — two longtime priorities for Samuels. Others want him to stake out a firm position against artificial intelligence in schools.

Whatever the agenda looks like, some supporters hope Mamdani will bring the same public attention campaign he’s launched for childcare — including a jingle contest judged by Cardi B — to K-12 education.

“I’m hopeful that we see more of that kind of skill around education, especially as they really get to take the reins of things this school year,” Gonzales said. “That’s going to really need the mayor’s messaging and savviness.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Allegations against Kamar Samuels highlight widespread dysfunction in NYC’s school contract system

2026-06-18T20:51:26+00:00

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On the campaign trail, Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to reduce fraud and waste in Education Department contracts, which total nearly $13 billion in spending, about a tenth of the entire New York City budget.

Recent allegations that his chancellor, Kamar Samuels, violated key contracting rules are complicating those efforts and have put the mayor in a delicate position.

The allegations that Samuels skirted the competitive bidding process in his prior role have brought scrutiny from investigators, lawmakers, and the public, while also casting a brighter spotlight on a system that almost all observers say is deeply flawed, even if they disagree about how to fix it.

One member of the City Council, Queens Democrat Phil Wong, has called for Samuels to resign, arguing he is not the right leader to oversee contract reforms. So far, Mamdani has publicly stood by Samuels and has asked allies on the City Council to do the same, according to someone familiar with the outreach.

In interviews with more than a dozen educators, administrators, and elected officials deeply familiar with the Education Department’s procurement system, many of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely about the system, few expressed surprise that someone might go outside the rules. They described a broken contracting and procurement process that can make it difficult, or nearly impossible, to get services for children in a timely fashion.

“At no agency is [the procurement process] more painfully cumbersome, bureaucratic, and slow than in the DOE,” said Brooklyn Council member Lincoln Restler. “Frankly this situation underscores the urgent need for procurement reform.”

The allegations against Samuels, first reported by independent journalist Sue Edelman and The New York Post, stem from his recent tenure leading Manhattan’s District 3, which spans the Upper West Side and parts of Harlem.

The city Special Commissioner of Investigation, or SCI, found last year that Samuels’ former deputy superintendent, Mariela Graham, improperly split a larger contract with a vendor into smaller chunks to avoid a $25,000 competitive bidding threshold, a practice referred to as contract splitting. The vendor hired and placed language teachers in the district.

The investigation began after school officials reported that one of the teachers employed by the vendor was barred from working in city public schools because of past sexual misconduct.

Samuels wasn’t mentioned in SCI’s 2025 report, but City Council testimony from Sean Kreyling, the owner of the vendor, along with emails shared by the vendor with SCI and viewed by Chalkbeat, suggest Samuels approved a similar arrangement with the same company the year before.

Asked to confirm if Samuels is under investigation, SCI spokesperson Anna Correa said the agency is “aware of these new allegations, and will handle them accordingly.”

Several people familiar with the situation said that Samuels and Graham were scrambling to find language teachers to place at schools receiving large numbers of migrant students. Language and bilingual teachers are typically among the most difficult positions to fill for New York City schools.

Graham did not respond to a request for comment.

Samuels, who has declined to answer specific questions about the episode, has defended himself.

“While I regret this lapse in procedure,” he said in a statement, “the actions in question were undertaken in pursuit of educational opportunities for children — not for personal gain or to benefit anyone other than our schoolchildren.”

The $25,000 threshold: A safeguard or bottleneck?

Contracts make up a large and growing share of the city Education Department’s budget, increasing from about $3.2 billion in 2014 to roughly $13 billion, according to the City Council.

Mamdani took aim at the system as a mayoral candidate, pledging to “overhaul procurement infrastructure” across the Education Department and cut contracted spending by 10%.

The $25,000 threshold Samuels is accused of violating is a key safeguard meant to ensure that vendors getting large sums of taxpayer money have been thoroughly vetted and are offering the best prices.

To make a purchase above $25,000, a principal or other official is required to use a vendor that has a contract with the central procurement office.

But the process of getting a central contract can take up to a year, according to city officials. Some vendors don’t even attempt it and others give up, vendors and officials told Chalkbeat. Several principals said they sometimes can’t find the services they need from a contracted vendor, and those are often more expensive than non-contracted vendors.

Kreyling, the owner of the language teacher company involved in the District 3 allegations, said he began the process to get centrally approved and waited months before giving up.

“It’s a pretty arduous process … chaotic and disorganized,” Kreyling told Chalkbeat, noting that in other districts outside of New York City, he can get a fully signed contract within a month.

City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who is pushing for a more thorough audit of Education Department contracts, said during a hearing last week that she worries the practice of contract splitting may be more common than is known.

“This incident, of course, raises concern that there may be more widespread practice of contracts being broken up to avoid appropriate spending scrutiny,” she said.

A separate 2025 SCI report on the practice of contract splitting pointed to eight past investigations since 2023 that found school officials or vendors skirting the competitive bidding rules, including the one into Graham and Kreyling.

Last year, about $386 million of total contract spending came through purchases of less than $25,000, according to SCI.

Allegations highlight tension between scrutiny and efficiency

The reactions to the allegations against Samuels highlight a key tension Mamdani will face as he seeks to reform the procurement system: balancing the need for stricter oversight with making the process more efficient for schools.

Some lawmakers and advocates have argued that the allegations against Samuels show the need for tightened guardrails.

Lawmakers, including City Council Education Committee Chair Eric Dinowitz, a Bronx Democrat, have argued that if Graham and Samuels had gone through the vendor approval process, it would have prevented the teacher with the past misconduct charges from ending up in a classroom. SCI did not explicitly make that assertion in its report.

Emails between Kreyling and Education Department officials shared with Chalkbeat suggest that vendors with city approval must run their employees through Education Department background checks.

The SCI report noted, however, that principals are required to conduct background checks on any vendor employee who interacts with students — something that didn’t happen in the District 3 case.

Many principals and Education Department officials told Chalkbeat they view the allegations against Samuels as an example of an educator working within a broken system to try to quickly get services for kids.

“Hiring foreign language teachers is an incredibly difficult task,” said a high level Education Department official who requested anonymity. “It sounds like this district was trying desperately to provide services for their students.”

The situation points to the need to make the process speedier and less bureaucratic, school leaders said.

Some suggested raising the $25,000 cap, a threshold that hasn’t changed in years. Others said the process to approve a vendor needs to be faster and less complicated. That could also increase competition and lower prices.

Lindsey Oates, who started this week as the deputy chancellor for the Division of Finance, Administration, & Human Resources and will oversee procurement reform, said she will try to “strike the appropriate balance of appropriate oversight of taxpayer dollars, as well as streamlining our operations.”

Education Department officials have offered few details about how they’re approaching procurement reform. But officials say they’re hoping a reorganization to bring the finance and procurement teams under the same deputy chancellor will streamline the contracting process for schools while helping to strengthen accountability.

SCI made several recommendations in its 2025 report to crack down on contract splitting, including significantly ramping up training for principals and other officials making purchasing decisions, as well as increasing central staff in charge of monitoring non-contracted vendors.

Education Department officials said at last week’s council hearing that many of those recommendations would require financial resources the agency doesn’t have.

In the specific District 3 case, SCI found that Kreyling “conspired” with Graham on the contract splitting and recommended that the Education Department stop working with his companies. Kreyling told Chalkbeat he was following the lead of city officials and didn’t know he was violating any rules.

Investigators said Graham, Samuels’ deputy, displayed “astoundingly poor judgment” and recommended her termination. They referred the case to the Manhattan District Attorney. The District Attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Education Department general counsel Liz Vladeck told lawmakers that the SCI report contained no allegations of illegal activity. The department opted to suspend Graham for two weeks instead of firing her, she said. A source familiar with her current role said Graham was recently promoted to senior director of strategy for Samuels.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Samuels turns to local communities for advice on making NYC schools safe, rigorous, and integrated

2026-06-17T20:47:28+00:00

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Since taking office in January, schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels has repeated a refrain that he wants the nation’s largest school system to be safe, academically rigorous, and integrated.

But he has revealed little about his tangible policy goals in each of those areas. Now, he’s signaling that some of those ideas may come from local communities rather than top-down from the Education Department or City Hall.

On Wednesday, education officials announced that five of the city’s 45 superintendents will convene working groups with parents, teachers, principals, and community organizations that will “address structural and instructional inequities in their district,” according to a press release. They are expected to meet monthly.

The groups represent “local solutions for systemic problems,” Samuels said Wednesday morning during a discussion with author Heather McGhee who has written about how racism has broader effects beyond people of color. Officials said all districts will have similar groups within three years.

Samuels suggested that the groups, which will be led by local superintendents, could begin to tackle some of the system’s biggest policy challenges. His conversation with McGhee touched on declining enrollment and the growing number of underenrolled schools; a state mandate to lower class sizes; and segregation of students by race, ability, socioeconomic status, and language.

Officials did not share who was selected by superintendents to serve on each working group, or commit to release each group’s recommendations publicly.

Previous administrations have also set up working groups to tackle thorny policy problems.

Under pressure from parents and advocates to address deep racial segregation in the city’s schools, former Mayor Bill de Blasio created a working group to recommend solutions. Some advocates were frustrated that the city did not embrace some of the group’s most sweeping suggestions. Still, some local districts have taken action to integrate local schools absent a broader citywide mandate, though others have sputtered. (Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that he would adopt some of the recommendations from de Blasio’s diversity advisory group that were not implemented, but he has yet to do so.)

On the campaign trail, Mamdani committed to getting rid of mayoral control — which gives the mayor largely unfettered power to set the school system’s policy direction — in favor of a more democratic system. He reversed his position just before taking office and recently won a two-year extension for it from state lawmakers.

But he has consistently vowed to give families and educators more of a say in policymaking and Samuels signaled the working groups were an effort to make good on that promise.

“When people ask me … ‘You have mayoral control, and are you going to really listen to parents, and are you going to listen to communities?’” Samuels said, “this is one of our main initial first steps.”

The first five districts that will participate are: Manhattan District 3 (Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, and parts of Harlem); Bronx District 7 (Mott Haven and Port Morris); Brooklyn District 13 (Brooklyn Heights, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill); Brooklyn’s District 16 (much of Bedford-Stuyvesant); and Queens District 25 (College Point, Whitestone, Hillcrest). Samuels previously led District 3 and 13.

The Wednesday morning event was livestreamed but the Education Department did not invite reporters to attend. Education Department spokesperson Nicole Brownstein said members of the working groups were invited and there wasn’t additional room due to the fire code.

The five working groups are expected to share their recommendations with the Education Department by the end of next school year, Brownstein said.

She indicated those reports could take multiple forms and officials plan to wait to release broader policy ideas until they review the recommendations. No funding has been earmarked for the working groups, officials said.

“We have to figure out what is the thing that we are going to do on behalf of our most marginalized young people, oftentimes, but on behalf of every single child in your district,” Samuels said.

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC school budgets won’t face cuts next year (for now) despite falling enrollment

2026-06-07T20:14:13+00:00

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Despite shrinking enrollment, New York City schools will not see their initial budgets take a hit next school year.

New York City principals are soon expected to receive their budgets for the 2026-27 school year, and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels gave them a heads up that even if they’re projected to have fewer students, their budgets won’t drop.

Though school budgets are typically tied to student head count, the city began its “hold harmless” policy — propping up school budgets despite enrollment losses — during the height of the pandemic. The Education Department’s coffers were flush with billions in one-time federal relief funding, and officials were concerned about catching kids up after prolonged learning disruptions. So they kept budgets steady even as students left the nation’s largest school system.

Over the past six years, the city has spent $1.6 billion to stave off enrollment-related cuts, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group. Meanwhile, K-12 schools have lost nearly 10% of students during that time, dropping below 800,000 students this school year — and declines are expected to continue. The decision from Samuels pushes any eventual financial reckoning further down the road.

“Our hold harmless policy began during the pandemic to provide stability amid a crisis—and while we are no longer in a pandemic, stability and predictability remain critically important for our school communities,” Samuels wrote in a Sunday email to principals.

“To that end,” he continued, “we will be holding schools harmless for their SY26-27 initial budget allocations. This investment will provide stability and predictability for school communities as principals plan staffing, programming, and supports for the upcoming school year.”

Some school funding experts warn against allowing budgets to drift away from schools’ actual enrollment, which disproportionately benefits schools that have lost the most students. But some educators and parent leaders note that many schools have come to rely on the money and abruptly removing it could force them to scale back programs such as music and art and let go of teachers.

Plus, cuts are likely to invite backlash and are politically unpopular, especially as Mayor Zohran Mamdani vowed to prioritize funding for public schools on the campaign trail. When former Mayor Eric Adams initially began winding down the program, the blowback ballooned, with families making T-shirts declaring that Adams defunded their schools. Subsequently, Adams decided to keep propping up budgets.

Samuels’ email made no mention of what the city will do midyear, when it will be faced with another inflection point whether to hold schools harmless if their enrollment is lower than anticipated. Again, before the pandemic, the city would claw back money in the middle of the school year if a school’s roster failed to match projections.

But principals this year did not have to give back money despite nearly two-thirds of the city’s roughly 1,600 schools having fewer students than projected. The policy cost the city more than $250 million.

Samuels is expected to testify Monday before City Council on the budget.

“Going forward,” he told principals, “I am committed to engaging with you and your school communities about our school budgets—to ensure both long-term fiscal sustainability and comprehensive school support.”

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC Chancellor Kamar Samuels pledges stronger AI guardrails: ‘We missed the mark’

2026-05-27T21:09:39+00:00

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When New York City officials released draft guidance in March for how schools should use artificial intelligence, it unleashed a torrent of criticism from parents and educators accusing officials of doing too little to curb the technology’s threats to education.

Now Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels is acknowledging that the Education Department didn’t grasp the depth of opposition to AI in schools, and he’s pledging a more aggressive approach to curbing AI use for the youngest kids in the city’s final guidance. Officials originally said they were planning to release a final version of the AI guidance in June, but a spokesperson didn’t say whether that timeline is still in place.

“We missed the mark, and we didn’t communicate in a way that really showed our community that we understood where we were … and that we were worthy of being trusted to protect young people,” Samuels said at an event Tuesday night at Bank Street College of Education in Manhattan, according to a partial recording shared with Chalkbeat.

AI “is the most invasive technology that we’ve seen,” Samuels said. While city officials believe older students will need some exposure to AI, the Education Department is “looking very closely” at restricting its use in school for the youngest students, particularly those ages three to five, the chancellor said.

Samuels’ comments mark a significant change in tone, and indicate that the nation’s largest school system is grappling with — and responding to — the fierce backlash brewing against AI and education technology in school communities in the city and beyond.

Across the five boroughs, parents have flooded public forums to rail against the city’s draft AI guidance, which uses a traffic light framework to delineate the risk levels of different uses of AI in the classroom, mainly by educators. Student AI use — one of the thorniest and highest stakes questions city schools must regulate — got scant attention in the guidance and was listed as a “yellow light” behavior.

Opposition to AI use in city schools has grown more organized in recent months, with several elected officials calling on the Education Department to pause implementation of its AI guidance. A petition for a two-year AI moratorium in city schools has garnered more than 3,000 signatures.

Samuels’ evolving response to AI

Samuels conceded that public sentiment about AI has shifted “rapidly” since he took over as chancellor in January.

Initially, he said, the system’s posture was: “‘AI is here; we need to kind of figure it out.’”

He thought that school communities were fearful of the technology, but over the course of developing the first draft of the AI guidance and hearing feedback from families, he came to realize the prevailing sentiment was anger, “a lack of trust in institutions, a lack of trust in our security mechanisms, and also a lack of trust in or deep skepticism of (education technology) companies.”

Officials gave the public 45 days to submit feedback on the city’s draft AI guidance following its March 24 release. On May 8, the last day officials accepted feedback, the city had received more than 6,000 comments, 48% of which came from educators and 42% from parents, the Education Department’s Director of Digital Learning Initiatives Tara Carrozza told parents at an advocacy meeting in Manhattan’s District 1.

NYC’s approach to AI has swung back and forth

Education leaders across the country have been grappling with similar tensions as they seek to develop AI policies. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, called publicly on Wednesday for a ban on student-facing AI in elementary schools, despite being an early and ongoing booster of AI use for teachers.

Those tensions have played out within the city school system at breathtaking speed, as the Education Department swung between initially banning ChatGPT on school devices and networks to pledging to become a national leader in embracing AI. In the absence of firm citywide policy, many New York City schools have crafted their own policies to regulate student and teacher use, while many others have steered clear of the topic.

Dan Weisberg, the former first deputy chancellor, recently argued that AI can help teachers with the time and labor-intensive task of identifying which students are lagging far behind academically, diagnosing areas where they need support, and designing makeup instruction.

But another former deputy chancellor, Shael Polakow-Suransky, who now serves as president of Bank Street College of Education and appeared at Tuesday’s event with Samuels, offered a cautionary tale about relying on AI to help students struggling with math.

He recounted observing a Bronx classroom where students were working on the concept of translating fractions into decimals on a computerized AI tutor program. Many of the students eventually got to the right answer, he said, but few showed a conceptual understanding of what they were doing, and the teacher was too busy troubleshooting tech issues to spend much time with any of them.

“This was something I fear is going to happen more and more schools in across the country, and in our city,” he said. “That in the interest of providing individualized feedback to students, we are going to take the intellectual work that we expect from teachers and pass it to the AI.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Mamdani launches NYC elementary school math curriculum overhaul, following in Adams’ footsteps

2026-05-22T00:36:42+00:00

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New York City will soon require elementary schools in four local districts to use city-approved math curriculums, one of the first education initiatives under Mayor Zohran Mamdani outside of early childhood.

The announcement Thursday marks the first time elementary school math teachers will be required to shift their instruction as part of the city’s broader curriculum mandate. Schools in Manhattan District 5, Bronx Districts 11 and 12, and Queens District 25 will be required to make the shift by this fall.

Elementary schools across all of the city’s 32 local districts will eventually be required to use approved math curriculums, though officials did not lay out a timeline. Officials also revealed the latest wave of middle schools that will be required to use approved reading and math curriculums.

The new elementary school curriculum mandate will use versions of the same curriculums the city mandated in middle schools.

The $17.3 million effort represents an expansion of a major initiative to overhaul reading and math instruction that began under former Mayor Eric Adams and which Mamdani signaled he would continue on the campaign trail. The mayor has yet to unveil a more detailed education agenda.

School leaders have long been allowed to choose their own materials, leading to variation in instructional approaches from school to school. On some campuses, teachers write their own curriculums. City officials argue that created uneven quality in instruction and complicated efforts to train teachers at scale. Now, Education Department leaders contend they are ensuring schools are using materials that are rigorous.

Chancellor Kamar Samuels, who got his start as a middle school math teacher, has hinted for months that changes were on the horizon to the city’s curriculum overhauls, known as NYC Reads and NYC Solves.

“We absolutely need to get elementary school math teachers into the conversation,” Samuels told educators affiliated with the advocacy group Educators for Excellence, at a meeting in March where they pressed him on expanding the curriculum overhaul. “Undergirding our system is a lot of fear in math.”

The Education Department has previously pointed to standardized test scores as a reason to rethink the way schools teach reading and math. Roughly 57% of New York City public school students were considered proficient in math and 56% in reading in grades 3-8, according to last year’s state tests.

Curriculum overhauls have sparked debate

Some educators and parents have embraced the curriculum changes while others have pushed back, arguing that a one-size-fits-all approach can stifle innovative approaches to instruction that attract families to their schools.

There have also been complaints about the specific curriculums city officials have mandated and concern that there hasn’t been enough public input in selecting them. The city’s most widely used reading program, for instance, favors excerpts over whole books.

The city’s teachers union, which supported the reading curriculum mandate, has been more wary of the math changes and criticized the decision to make changes to elementary school math.

“The DOE has not solved the problems of NYC Solves,” United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said in a statement. “Changes that educators have called for from the beginning have not been made, and the holes in the curricula have not been filled.”

All middle schools are in the process of transitioning to approved reading and math curriculums, which officials previously said would happen by fall 2027. High schools are already required to use a common Algebra 1 curriculum called Illustrative Mathematics, which has garnered mixed reactions from teachers. Beginning this fall, elementary schools in District 5 will use i-Ready Mathematics Classroom; Districts 11 and 12 will use Illustrative Mathematics; and District 25 will use Amplify Desmos Mathematics.

The decision to approve i-Ready as the primary math curriculum across many elementary and middle schools may raise eyebrows. The private equity-backed education technology platform, widely used in New York City and across the country, has faced criticism from some families and educators amid a wider backlash over tech in schools.

Asked about potential concerns with selecting i-Ready, First Deputy Chancellor Danielle Giunta said that “has not [been] flagged as an implication to the core program and implementation, but should something arise, we will respond accordingly.”

Unlike the elementary school reading changes, which were made in part because hundreds of schools used curriculums that were discredited, Giunta said the math overhaul was prompted by successful rollout of common curriculum materials in other parts of the system. “There is so much energy from our superintendents, our principals,” she said.

Officials are also considering expanding the curriculum mandate to include high school English classes, Giunta said, though there is not yet a timeline for that. For now, city officials are focusing on beefing up targeted instruction for students who are behind in reading in four of the city’s 11 high school districts.

Questions resurface about parent engagement

Some parent leaders said they were unaware elementary school math curriculum changes were in the works, despite promises from Mamdani to incorporate parent and educator feedback in education policy decisions. One member of the community education council in Manhattan’s District 5, which includes Harlem, said they had not been consulted about the elementary school math curriculum changes. (The council member spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.)

Jonathan Collins, another District 5 parent and member of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, said he had also not heard community discussion about elementary school math overhaul.

“I think there are questions as to whether or not this engagement process really reached the street level,” Collins said. Still, he said is “cautiously optimistic” about the elementary school math changes.

Advocates who have pushed the city to require more schools to adopt common curriculum materials cheered the move to expand to elementary school math.

Elementary school math instruction is “fractured and fragmented across the system,” said Evan Stone, the CEO of Educators for Excellence. He added: “If we actually want to build coherence in a system, we need to be training teachers on a core set of curriculum materials.”

Thursday’s announcement also included expansions to reading and math mandates at the middle school level in a slew of districts, which have been incrementally rolling out over multiple years. Manhattan District 2 and Brooklyn District 18 will use the Wit & Wisdom reading curriculum.

Middle schools in the following districts will be required to use a city-approved math curriculum: Manhattan District 3; Bronx District 9; Brooklyn Districts 16, 21, 22, and 23; and Queens Districts 24, 27, 28, and 30. Officials did not respond to a question about which curriculums those districts will use.

Educators and families: Let us know what you think of the curriculum changes by emailing us at ny.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

5 new public schools opening this fall in the Bronx and Queens

2026-05-05T14:14:39+00:00

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Five new schools are expected to open this fall in the Bronx and Queens: Two will exclusively serve students with significant disabilities, three will have an arts focus, and all promise to incorporate project-based learning.

The new schools aim to ease overcrowding in neighborhoods that have historically been bursting at the seams, city officials said. They also are geared to expand access to seats in District 75, a network of public schools for students with significant disabilities, so students don’t have to travel as far to school.

“Our new schools reflect a bold commitment to expanding access to high-quality, rigorous learning experiences for every student, in every neighborhood,” schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said in a statement on Thursday.

Several of the new schools have been in the works for a while, but the move to open new campuses comes at a time when the nation’s largest school system is getting smaller, and the city is increasingly eyeing school mergers as it grapples with enrollment losses. There were roughly 793,000 K-12 students, according to preliminary data for this school year. That’s down about 15% from the 2019-20 school year, when the city served about 912,815 students.

The city opened seven new schools this year and nine new schools the year before. The city recently nixed plans to open New Generation Technology High School, a proposed selective school with an AI focus after community members pushed back on its admissions process and raised concerns about AI use in the classroom.

Here’s a look at the schools expected to open in September:

Academy of Cultural Excellence

Long Island City, Queens

The school, which will serve prekindergarten to fifth grade, aims to foster “confident, curious, and compassionate learners,” according to its website. It will embrace project-based learning and the arts, city officials said. Starting in third grade, students will “co-design an individualized learning pathway, allowing them to pursue areas of interest while maintaining strong academic foundations,” said a blurb on MySchools.

The school will not be zoned, according to MySchools. But students from the nearby P.S./I.S. 78, which had a waitlist last year for students in its zone, will get priority.

The school is in District 30, which has long been overcrowded and is one of the few districts where enrollment has been growing. The district is also home to the largest number of new apartments constructed in the past year — more than 2,470 — according to 2026 data from the New York City School Construction Authority. Yet, city officials expect enrollment to decline in the district, along with most others, over the next decade.

Bronx School of Arts & Exploration

Highbridge/South Crotona, Bronx

This District 75 school, for students in grades K-8, will have an arts focus, integrating core academics with visual and performing arts. It will also employ project-based learning and performance-based assessments, school officials said.

The Bronx School of Hip-Hop

Claremont, Bronx

Students at this 9-12 school will study hip-hop — emceeing, DJing, and graffiti — in the borough that birthed the art form. The school will also teach entrepreneurship and civic engagement through music while creating pathways to college, internships, and careers for students, school officials previously said.

“It’s about keeping the Bronx at the center of a culture we gave to the world,” Carl Manalo, the high school superintendent for Districts 7, 9, and 12, said when the city approved the school in December.

Each classroom will operate like a studio, according to the school’s MySchools page, with units culminating in showcases for students’ original work.

Admissions are based on what’s known as “Ed. Opt,” where a certain number of students performing at “high, medium, and low” academic levels are accepted.

Queens Academy for Innovative Learning

Astoria, Queens

Students from grades 6-12 at this District 75 schools will focus on STEM and work-based learning to help prepare them for jobs after high school.

West Q Elementary (P.S. 437)

Woodside, Queens

This new elementary school in Queens’ District 24 will seek to blend math and literacy instruction with more hands-on projects. According to its MySchools page, each grade in the K-5 school will take on a “signature project that connects classroom learning to real-world experiences.” District 24 has roughly 1,300 open seats across its middle and elementary schools, but roughly a third of its 83 school buildings were listed as overcrowded last year, according to city data. The district is also projected to lose among the most students of any district in the next decade, according to the city’s predictions.

West Q will not be zoned, but will give priority to students who live in the district, according to its MySchools page.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

The AI rebellion grows in NYC: Over 100 New Yorkers demand moratorium on AI use in schools at marathon board meeting

2026-05-01T19:15:03+00:00

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Despite New York City’s last-minute withdrawal of a controversial proposal for a new artificial intelligence-centered high school, parents, students, and educators packed this week’s school board meeting to speak on AI anyway.

More than 100 New Yorkers testified at a nearly seven-hour-long meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP, earlier this week.

Community members repeatedly argued that the Education Department is rolling out AI tools without clear rules, transparency, or adequate knowledge of the technology. Students said AI was already reshaping classrooms, and surveillance practices, like the digital bathroom hall pass technology, are already in use at 150 city schools. Educators expressed concern that the increasing use of various technologies in schools conflicts with the preliminary AI schools policy the city released in March.

One parent from Park Slope approached the microphone with her two toddlers in tow, holding one in her arm while clasping the other tightly by the hand.

“I’ve never been an activist before, but I feel so strongly about this: It is starting. Gen Z is turning against AI; I’m turning against AI. The city is telling us that AI is inevitable, but won’t tell me what devices and applications my children are using. You tell us you are spending our money to give artificial intelligence to our children?” she said to a chorus of cheers at Wednesday night’s packed meeting.

The PEP’s voting agenda had little to do with AI. It centered on the Education Department’s capital plan, the estimated budget for the coming year, and the updated Fair Student Funding weights that shape how money flows to schools. The panel also voted on 30 separate contract agreements, from cafeteria equipment repairs to special education services.

But the bulk of the seven-hour meeting involved parents, children, and educators arguing against the city’s spending on AI and educational technology contracts and the city’s preliminary AI policy. Although the Next Generation High School proposal was removed from Wednesday’s agenda following backlash over its AI focus and selective admissions, speakers said those concerns would extend to future school plans.

“Many feel AI is teaching a dangerous message that results matter more than the learning process. Some of the most important learning happens when students struggle, make mistakes, ask questions, and improve over time,” said student panel member Julia Nasef, of Staten Island’s Tottenville High School.

AI discussions surface issues with current Department of Education process

Throughout the night, speakers expressed waning confidence in the Education Department’s vetting process for AI tools and its ability to protect students, educators, and families from a complex and rapidly-changing technology.

Most of the speakers were opposed to any AI in the classroom.

Panel for Educational Policy Chair Greg Faulkner admitted on Wednesday that he was a “baby boomer” with limited understanding of AI, and that he wanted more thorough engagement with both the community and Education Department in future AI-related proposals.

But he also thought that Chancellor Kamar Samuel’s move to pull the AI-focused school proposal for Next Generation High School aligns with the schools chief’s priority to better engage and respond to the needs of local communities.

“Under previous administrations, the general assumption was that the panel votes yes on all DOE proposals. But the chancellor’s decision and the panel’s back-and-forth discussion on Wednesday showed us that the old model isn’t working anymore,” Faulkner told Chalkbeat on Thursday.

Faulkner said the “AI question” has him considering proposing changes to some of the Education Department’s policy-making processes. He said he would like the panel to work more closely with the department’s AI policy authors — the names of whom are not public — so the panel can get up to speed on AI research and better share community concerns.

Education Department officials said that the initial AI guidance was shaped by the Department’s central Academics and Instruction team, with input from stakeholders and various internal Department subcommittees.

“We have not had any briefings on AI research, and while I am concerned about a moratorium, I don’t know enough about this technology,” said Faulkner.

Nasef, the student PEP member, said at the meeting that many of her peers acknowledge that AI can be helpful when used “intentionally” to help them understand math and science concepts, for example.

She urged the panel to “support clear, student‑centered guidelines for AI implementation.”

The city’s framework, released last month, did not include guidance on how or if students can use AI for homework, nor did it differentiate AI use for students in different grades

Panel greenlights controversial tech contracts as AI policy lags

Of the 30 contract proposals up for a vote, three included three educational technology products. Just one was voted down.

One of the contracts approved covered the full line of K-12 digital learning products from Kaplan, a global educational services company that has recently rolled out AI add-ons in their digital test prep products. Several speakers who testified at Wednesday’s meeting mentioned the company’s recent privacy breach affecting the personal information of 1.4 million people across seven states. Despite those concerns, the PEP approved the company’s $500,000 contract.

A representative for Age of Learning, an AI-based software tailored to early childhood education up for contract vote, spoke at the meeting. He assured panel members that the software could be “turned off at any point” because “teachers have complete control of what is going on in the classroom.” This was the only contract that the PEP voted against.

Naveed Hasan, the panel’s de-facto technology expert who had previously supported the AI-focused high school, announced at the meeting that he now supports a two-year moratorium on AI use in schools, saying the city needs more time to address data privacy infrastructure and learning concerns.

The term limits of all current panel members expire at the end of June. The Education Department’s full AI policy is also expected to be released that month, and the Education Department is asking families and educators for input on its early framework through May 8.

Lizzie Walsh is a Data Fellow at Chalkbeat New York. She reports on New York City education and produces data-driven stories across Chalkbeat’s national network. Contact her at ewalsh@chalkbeat.org.

NYC pulls contentious proposals to open AI-themed high school, close Upper West Side middle schools

2026-04-27T10:30:00+00:00

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In a major reversal, New York City schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels is withdrawing controversial proposals to open the city’s first artificial intelligence-focused high school, close two middle schools, and relocate another.

The plan to open Next Generation Technology High School as a selective school in downtown Manhattan drew fierce community opposition in recent months. The city also saw intense backlash to its proposals for a slew of Upper West Side schools: to close the middle schools of P.S. 191 and Manhattan School for Children, and to relocate The Center School.

All four proposals were scheduled for a vote Wednesday in front of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP. Withdrawing the proposals makes it nearly impossible for them to take effect next school year.

Samuels, who’s entering his fourth month as chancellor under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, said he believes all of the proposals “met multiple goals” but decided it wasn’t fair to advance them so quickly after a major leadership transition. Instead, he hopes to revisit the proposals later on, with a stronger plan for hearing community feedback.

“These proposals were always ambitious,” Samuels told Chalkbeat in an interview Sunday. “I think when you have a transition and you’re hearing simultaneously that families want more time, I want to be a chancellor who listens and engages and understands the complexity of all of the issues.”

The proposals represented an early and personal challenge for the chancellor, who previously served as superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3, where he helped get the ball rolling for the Upper West Side school proposals. As superintendent, Samuels developed a reputation for shepherding complicated school merger proposals to the finish line.

Multiple PEP members expressed serious concerns about the proposals directly to Samuels in recent days, according to several panel members. Chairperson Greg Faulkner penned a letter asking Samuels to withdraw the proposal for Next Generation High School, according to a copy obtained by Chalkbeat. The panel’s main criticism was over the school’s designation as a “screened” school, raising concerns about equity and access.

Samuels said he didn’t withdraw the proposals because of concerns they would not clear the panel’s vote. But losing a high-profile vote could have complicated Mamdani’s campaign pledge to run the school system in a more democratic fashion, especially while pushing to retain control of the school system.

Mamdani is lobbying state lawmakers for a four-year renewal of mayoral control, which expires in June, and an extension of the city’s deadline for complying with the class size law — arguments that hinge in part on his ability to convince them he will be responsive to community needs. (An agreement on mayoral control could be included in the state budget, which is overdue and expected to be finalized soon.)

The Upper West Side proposals were meant to help stabilize flagging enrollment while clearing out space for an overcrowded school to meet the class size requirements, city officials said. But parents and community members from all three schools decried the plans, arguing officials didn’t do enough to engage parents and that the moves would undermine critical support for vulnerable students. Several elected officials planned to hold a press conference Monday morning to oppose the plans.

Meanwhile, the proposal for Next Generation Technology High School, often called “Next Gen,” generated pushback from some families concerned about the role of AI in schools — tapping into a larger debate roiling the city and country.

Education Department officials recently introduced a draft AI playbook that largely sidestepped thorny questions about how to regulate student AI use and drew intense criticism from some parents who feared it encouraged schools to embrace untested technology. Samuels said he wants to focus on finishing that guidance before crafting proposals for schools like Next Gen.

“We have to ensure that any future proposal of a model like Next Gen high school fits the needs of the broader community and aligns with our AI guidance,” he said.

Officials had already solicited applications from eighth graders to Next Gen, though they hadn’t yet offered admission.

Next Gen raises questions about AI, equity

Officials had been moving swiftly to open Next Gen, a selective Lower Manhattan school geared toward preparing students for jobs in cyber security, computer science, robotics, and math. It would also teach students to be “builders as well as ethical users of AI and other modern technologies,” according to the city’s proposal for the school.

Supporters of selective schools, which typically admit students based on their middle school course grades, said the program would allow students to explore an emerging technology and help prepare them for competitive tech jobs.

But critics argued the school’s planning process was rushed, its mission was unclear, and it could enable companies like Google and OpenAI to influence how AI is used in city classrooms. Both companies were part of the school’s planning team, and Manhattan High Schools Superintendent Gary Beidleman said his experience as a Google Education Innovation Fellow in 2024 inspired his decision to push for the new program.

Some panel members raised concerns that the school was slated to admit students based on their academic records rather than being open to anyone and pressed officials about why the campus was planned for Lower Manhattan as opposed to higher-need areas of the city.

“If they’re talking about this technology really being something that is going to become more global … why would we be exclusive in who can have access?” said Faulkner, the chair.

Panel members raised the idea of introducing an AI literacy course that could be used across multiple schools, rather than concentrating on a single standalone school.

Faulkner added that he worries about opening more screened schools “that have historically segregated” students.

Samuels said he believes the city’s current system for deciding admission to selective schools, which groups students into five tiers based on their seventh grade marks, is working.

“I’m not necessarily looking to make major changes to screens in high school,” he said.

Panel members were also frustrated with how top officials handled public discussions about the school. Several pointed out that district officials’ communication about the school seemed to suggest it was already approved, even though it hadn’t yet cleared a panel vote.

Under the city’s original proposal, Next Generation would have taken the place of the Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women, which currently enrolls just 91 students. The city is still moving forward with plans to close that school.

Families at a middle school on the same campus, Lower Manhattan Community School, had also raised concerns about Next Generation because they have long pushed for space in the building to make the school a program for grades 6-12 rather than 6-8.

District 3 proposals test city’s commitment to parent engagement

The move to withdraw three controversial proposals in District 3 came after months of outcry from families and educators in the district. They argued the process felt rushed and the timing of the decision would force families who planned to enroll in the two middle school programs slated for closure, P.S. 191 and the Manhattan School for Children, to scramble to find new schools for this fall.

Some families at P.S. 191 felt the school, which enrolled many asylum-seeking children, had not been properly supported by the city’s Education Department. The Manhattan School for Children developed a reputation for including students with disabilities in classes alongside their general education peers. Families feared they would not be able to find similarly welcoming campuses elsewhere.

Meanwhile, city officials contended that the middle schools were too small to be sustainable and offer solid academic programming. P.S. 191’s middle school currently enrolls 126 students, while the Manhattan School for Children has about 130, according to state data.

Yet the pushback put Samuels in an awkward position because Mamdani came into office promising to give families and educators a voice in the policy process.

For his part, Samuels said he wanted to give the acting superintendent of District 3, Reginald Higgins, time to develop his own strategy and build public support.

“He and all the superintendents around the city have to engage locally to collectively come up with proposals that will benefit everyone — and I think I want to give him a chance to do that,” Samuels said.

The administration has shown a willingness to back away from controversial proposals — including a fourth one for the district.

Last month, the city withdrew plans to close the Community Action School after a Center School mom made a racist remark caught on a hot mic while a Community Action Student was testifying at a public meeting. That episode drew international attention and prompted Samuels to promise an expansion of the Education Department’s Black studies curriculum and new parent training.

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Where is NYC’s 2026-27 public school calendar? Kamar Samuels says it’s coming next week.

2026-04-16T17:26:37+00:00

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New York City public school parents and educators eagerly awaiting to know next year’s first day of school will likely get the answer soon: Chancellor Kamar Samuels expects the school calendar to drop next week.

“Everybody wants to know: When will the school calendar be released?” Randi Garay, the co-chair of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, pressed Samuels Thursday morning.

Samuels responded: “Feel confident saying by the end of next week.”

Families and staff have yet to receive confirmation about the first day of the 2026-27 school year and the timing of holidays, making it difficult to plan summer camps or make child care arrangements. But most are expecting a late start to the school year.

The first day of school for students is typically the Thursday after Labor Day, which falls on Sept. 10 this year. It’s on the later side since Sept. 1 is on a Tuesday, and it could mean many families will struggle with the longer stretch of post-Labor Day child care.

This year’s calendar might bring other quirks that have made planning especially difficult for next school year. Students are unlikely to get off this year for the Jewish new year of Rosh Hashanah, which falls on the weekend of Sept. 11, just after the start of school. But they will likely have off on Sept. 21 for Yom Kippur, just after what is expected to be the first full week of the school year.

The trickiest thing is that Easter and Passover are far apart in 2027, with Easter Sunday on March 28 and the first night of Passover on April 21.

When these holidays were spread out in the 2023-24 school year, the Education Department ended up going back to the drawing board after releasing a calendar that sparked backlash. After giving Good Friday off, the city added a day after Easter Sunday. And after giving schools a weeklong spring break that coincided with most of Passover, the city ended up adding two more days for the last two days for the eight-day holiday.

The timing of the school calendar’s release has varied widely over the past decade. Officials have often released it in March or April. In recent years, the calendar has come as late as the end of May, prompting loud complaints. Many other school districts, including Newark, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, have already published their 2026-27 calendars.

The city recently experimented with releasing multiple years of calendars at once — after the teachers union fought for that. Samuels, however, said the city will only release one year at time, at least for now.

“The calendar is coming out right on time,” Education Department spokesperson Nicole Brownstein wrote in an email. She called the prior decision to release multiple years at once “an anomaly.”

Many observers will be watching closely to see how many days of class students will have.

Under state rules, the city must offer 180 days of learning. This year, the city is on track to have only 175 days of instruction after the state gave the city permission to cancel a day of school due to a snowstorm on top of having four teacher professional development days that counted toward the state’s limit, as the rules allow. (Before Mayor Zohran Mamdani reinstated a snow day this year, the city’s post-pandemic approach during storms has been to pivot to virtual learning rather than canceling class.)

In general, New York City students have fewer hours of instruction than average, largely because the 6 hour and 20 minute school day is shorter than what many other districts offer.

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.

An alternative to gifted education: Why some NYC schools are embracing International Baccalaureate

2026-04-10T14:44:08+00:00

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A few years back, a groundswell of Brooklyn parents in District 13 wanted to ditch gifted and talented classes, concerned about sorting and segregating children starting in kindergarten.

Then-Superintendent Kamar Samuels, now chancellor of New York City schools, wanted to find an alternative that offered rigorous academics for all students in a school rather than a select few. He settled on the International Baccalaureate, or IB, program and encouraged schools in District 13, which spans from Brooklyn Heights to Bedford-Stuyvesant, to pursue the yearslong authorization process, using a grant to support the shift.

The IB approach embraces inquiry-based, transdisciplinary learning that allows students to go deep into a specific topic across classes, connecting global issues to their own experiences. Educators are trained to facilitate these connections and foster ways for students to become independent thinkers and leaders.

“It means something for a teacher to be an IB teacher. It means you’ve gone through a process,” Samuels said in 2021, when introducing the initiative, “and you’re really pushing the envelope as you think about all your students.”

Amy Hamberry and her second grade students at P.S. 56 in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, on March 9.

The district now has five elementary schools and two middle schools in the program, representing New York City’s first IB “pathway” designed to serve children from 3-K through eighth grade. (The district also hopes that students continue on to the handful of public IB high schools in the city, including those in neighboring districts.)

The IB model might soon gain in popularity as schools grapple with the state’s graduation requirement overhaul, as the Portrait of a Graduate framework replaces Regents exams for diplomas starting in the 2027-28 school year. The approach closely aligns with the state’s six key qualities students must demonstrate (such as being creative innovators, effective communicators, and global citizens). And as schools await the state’s guidance on how to assess students under the new framework, IB schools already have a well-developed system of project-based assessments.

The schools also boast strong post-secondary outcomes: 71% of IB students in the U.S. enrolled in college compared to the average of 56%, the IB Schools and Colleges Association found.

Fifth grade students at P.S. 56 on March 9.

On a recent Monday at P.S. 56, in Clinton Hill, second graders hummed as they worked on a project for a unit on self-expression. The kids were creating shapes to use for fabric construction, incorporating math, writing, and social-emotional learning as they jotted down the way the colors they used made them feel.

In a fifth grade room down the hall, students — also doing a unit on self-expression — tackled a poem about technology, as they discussed the effect technology is having on education. Another fifth grade class read a poem about bullying, and students were asked to write their own poem about a problem they wanted to change.

Jayda, a fifth grader, wrote about concerns with the increase in immigration enforcement across the nation. She recently participated in an anti-ICE protest that Lucy, another fifth grader, organized. They and their peers talked about how they struggled with writing when they were younger but have since blossomed as writers, especially as they’ve been able to work on more creative writing.

“Now it’s my passion,” fifth grader Noah said. “I couldn’t imagine life without it.”

Tracey Scronic, the instruction lead and coordinator for District 13’s IB schools, sees the shift to the IB model as an “equity tool” to ensure all of a school’s students are exposed to enrichment. She said it “de-prioritizes traditional testing’s emphasis on regurgitation of information.”

Jayda speaks about her experience learning through the IB program at P.S. 56 on March 9.

Leaning on IB to tackle enrollment declines

The IB program at P.S. 56 has helped prop up enrollment, its principal, Eric Grande, said.

Just before Grande became principal of P.S. 56 a decade ago, the Clinton Hill elementary school tried to bolster enrollment, then hovering below 200 students, by adding a gifted and talented program. Grande added a “world language” program, focusing on Spanish, hoping that would attract more families. But the school didn’t feel cohesive.

“Even though we had a relatively small school, there was almost like schools within the school,” Grande said. “You had your world language Spanish program, your gifted and talented program, you had your special education classes and your gen ed classes, and it just started to feel a little bit off.”

Students within the school, which is more racially diverse than most New York City elementary schools, were not integrated within the different programs, he said. (Last year, about 36% of its students were Black, 36% were white, 17% were Latino, and 1% were Asian American; roughly 47% of children came from low-income families.)

Principal Eric Grande and Arelis Jimenez, IB coordinator, in a third grade classroom at P.S. 56.

Grande began looking for a model to bring everyone — and all of their different programs — together, appeasing families who wanted a foreign language and those who wanted a project-based approach to teaching. IB offered the “perfect synergy of all things that we were doing.”

The school is now in its second year as an authorized IB school following three years as a candidate school. Enrollment has increased, with about 230 students last year.

And while Grande said his school has never been too focused on test prep, he was proud to see a shift in state test scores since his teachers transitioned to the IB framework, from about 35% proficiency on reading in 2019, the year before the pandemic, to more than 60% last year.

The move to IB can be challenging

The buy-in from teachers on IB takes some time, said Scronic. They needed training to shift practices and must do more in-depth planning around the new units. They also needed to figure out how to meld the IB framework with the mandated literacy curriculum for their district, EL Education.

“It is a bit more cognitively intense for the teachers,” Scronic said. But after a while, she said teachers feel like they’re being respected again for their craft and facilitating connections between the curriculum and students’ own lives. “I feel like the passion that a brand-new teacher brings to the profession then kind of gets squashed sometimes, IB has brought that back.”

Rosa Davis and her seventh grade students during science class at Restoration Academy on March 9.

Becoming an authorized IB school is not easy. Schools have to pay the Switzerland-based nonprofit that oversees the IB program about $9,000 a year to start the training and candidacy process. It’s about $10,000 each year once a school is authorized to support the implementation and maintenance of IB programs, according to the organization’s website. District 13 used a grant to cover the costs for the initial training for the schools, though the schools have had to foot the bill for new teachers.

Though Scronic leads District 13’s IB initiative, she’s started holding monthly Zoom meetings for about 40 IB elementary and middle schools in the city, a grassroots effort to provide support and create a community to share best practices and resources.

Restoration Academy Principal Adele Simon's office displaying IB program notes and a diorama created by students.

Samuels continued to promote IB schools when he left his Brooklyn district to become superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3. He encouraged schools in Harlem to adopt the IB model as a way to tackle declining enrollment in a part of the district facing heavy competition from charter schools. (District 3 used a grant to cover the costs as well.)

But Samuels acknowledged the challenges in pursuing IB authorization.

“I do believe in a lot of the work of IB, but it really takes a big investment,” he recently told K-12 Dive. “It takes principals being onboard. It takes teachers being onboard and willing to go and get a lot of background and content knowledge, and to be able to personalize for young people and the kids in your school.”

A middle school IB program helps students find their ‘voice’

Sanai Gary, an eighth grader at Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Restoration Academy — which is in its first full year as an authorized IB school after its yearslong candidacy — said the IB approach has helped her deepen her learning.

“I like how the topics transmit over to other classes. I feel like it helps me learn better,” said Sanai. “It gives me more time to focus on it.”

Last year, she and her peers became clean water advocates after diving into a unit on global sustainability.

Sanai Gary, an eighth grader, speaks during her language and literature class at Restoration Academy.

It started after they read a novel in English class, “A Long Walk to Water,” about the struggle in South Sudan for clean water. In their Individuals and Societies class (akin to social studies), a student brought up questions about the water crisis that started in 2014 in Flint, Michigan, that got the students wondering about the water quality in their own school. So, in science class, they tested their school’s water fountains and created makeshift filtration devices.

Concerned about the color and clarity of their school’s water, back in English class, the students mounted a letter-writing campaign to city officials demanding changes.

Restoration Academy has struggled with enrollment and has long served marginalized students. The middle school currently has roughly 80 middle schoolers; about 80% are Black and Latino, and more than 90% are from low-income families. Pre-pandemic, about 20% of its students were considered proficient in reading. Since transitioning to IB, the scores have improved, rising to about 30% last year.

Tomaso Millian and his eighth grade students during design and art class at Restoration Academy on March 9.

But more importantly, Principal Adele Simon said, students are increasingly linking what’s happening around the world to their own lives and finding their voices to advocate for change based on what they’re learning in school.

“It’s the connection between what they’re reading,” Simon said, “and not just reading it for the purpose of reading it, but reading it for the purpose of, ‘Okay, what am I going to do with this? … Who’s in power and who is not in power? And how can I make sure that the people in power represent me and my community?”

Their school is getting new water fountains with filtration devices this spring.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.

P.S. Weekly: NYC student reporters press Chancellor Kamar Samuels on integration, AI, and more

2026-04-09T11:00:00+00:00

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Welcome back to P.S. Weekly, a student podcast created in collaboration between Chalkbeat and The Bell!

In our first episode of Season 3, The Bell’s high school reporters landed an exclusive interview with schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels.

The new schools chief made his three priorities known: safety, academic rigor, and integration. But The Bell’s student reporters grilled him on the issues most important to them, including artificial intelligence, how he plans to approach racial integration, and whether he will fulfill Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s promise to make school buildings greener.

In this episode, you’ll hear Samuels’ answers and the student reporters’ assessment of his responses.

P.S. Weekly is available on major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Reach us at PSWeekly@chalkbeat.org. New episodes drop on Thursdays.

P.S. Weekly is made possible by generous support from The Pinkerton Foundation.

NYC’s homeless students struggle to get to school. Advocates want more funding, coordination.

2026-04-06T10:00:01+00:00

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It’s been six months since Dorainy Santos and her two sons moved from Pennsylvania to a homeless shelter in the Bronx, and her kindergartner still hasn’t started school.

Santos first visited her neighborhood public school, where officials told her they couldn’t accommodate the 5-year-old, who has autism and requires a smaller class. They referred her to the city’s District 75 programs for students with complex disabilities.

Santos then spent months waiting, finally getting a spot after contacting the nonprofit Advocates for Children for help. But the school is 35 minutes away from her shelter, and Santos is now waiting on the school bus service the city promised.

“Because my son isn’t going to school, I can’t start my job search” and begin earning income to rent her own apartment, Santos, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, said in Spanish. “And it has limited my son too … I need a professional who can educate him on an academic level.”

Cases like Santos’ — where children in the city’s overburdened shelter system struggle to enroll in or regularly attend school — remain all too common, advocates say.

Last school year, 63% of the roughly 65,000 students who lived in homeless shelters were marked chronically absent — meaning they missed at least 1 in 10 school days. That’s more than double the rate of students with permanent housing, according to newly released data from Advocates for Children.

Many students in shelters routinely face long commutes, transportation delays, and frequent moves during the school year, pushing them further behind academically, families and advocates say.

In response, some advocates are pushing both the state and city governments to step up funding and coordination of services for homeless students.

At the state level, both the Assembly and Senate included in their budget proposals changes to the state funding formula that would drive additional money to districts with large shares of homeless students. Those proposals would bring anywhere between $93 million and $486 million additional dollars to New York City, where roughly 1 in 7 students was homeless last year, according to estimates. Advocates are pushing Gov Kathy Hochul, who did not include the funding shift in her proposed budget, to adopt it.

In city government, advocates say there’s far too little coordination between the various agencies — including the Education and Social Services departments — that have a role in overseeing homeless students, creating unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles for families.

“Only bold leadership from City Hall can bring the urgency and coordination needed to ensure students who are homeless can get to school every day and access the educational support they need to thrive,” said Jennifer Pringle, director of Advocates for Children’s Learners in Temporary Housing Project.

“Far too often, our students in temporary housing are left behind without the resources and supports they need to succeed,” schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said in a statement. “Under this administration, we will work to tackle those longstanding issues head on.”

Samuels said he supports the increase in state aid and that the city has a “robust network of interagency partnerships” to help address chronic absenteeism and educational outcomes for homeless students.

Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, added that the administration is “expanding outreach programs we know work” and improving coordination between the Education Department and other city agencies.

Transportation barriers drive down school attendance

The barriers keeping homeless students from regular school attendance aren’t new. Many families wind up in shelters far from their kids’ schools, forcing them to endure long commutes or transfer schools midway through the year, upending relationships and academic progress. And despite their legal entitlement to school bus transportation, families in shelters often end up waiting weeks or more for yellow bus service to start, advocates say.

Roughly 1 in 5 families in shelters were living in a different borough than their youngest child’s school last year, according to city data. A spokesperson for the Department of Social Services, which oversees family shelters, noted that figure has ticked down in recent years and said the agency reaches out to families with long commutes whenever a shelter placement closer to their school opens up.

Still, roughly 20% of children living in shelters switched schools at least once last year, more than four times the rate of students in permanent housing, according to data from Advocates for Children.

Some of those challenges have compounded in recent years as the city’s shelter system saw an influx of tens of thousands of new migrant families. The city erected dozens of emergency shelters and introduced policies meant to limit families’ shelter stays, which may have increased the churn for families and schools.

Over the past year, as the city’s shelter population has declined, officials have closed some of those emergency shelters.

All of that disruption and dislocation can be detrimental to students’ academic progress, advocates say. Just 33% of homeless students in grades 3-8 scored proficient on state reading tests last year, compared to 60% of students in permanent housing, according to the data.

City officials have made some efforts to boost support for homeless students in recent years, including extending pandemic emergency funding for Education Department staffers who work in shelters and launching a program that pairs homeless students with adult mentors to improve attendance.

But kids like Santos’ continue to slip through the cracks.

She urged the city to focus on hiring staffers with the skills and empathy to quickly help families in shelters with challenges like finding special education spots and arranging bus transportation. That way, she said, kids like her son won’t “fall behind so much waiting at home.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org

Will NYC school budgets take a hit next year? Education Department officials are mum.

2026-03-23T22:26:39+00:00

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During a City Council hearing about Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed budget for New York City’s public schools, one question came up again and again: Will school budgets take a hit next year?

It’s a question Education Department officials repeatedly sidestepped — but the answer may influence the fate of Mamdani’s first budget plan.

“There are not many individual issues that we will discuss at any of these hearings that impact our collective vote on the entire $127 billion dollar budget — that’s how important this is,” Brooklyn City Council member Lincoln Restler said during the budget hearing on Monday. “I really want to make sure we’re not in a situation where we’re seeing school budgets a day before the vote.”

As K-12 enrollment in the nation’s largest school system plunged nearly 10% over the past six years, dropping below 800,000, city officials spent $1.6 billion propping up budgets. That money staved off cuts that would typically have been automatic since school funding is typically tied to student headcount. But officials were reluctant to slash budgets while schools were scrambling to catch up students in the wake of the pandemic and the system had billions in one-time federal relief money at its disposal.

As the pandemic receded and federal funding dried up, however, it became difficult to change course. The Education Department kept school budgets relatively stable even as enrollment ticked down. This year, schools received over $388 million in various forms of relief to offset lower enrollment, the largest single-year sum since the pandemic hit.

Whether to keep school budgets steady and hold them “harmless” for enrollment declines is a politically tricky decision as the Mamdani administration has tasked city agencies to find savings to help fill a multi-billion dollar budget gap. When former Mayor Eric Adams initially began winding down the program, the blowback was so intense that City Council members later apologized for approving the city’s spending plan, and families made T-shirts declaring that Adams defunded their schools. Subsequently, Adams decided to keep propping up budgets.

Some school funding experts and budget watchdog groups say that it makes little sense to keep allowing school budgets to drift away from enrollment, disproportionately benefiting schools that have lost the most students. It’s a problem that was top of mind for multiple city lawmakers.

“Are we funding empty seats?” asked Queens City Council member Phil Wong. “And is there a long term plan to phase this out — or this is now a permanent policy?”

But educators and parent leaders have pointed out that many schools have come to rely on the money, and abruptly cutting it could force painful cuts to programs such as after-school, art, and music. Plus, cuts are likely to invite backlash, especially as Mamdani vowed to prioritize funding for public schools on the campaign trail.

At the City Council hearing on Monday, schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels stressed that “no decision has been made on hold harmless.”

“When we think about declining enrollment, we see the impact of that across our schools and specifically many of our schools who serve the most vulnerable populations,” Samuels added. The city should be “making sure those schools are sustainable and can withstand the impact of the declining enrollment.”

The “hold harmless” funding is a small share of the more than $16 billion the Education Department spent on K-12 schools and instruction this year. But on dozens of campuses, the money represents more than 10% of their initial allocations.

Officials said preliminary school budgets would be available later this spring, potentially leaving little time for lawmakers to negotiate the issue before the June 30 deadline to pass the city budget.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC’s Education Dept. is releasing a long-awaited AI policy. Some schools already have their own.

2026-03-23T21:37:33+00:00

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By last spring, it had become clear to Manhattan Assistant Principal Joe Vincente that his school had an artificial intelligence problem.

Staffers at East Side Community School were holding multiple meetings a week with students suspected of using AI inappropriately for schoolwork. AI platforms were multiplying at a dizzying pace. And the city Education Department had offered no formal guidance for schools.

Navigating the moment without a policy felt unsustainable, Vincente recalled. “The need was reaching a fever pitch.”

In the months that followed, Vincente convened a committee of staff members, gathered input from students and parents, hired substitutes so the committee could hole up in the library uninterrupted, and spent hours of his own time out of work hammering out a 12-page draft AI policy. They based their approach on a core tenet: “As a community dedicated to deep learning, we prohibit the unsupervised use of generative AI for all schoolwork and assessments.”

The city’s Education Department is expected to release its own long-awaited citywide draft AI policy for schools on Tuesday, more than two years since ChatGPT upended what students and teachers could do with the click of a button. In that time, schools across the five boroughs have come up with a wide variety of approaches on their own, according to interviews with educators, parents, and students at 10 schools. The school-level efforts offer a preview of the complex task facing the Education Department as it seeks to chart a path forward at a moment when the value and role of AI in education is fiercely contested.

Some, like East Side Community, have crafted comprehensive policies detailing acceptable and unacceptable uses of the technology, along with how the school should respond. Others have tried to keep AI out of classrooms altogether. Many, however, haven’t broached the topic in a formal way.

A growing chorus of educators and parents are calling for a full moratorium on its use in school, pointing to the academic, environmental, and mental health risks of AI. Others argue it would do city students a disservice not to expose them to a transformative technology already deeply embedded in our economy and society. Those conflicts have burst into public view with increasing frequency in recent months in debates over whether to approve contracts with AI companies and a new AI-focused high school in Manhattan. (After the city releases its policy, the public will have 45 days to offer feedback.)

Caught in the center of the swirl are schools and teachers.

“There are a lot of extreme opinions, and I think somewhere in the middle is our responsibility as educators to wrestle with the tension of all of those things and then decide what’s best for our students and our communities,” Vincente said.

At East Side, which is part of the New York Performance Standards Consortium that allows students to complete portfolio assessments rather than Regents Exams to graduate, educators decided it was most important to nurture students’ critical thinking skills — even if it meant curbing or supervising AI use.

“If we send them out in the world with all of these other really strong skills that we believe in, critical reading and strong writing, they’ll be able to learn AI if they need to,” Vincente said.

NYC schools struggle to keep up with growing AI use

Keeping up with the dizzying changes in AI has bewildered many city schools. The city Education Department’s approach has swung wildly, from initially banning ChatGPT on school devices in January 2023, to pledging in May of the same year to become a national leader in embracing the use of AI in schools.

There’s now a variety of chatbots capable of doing complex work, and AI is built into functions as basic as email and Google search, making it nearly impossible to avoid. Educators who spoke with Chalkbeat said they routinely encounter students using AI to shortcut writing assignments — and can’t rely solely on online “AI detectors” to ferret it out.

At many schools, administrators have kept their distance, waiting for the city to develop a clear set of guidelines and leaving it largely to teachers to handle the day-to-day instances of AI use.

That’s led to a frustrating two years for some educators, especially in humanities courses that rely heavily on writing.

“I would love clear rules … and I feel that I do not have backup,” said a Brooklyn high school English teacher who requested anonymity for fear of jeopardizing her job. “The administrators … do not recognize the extent of the problem.”

Many English and social studies teachers have figured out their own ways to restructure the writing process, moving away from take-home essays and having students write their work by hand during class time in order to ensure students don’t turn to AI.

“I have gone back to paper. For last semester, I did all in-class writing,” said Jessica Radin, a social studies teacher at The Beacon School in Manhattan, which also shifted its admissions essay in-person last year in order to avoid concerns about students using AI or paid tutors.

There are downsides of shifting to in-class assignments, including shorter essays that eat up more instructional time. But Radin said she’s been pleasantly surprised by how well she’s gotten to know her students’ writing this year.

Adam Stevens, a social studies teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School, the city’s largest with almost 6,000 students, knows he doesn’t have the bandwidth to scour every assignment for signs of AI. So he makes the case that students will be putting themselves at a disadvantage in college by leaning on AI — and tries to pose questions with a personal component that students will find “too important for them to feed into a chatbot.”

Enterprising staffers take the lead

At schools trying to take a more comprehensive approach to AI, it often comes down to having a staff member with the expertise and motivation to lead the charge.

At Sunset Park High School in Brooklyn and John Bowne High School in Queens, teachers who attended professional development sessions sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers through a $23 million “AI Academy,” brought back resources and helped launch faculty committees at their schools.

“The reality is it’s here, and [students] are going to use it,” said Jennifer Goodnow, an English as a Second Language teacher at Sunset Park High School, who attended the union-sponsored training. “We can’t stop that but … our school can teach kids about the potential pitfalls.”

Goodnow said she was particularly concerned to learn some students are turning to chatbots to discuss mental health struggles, and she hopes the school can play a bigger role educating kids and parents about the possible risks and offering alternative outlets.

Some schools have taken more aggressive measures to try to keep AI out of classrooms. At Williamsburg Charter High School, officials decided earlier this school year to ban ChatGPT on school devices, said Jeremiah Dickerson, an 18-year-old senior. (School officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.) But while Dickerson acknowledged some students misuse AI, he argued the school’s approach isn’t likely to be effective or productive.

“If AI is banned in my school,” he said, “and then I go to college and an AI is everywhere, how does that really effectively prepare me to use it?”

As schools develop AI policies, they dig into the gray area

There’s little disagreement that asking AI to generate an entire essay is a violation of academic integrity. But as schools develop their AI policies, they are digging into more nuanced scenarios — and finding the answers aren’t always clear cut.

Can AI be used, for example, to direct students to sources for a history paper? Or is there something valuable students would miss in the process of finding those sources in a different way?

It’s also not always obvious what consequences to apply: Sometimes it’s unclear whether students even knew they were using AI, given its ubiquity online.

At Brooklyn Collaborative School in Carroll Gardens, administrators acknowledge the rules might vary depending on the teacher and assignment. They ask educators to include a “traffic light” on each task that outline a few clearly permissible uses of AI (green light), a few where students should exercise caution (yellow), and a few clearly impermissible ones (red), said Chrissy Prince, the school’s data specialist.

It’s not only student AI use that can grow murky. Educators are also experimenting with AI to craft lesson plans, create resources for students, and offer feedback.

Vincente, who was part of a district-sponsored fellowship to learn how to use an education-oriented AI tool called Playlab, acknowledged the lines can be blurry and emphasized the importance of understanding the school’s values while trusting teachers to carry them out. That’s why East Side staffers decided to only endorse student AI use that’s supervised by school staff.

“Just kids out there roaming in the wild of AI,” he said, “more often than not, what they’re going to do and experience with that is actually going to be a detriment to the learning that we want to happen.”

Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.

Next phase of NYC reading overhaul? Schools chief wants to help struggling middle, high school students

2026-03-19T18:39:41+00:00

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In recent years, New York City’s public school system has made improving elementary school literacy rates the top priority.

That focus, experts have warned, doesn’t address an equally pressing challenge: Many middle and high school students are far below grade level, and their schools are not always equipped to help them catch up.

Now, Chancellor Kamar Samuels is vowing to shift the Education Department’s agenda. Addressing that gap will be the “next stage” of NYC Reads, the city’s plan to improve reading instruction, Samuels said at a recent literacy conference convened by Columbia University’s Center for Public Research and Leadership.

Middle and high school teachers “love books, they are wonderful at comparing themes, they’re wonderful at getting most of our kids … excited about reading,” Samuels said. “But what they’re not necessarily good at is teaching our kids to read.”

He added: “We have to ensure that when our kids are off track at sixth grade, that there are research-based interventions that can help to get them on track.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Samuels have vowed to continue the previous administration’s focus on literacy, including a requirement that elementary schools remove discredited curriculums from their classrooms and adopt city-approved programs. Samuels has indicated that one of his top priorities will be getting older students who did not receive adequate reading instruction back on track.

The stakes of that effort are high. More than 40% of New York City middle school students were not considered proficient readers on last year’s state tests, and just under half of high school freshmen arrived on campus reading below grade level.

Officials have previously acknowledged the city’s approach to catching up students has been scattershot. For the first time this school year, all campuses — including middle and high schools — are required to use city-approved intervention programs for struggling readers. Officials are also requiring all middle schools transition to city-approved reading and math curriculums by fall 2027. Both of those efforts launched under Mayor Eric Adams.

Literacy experts welcomed Samuels’ focus on older students.

“I appreciate his acknowledgement that middle and high school students and teachers haven’t been a priority in this conversation around the shift to evidence-based instruction,” said Katie Pace Miles, a Brooklyn College professor and literacy expert.

The city should roll out training for middle and high school teachers on the latest evidence about how students learn to read, she said, and consider intensive tutoring programs for students who are behind.

The Education Department plans to share more detailed plans in the coming months, said agency spokesperson Onika Richards. She emphasized that schools are focused on using assessment data to identify students who need more help and ensuring dedicated time in the school day to provide extra help. (Officials did not say whether high schools will be required to use city-approved reading curriculums, as middle and elementary schools have.)

When it comes to supporting older students, making the interventions schools deploy more coherent would be a welcome change, some observers said. Teachers have sometimes relied on elementary school reading materials for those who are behind, which can be embarrassing for middle or high school students, said Evan Stone, the CEO of Educators for Excellence, a teacher advocacy group.

A challenge will be finding time during the school day to offer interventions without pulling students out of their regular English language arts classes.

“You don’t want them to miss the ELA block to get their support because then they never catch up,” Stone said. The materials teachers use for students who are behind should be aligned with their school’s regular reading curriculum, he added.

Stephanie Vazquez, a literacy coach at M.S. 101 in the Bronx, said teacher training will be a crucial element of any effort to improve reading outcomes. Her students arrive with a wide range of reading abilities; some are capable of high school level work while others are far behind.

“As a teacher, you’re trying to figure out, ‘How do I help my student gain access and fully comprehend this text without completely modifying the text?’” Vazquez said, noting the city could create more opportunities for teachers from different schools to share best practices.

Vazquez said teachers in upper grades could also use more exposure to a longstanding body of research on how children learn to read, known as the science of reading.

“Oftentimes, when you’re a teacher in middle and high school, your certification program may not have taught you about the science of reading,” she said. “We don’t always feel well-equipped because we don’t walk in with that foundation.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Kamar Samuels’ cabinet: Your guide to the Education Department’s new leadership team

2026-03-05T19:54:48+00:00

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New York City schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced his top deputies Thursday, replacing some of the system’s top leaders while keeping several others.

Of his 11 cabinet members, all have deep roots in the nation’s largest school system — and six are staying in the roles they assumed under the previous administration.

Samuels named Danielle Giunta as first deputy. She will helm his cabinet and oversee a slew of key areas, ranging from academics to district leadership, including managing two newly created roles of supervising superintendents. One will supervise elementary and middle school superintendents and another will oversee high schools and alternative program superintendents.

“I spent two decades of my career in roles across NYC public schools — from math teacher to principal to superintendent — and I’ve seen many iterations of our organizational chart, iterations that often lacked cohesion, efficiency, and clarity,” Samuels told a packed audience at the Education Department’s Lower Manhattan headquarters. “I needed to make some structural changes.”

The changes Samuels announced on Thursday do not completely overhaul the system’s leadership. Simone Hawkins, the deputy chancellor of early childhood education, will keep her position — a key post as Mayor Zohran Mamdani prioritizes universal child care and shoring up the prekindergarten system. Kenita Lloyd will stay in her role as chief of staff, which she held under former chancellors Melissa Aviles-Ramos and David Banks. She previously worked with Banks to support the Eagle Academy network of public schools, which he helped launch.

Lloyd compared herself to a professional basketball player changing teams.

“The coaching philosophy shifts, culture evolves, and expectations have risen, yet the responsibility remains the same,” she said. “Elevate performance, protect the star, and help the team win.”

It remains to be seen whether Samuels will make other structural changes.

Former Chancellor Richard Carranza added a new layer of executive superintendents. Banks scrapped those positions and required all of the city’s local superintendents to reapply for their jobs.

Here are the new faces in Samuels’ cabinet.

First Deputy Chancellor: Danielle Giunta

As first deputy, Giunta will oversee district planning, enrollment, new school development, and policy as well as academics and instruction, with the two supervising superintendents, one for elementary and middle school, and the other for high school and alternative programs, reporting directly to her.

Giunta most recently served as the chief of school leadership development, tapped by Banks to fill that new role. Prior to that she spent about a decade as the superintendent of District 26, a high-performing and affluent part of Queens that includes Bayside, Douglaston, and Little Neck. She was a principal at P.S. 154 in Flushing.

Supervising Superintendent of Elementary and Middle Schools: Maribel Torres-Hulla

Supervising Superintendent of High Schools and D79: Alan Cheng

In these newly created roles, Torres-Hulla and Cheng will oversee the implementation of the city’s curriculum mandates, NYC Reads for literacy and NYC Solves for math. They will oversee work around career readiness and apprenticeship programs. And as the state is changing graduation requirements, the high school supervising superintendent will have a massive job helping schools figure out how to shift their practices.

Torres-Hulla, born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn, rose through the ranks from elementary school teacher to literacy coach, assistant principal, principal, deputy superintendent, and superintendent of the Bronx’s District 10. Most recently, she served as chief of school support, working with superintendents of 18 local school districts across Brooklyn and the Bronx to help them align instruction with citywide initiatives.

Cheng’s career has had a similar trajectory, starting as a math teacher and working his way up as a principal, deputy superintendent, and superintendent. He most recently has served as the superintendent for Outward Bound schools and international schools — serving newcomer immigrants — as well as New York Performance Standards Consortium schools, which require students to do performance-based assessments, such as capstone projects or other presentations rather than Regents exit exams. Consortium schools could potentially serve as a model as the state overhauls graduation requirements.

Former Deputy Chancellor for School Leadership Danika Rux previously oversaw all superintendents; she will no longer have a cabinet position and will advise the office of the general counsel. Samuels, who previously served two tours as local superintendent in Manhattan and Brooklyn, said the new roles are meant to help support superintendents as they navigate reading and math curriculum overhauls and implement a new set of graduation standards in the coming years.

Deputy Chancellor of the Division of Family Partnership & Community Support: Flavia Puello-Perdomo

Attendance, students in temporary housing and foster care, language access, school wellness and counseling programs, and community schools providing wraparound support will be among the areas that Puello-Perdomo will oversee. She will also be in charge of Family and Community Empowerment, or FACE, the office that supports parent leaders on parent-teacher associations, school leadership teams, and Community Education Councils — along with running the elections for these councils, which have been plagued by low turnout.

Puello-Perdomo most recently served as the chief of schools for the office of community supports and wellness where she worked across agencies to support community school programs, students in temporary housing and foster care, after-school, and summer programs. She also focused on attendance initiatives.

Deputy Chancellor of the Division of Finance, Administration, & Human Resources: Michael Cheatham will serve as acting deputy chancellor until June, when Lindsey Oates takes over

This role will be responsible for administrative services, finance, human resources, and procurement.

Cheatham previously served as a senior advisor to the chancellor and chief financial officer and as senior executive director and acting chief of finance and human resources for the Division of School Leadership. He’s currently also the Education Department’s interim chief savings officer, a role Mamdani established to find cost-efficiency strategies.

Oates previously served as the Education Department’s chief financial officer during the de Blasio administration. She’s currently the interim chief financial officer at the Legal Aid Society.

Here’s who is returning to their former post.

Chief of Staff Kenita Lloyd. Lloyd joined the Education Department as a deputy chancellor of family engagement under Banks. She was elevated to the chief of staff role in 2024, and Samuels is keeping her in that role.

Deputy Chancellor of the Division of Inclusive and Accessible Learning Christina Foti. The division oversees special education, multilingual learners, and District 75, a network of schools that serve students with more significant disabilities.

Deputy Chancellor of the Division of Early Childhood Education Simone Hawkins

Deputy Chancellor of the Division of School Operations Kevin Moran

Chief of Safety and Prevention Partnerships Mark Rampersant

Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel Liz Vladeck

Correction, March 5, 2026: Alan Cheng most recently oversaw Outward Bound schools, the Internationals School Network, and consortium schools.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Kamar Samuels to unveil new Education Department cabinet as old deputies exit

2026-03-05T02:17:12+00:00

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After two months helming New York City schools, Kamar Samuels is expected to announce his cabinet members on Thursday as top Education Department officials say their goodbyes.

Acting First Deputy Chancellor Isabel DiMola, the school system’s second in command, announced plans to retire in a Wednesday evening letter to staff. She was tapped to fill the role by former Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos after a previous top deputy, Dan Weisberg, stepped down.

Also leaving her post: Deputy Chancellor for School Leadership Danika Rux, who supervises 44 superintendents charged with directly managing principals. Rux oversaw the system’s reading and math curriculum overhauls, a major priority under former Mayor Eric Adams.

In a Wednesday letter announcing plans to step down, Rux said she is “excited to see Samuels deepen the work and build his team.” Samuels has previously said he plans to keep the literacy mandate changes in place but has suggested there could be tweaks to the math program.

Cristina Meléndez, the deputy chancellor of family, community, and student empowerment, had previously announced her departure.

The flurry of staff changes is not surprising, as Samuels is expected to assemble his own cabinet to replace the one he inherited from the prior administration. Any new appointees will play an important role implementing Samuels’ priorities. The new administration’s vision for the larger system remains a question mark, as Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said little about his plans for the city schools.

In a message to principals, Samuels wrote that he is making an announcement Thursday about the system’s “organizational structure” and planned to convene school leaders shortly after the official announcement.

In her letter to school staffers, DiMola reminisced about her 30 years in education. She started at the age of 22 teaching social studies at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island, Brooklyn, working her way through the ranks as an assistant principal, principal, and superintendent. For 16 years, she served as the superintendent of Brooklyn’s District 21, the same district where she attended public schools growing up.

Rux also began her education career 30 years ago, starting as a teacher and working her way up from a school leader to superintendent.

“Each step along this path has strengthened my belief that leadership in education is ultimately about people,” she wrote in her farewell to staffers. “It is about the relationships we cultivate, the trust we build, and the collective responsibility we carry for the success of every student in our care.”

Rux is leaving her post as a deputy chancellor to become a senior advisor to the Education Department’s Office of the General Counsel, she wrote.

Former Chancellor Aviles-Ramos announced a new job of her own this week. She has a senior role at HMH, a curriculum company with strong ties to the school system, a move that has raised eyebrows.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

NYC reverses Upper West Side middle school closure after mom’s viral racist remark sparks outcry

2026-03-03T12:56:25+00:00

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New York City education officials have reversed plans to close an Upper West Side middle school after a mom’s racist comment during a public meeting thrust the school into the national spotlight.

Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels wrote in a letter to families Monday night that the city will not begin phasing out the Community Action School, known as CAS, as originally planned next school year.

The move comes after a mom’s comment, which was made on a hot mic on Zoom while a Black student was speaking during a public meeting, went viral. “They’re too dumb to know they’re in a bad school,” the mom said. Samuels said he and the local superintendent visited the school to meet with students and school leadership and ultimately were persuaded to scrap the plan.

“First, the CAS community is continuing to process and recover from the racist and unacceptable remarks directed toward a CAS student at a [community education council] meeting in February,” Samuels wrote in the letter obtained by Chalkbeat. “And second, members of the school community shared a strong desire for stability as they move forward.”

Samuels, who recently visited the campus and met with students, added: “What the CAS community needs right now is meaningful and comprehensive support — and that would be difficult to provide authentically in the context of a phase-out proposal.”

The decision represents a remarkable about-face. Samuels helped launch the closure plan in his previous role as the superintendent of District 3, a diverse chunk of Manhattan that spans from the Upper West Side to part of Harlem. The controversy represented an early test for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has vowed to listen to feedback from school communities in decisions that affect their schools.

City officials previously argued CAS was too small to sustain, enrolling just over 170 students this year. They also pointed to standardized test scores that are below the city average. Families and educators pushed back against the plans, noting the school added about 40 students this year and predominantly serves Black and Latino children from low-income families. Some parents said the school is an unusually supportive environment with strong social emotional programming.

But the closure proposal earned more intense scrutiny after a Feb. 10 public meeting in which Allyson Friedman, a mom from The Center School, a more affluent and majority-white school, was caught on a hot mic apparently insulting the intelligence of a Black student from CAS. (Friedman — whose school is part of a separate relocation plan — participated in the meeting on Zoom while the student was in person; multiple people in attendance said the student likely did not immediately hear the comment.)

After making the comment about “dumb” students, Friedman then appeared to misattribute and misquote Black historian Carter G. Woodson. “Apparently Martin Luther King said it: If you train a Black person well enough, they’ll know to use the back. You don’t have to tell them anymore,” Friedman said.

The District 3 interim acting superintendent had quoted from Woodson earlier in the meeting in his remarks on Black History Month.

In the 1933 book, “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” Woodson described how racism in schools can perpetuate inequities. “If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door,” Woodson wrote.

A recording of Friedman’s comments captured international headlines and drew rebukes from Mamdani and Black parent leaders and elected officials. In the aftermath, Hunter College placed Friedman on leave.

In an earlier email to Chalkbeat, Friedman wrote that she inadvertently unmuted herself during the meeting. “As a parent, I was trying to explain the concept of systemic racism by referencing a historical example,” she said. “My remarks were not directed at the student speaker, and they do not reflect my beliefs or values.”

Samuels previously announced that the Education Department would take action in response to the incident, offering support to the CAS community, expanding access across the system to the city’s Black Studies curriculum, launching training for families focused on combating prejudice, and devising a citywide plan to combat anti-Black racism.

The chancellor’s letter to families did not indicate whether two other middle school closure proposals under consideration in District 3 will move forward. One of those schools, the Manhattan School for Children, shares a building with CAS.

The other proposal would close the middle school program at P.S./I.S. 191, which is majority Black and Latino. Meanwhile, The Center School, where Friedman’s child attends, would move into the P.S./I.S. 191 building.

Families at both campuses have raised concerns about the proposal. The parent association at The Center School previously distanced themselves from Friedman’s comments.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Deputy chancellor for family engagement is stepping down. Will a broader reshuffle follow?

2026-02-18T21:48:16+00:00

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As New York City school insiders eagerly await to see how the new chancellor reshuffles top brass, the Education Department has its first high-profile departure.

Cristina Meléndez, the deputy chancellor of family, community, and student empowerment, is leaving her post on Feb. 27, she wrote in an email to parent leaders on Wednesday, thanking them for their work.

“The most important thing you can do is stay engaged in your schools and keep building your child’s confidence day by day, conversation by conversation, and moment by moment,” she wrote. “That steady belief you offer your child becomes their strength.”

She did not say where she planned to head next. Education Department officials did not respond to questions about her replacement or whether the departure is related to a broader cabinet shakeup.

“We look forward to sharing more soon,” Education Department spokesperson Nicole Brownstein said in a statement commending Meléndez for her service.

Meléndez assumed her role as deputy chancellor more than a year ago, after serving as the executive director of the Education Department’s Office of Family and Community Empowerment, known as FACE, which among other things, oversees the Community Education Council elections.

The elections have had notoriously low turnout, with roughly 18,000 households, or just 2% of eligible families, casting ballots in 2025. A 2023 Chalkbeat investigation highlighted numerous concerns in how FACE conducted the election process, uncovering how the office was gripped internally by turmoil and factions, potentially affecting the election process. A New York City comptroller report called on the Education Department to implement a series of changes in the voting process, but the participation rate remained unchanged.

“It’s indefensible what happened with the election,” said Robert Murtfeld, a former Community Education Council member in Manhattan’s District 1, who runs an advocacy committee at The Neighborhood School.

Given Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to include families in governance of the nation’s largest school system, Murtfeld suggested there’s an opportunity to find someone who can engage not only the estimated 1.6 million current parents in the system but also include millions more alumni.

“It needs to be someone who is inspiring,” he said. “It can’t be a bureaucratic robot.”

Meléndez took over at FACE in January 2022 after serving as a lead on the education transition team for former Mayor Eric Adams.

A former bilingual education teacher in the Bronx and assistant principal, Meléndez earned a doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania in educational leadership. While there, she wrote a thesis entitled “Dominican parenting across generations” and examined difficulties the city had engaging Black and Latino parents.

Before that, Meléndez served as a district supervisor for the city’s controversial renewal initiative aimed to turn around failing schools, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Plans to close Manhattan middle schools test Mamdani’s parent engagement pledge

2026-02-06T22:53:24+00:00

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Before Kamar Samuels took the helm of the nation’s largest school system, he set in motion plans to shutter three small middle school programs and relocate another coveted school in the Manhattan district he supervised.

Now, those nascent plans in District 3 — which includes the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, and parts of Harlem — are generating pushback from families who are hoping to persuade Samuels and other top officials to reconsider.

How the Education Department reacts will represent the first stress test of a major campaign promise from Mayor Zohran Mamdani to give communities a greater voice in decisions that affect their schools. It is also a high-stakes moment for Samuels, who indicated he might ramp up mergers and other significant changes, moves that often spark strong reactions.

Education officials argue the plans, which have been discussed with parent leaders but not yet released publicly, would help address broad systemic issues, including the growing number of tiny campuses that are difficult to sustain and the need to reshuffle school space to comply with the state’s class size mandate.

To families, the moves represent grave threats to beloved community institutions, including a campus that is known for welcoming students with disabilities and another with an emphasis on social emotional learning.

“I’m hopeful about the messages that the mayor and chancellor put forward,” said Olivia Greer, a parent who has children at two schools that would be significantly altered by the proposals. But she worries about what will be lost if the current plans go through.

District 3 plans represent broader issues facing the school system

Enrollment in the city’s public schools has been declining for years, with losses accelerating during the pandemic. That’s resulted in a growing number of schools that officials say are too small to sustain.

At the Joan of Arc campus on West 93rd Street, two of the building’s three middle schools welcomed fewer than 200 students this year.

Schools below that threshold may lead district officials to “question the sustainability of offerings for students,” Mariela Graham, the deputy superintendent in District 3, told families at a community meeting this week. Schools are funded on a per-student basis and could struggle to afford basic programs without healthy rosters.

The city is looking to close the campus’ two smallest middle schools: the Community Action School and the middle school grades of the Manhattan School for Children. Officials hope to phase out the programs over three years, according to district officials and families briefed on the plans. The building’s third middle school, Lafayette Academy, had already merged with a school on a different campus in 2023, despite parent opposition.

District officials also are planning to relocate the Center School, a popular grades 5-8 program, from its West 84th Street home shared with P.S. 9. The elementary school needs more space to comply with the state’s class size law. With pressure to shrink all classes by 2028, these kinds of moves could become increasingly common.

The city would relocate the Center School a mile and half south into a building occupied by P.S./I.S. 191, which would then lose its middle school grades, which enrolled 151 students last year.

Samuels has pulled off controversial school moves, but parents are deeply concerned

During his time as a local superintendent in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Samuels built a reputation for successfully completing mergers and relocations, even as some of them proved contentious.

These four proposals will likely face additional scrutiny, as Samuels set them in motion as the District 3 superintendent before Mamdani elevated him to lead the system. Families have launched petitions against the plans and are packing community meetings to voice their opposition.

“We’re not taking this sitting down,” said Tiffany Rodriguez-Noel, a parent at P.S./I.S. 191. She said the school took on many asylum-seeking families and contends the Education Department has not properly supported the program.

Parents at the Center School have also raised strong objections to the move. They contend their school’s flourishing theater program would struggle because their new campus does not have a proper space for it and that the move would require other programmatic changes. The Manhattan School for Children, which enrolled 130 students this fall in the middle school grades, has developed a reputation for including students with disabilities in classes alongside their general education peers. Families worry it would be difficult to find similarly welcoming communities elsewhere.

Meanwhile, at the Community Action School, dozens of parents and educators pleaded with district leaders not to close the school during a virtual community meeting this week. They stressed that the school’s small size has advantages, and it boasts strong social emotional support and restorative justice programs. Plus, enrollment shot up to 171 students this fall up from 131 last year.

When District 3 officials suggested the school’s below average reading and math scores also factored into the closure proposal, families were quick to counter that the vast majority of students come from low-income families and many arrive behind grade level.

Nicki Holtzman, a Bronx parent of a sixth grader who was bullied at his previous school, said the family sought out the program after an extensive search for a campus with the right support. “All of the teachers are highly engaged,” she said. “My child went from having no self-esteem academically to making honor roll twice.”

The closure plan, she added, “feels like a punch to the stomach — it feels rushed.”

District officials told families during the town hall they began deliberations about the district’s changes more than a year ago and included parent leaders and other representatives from each school.

But that argument did not sit well with some who said details about the plans were largely kept to a district-led working group and only trickled out to wider school communities in the last couple months. In some cases, parents heard rumors of the plans just before the December middle school admissions deadline, causing confusion and last-minute application overhauls to avoid listing schools that could soon close.

Andrew Sullivan, the principal of the Community Action School, noted during the town hall meeting that working group meetings took place during the day, making it difficult for parents to attend. (Mamdani has said he wants to rethink when meetings with parent leaders are held so “working parents can actually attend them.”)

Greer, a parent with children at the Center School and Manhattan School for Children, acknowledged that district officials have incorporated some feedback, such as phasing out middle school programs over three years rather than shutting them down outright.

“It’s not that there has been no listening and incorporation of feedback,” she said. But “my sense is that there has been a plan in place from the beginning and a view about what the preferred outcome is.”

Reginald Higgins, the acting superintendent in District 3, acknowledged in the town hall meeting that families felt the process was opaque and frustrating and suggested the process left room for improvement. He stressed that the proposals were formed before he was appointed and vowed to hear school communities out.

“I want to ensure that whatever we do moving forward, that that is a different experience for all of us,” he said.

Education Department spokesperson Nicole Brownstein noted that District 3 has held several meetings with families, parent leaders, and elected officials since December and said the superintendent plans to “schedule additional engagements.”

“Creating space for community voice is critical to this administration,” she wrote.

Fight over school closures comes at an awkward time for Mamdani

How Higgins manages the process could offer an early window into the new administration’s approach to community engagement, and it comes at a politically delicate moment for Mamdani.

On the campaign trail, the mayor vowed to cede his substantial power over the school system to give families and educators more voice. But he recently abandoned that proposal and is now pushing lawmakers to extend mayoral control of the school system, which expires this summer and is dictated by state law.

Mamdani pledged his version of mayoral control will give communities more of a say without giving up his power. That could be an awkward sell while scores of parents from District 3 are protesting decisions to close their middle schools.

Making matters more complicated, Mamdani has not been able to appoint the majority of the members of the Panel for Educational Policy, the board that makes the final decision on school closures and relocations and has historically voted in line with City Hall’s wishes. The terms of the current members, including appointees of former Mayor Eric Adams, don’t end until June. But if the Education Department moves forward with the plans in District 3, they would likely come up for a vote by the panel in April.

Board members are already paying close attention, with several attending community meetings in District 3 to learn more about the plans.

Panel chair Greg Faulker said he expects the board to carefully weigh the Education Department’s proposals, offering no guarantee of their fate. “The DOE has to work harder because they have to convince us,” Faulkner said. “I don’t think the days of ramming things through really exist anymore.”

On the campaign trail, Mamdani’s critique of mayoral control invoked the image of parents protesting plans to upend their children’s schools in hourslong meetings, only for the panel to vote in line with City Hall’s wishes.

In the coming months, the mayor that families might be protesting is Mamdani.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Safety, academic rigor, integration: Kamar Samuels embarks on 5-borough tour to discuss priorities

2026-02-05T22:16:39+00:00

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Before becoming the chancellor of the nation’s largest school system last month, Kamar Samuels was a superintendent, first in Brooklyn and then in Manhattan, where he developed a reputation for his listening skills.

Now Samuels plans to embark on a five-borough tour to hear from students, parents, and educators on how to better include them in the decision-making process, especially when it comes to his main priorities: safety, academic rigor, and integration. Other Education Department staffers will be on hand to answer questions about special education, enrollment, language access, and more, officials said.

Each borough will host two sessions, one on a Tuesday and one on a Saturday. After the 10 sessions wrap up, the Education Department plans to release a report based on the feedback gathered during the events’ roundtable discussions as well as a “long-term roadmap” for the city’s school, officials said. It’s something of a rite of passage for new chancellors, who have previously embarked on similar listening tours and issued reports about what they heard.

“These conversations are about fundamentally changing how we make decisions by ensuring that those closest to our students have a real seat at the table,” Samuels said in a statement.

Several controversial topics will likely come up, including Samuels’ record of merging schools as a way to tackle low enrollment and integrate students from different backgrounds. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has indicated his support for bolstering diversity in New York City schools, which is one of the nation’s most segregated school systems.

Samuel’s approach to gifted and talented programs is also sure to attract heated debate. When he was in charge of Brooklyn’s District 13, he helped several schools move away from gifted programs, responding to a groundswell of support from families who were concerned about the relative lack of Black and Latino students in such classrooms, and he instead encouraged schools to create International Baccalaureate programs, bringing academic enrichment to entire schools rather than just a subset of classes.

Mamdani has also expressed wanting to rethink the city’s gifted programs, particularly the practice of admitting students into the programs in kindergarten. Most programs across the nation start when kids are older, and in recent years, New York City has opened new programs starting in third grade.

Several parents and educators who have worked with Samuels are quick to point out that the chancellor is unlikely to simply take something away without providing other compelling options. In Manhattan’s District 3, which he most recently oversaw, Samuels tried to tackle enrollment declines in Harlem — where a large percentage of families go to charters — through mergers along with bringing new programs.

Michelle Lee, who sits on the parent council for Manhattan’s District 3 and formerly served as PTA president at Anderson, a gifted and talented K-8 school that draws students from across the city, said parents were leery when Samuels took the helm of their district.

But when Samuels held a town hall for the school to discuss bringing back screens for the middle school, families were “pleasantly surprised” that he wanted to engage with them.

“I think he sees the validity of why there is a segment of the student population that needs to have accelerated learning, and he understands that,” Lee said. “He does believe in providing opportunities for children and different types of learners.”

But she also had some suggestions about ending gifted for kindergartners in favor of starting in third grade: Few parents would want to pull their children from their elementary school for a program lasting third to fifth grade, she said. They would, however, potentially consider a third through eighth grade program, allowing them to skip the middle school application process.

It remains to be seen whether Samuels’ can translate his listening approach from a more local level to the system writ large and how he’ll be able to synthesize feedback from families with competing needs from 1,600 schools across the city.

Meghan Dunn, District 13’s superintendent who had been Samuels’ deputy superintendent when they started pursuing the International Baccalaureate, said the idea grew out of conversations with families.

Dunn said Samuels was intentional about cultivating relationships with families — in his capacity as a fellow parent of children in the school system and as a superintendent. “He called it,” Dunn said, “the playground superintendent.”

Here’s the schedule for the chancellor’s listening tour, dubbed, “Our Schools. Our Future: Conversations with the Chancellor:”

Queens, March 17, 6:30-8:00 p.m.

Queens Innovation Center, 53-16 Northern Boulevard

Brooklyn, March 24, 6:30-8:00 p.m.

John Dewey High School, 2471 Stillwell Ave.

Bronx, March 28, 10:30 a.m. to noon

Roosevelt Educational Campus, 500 East Fordham Road

Staten Island, April 11, 10:30 a.m. to noon

Curtis High School, 105 Hamilton Ave.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC might miss class size targets, education leaders say

2026-01-30T00:22:28+00:00

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Top state and city education leaders raised serious doubts about whether New York City schools will be able to meet the mandates requiring them to reduce class sizes.

New York State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa and New York City schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels testified Thursday at a hearing held by state legislators in response to the executive budget Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed last week.

Both officials said that the city would need a significant increase in funds, building space, and teachers to meet targets in a state law that requires schools to limit classes to between 20 and 25 students, depending on the grade. The law mandates that 80% of classes meet the limit next school year. State officials can withhold funding if the city’s Education Department fails to comply with the law.

The class size law, which was enacted in 2022 with a five-year implementation plan, requires city schools to ensure that the number of classrooms meeting the mandate increases by 20% each year.

New York City met this year’s target of 60% compliance, but only after declaring thousands of classes exempt from the cap, a Chalkbeat analysis found. The city spent approximately $450 million on a teacher hiring spree this fall to help meet that target.

“We are going to have a major difficulty getting to 80%,” Rosa said.

The city would need $602 million annually to hire 6,000 additional teachers on top of its standard annual hiring needs, Samuels told legislators. Even with that funding, there are not enough teachers in the workforce pipeline to meet the mandate and achieve the state’s class size goals, he added.

In addition to hiring more teachers, officials previously projected that the city would need to spend up to $18 billion on construction to create space for additional classrooms.

Samuels told legislators the city was looking for ways to better utilize existing school space, including by merging schools that have underutilized space with those that are overcrowded. The chancellor also said that of the city schools that don’t have enough space to meet the mandates, 25% need just one to four additional classrooms. So there may be solutions that don’t require new construction.

In response to legislators’ questions, Rosa repeated her previous concerns about the class size law’s unintended negative consequences for high-poverty schools. A 2023 Chalkbeat analysis found that because poorer schools already have smaller class sizes, they stand to benefit least from the cap. When there are hiring sprees, high-needs schools are also at risk of losing teachers to schools with more resources.

If new construction is targeted in neighborhoods with the highest enrollment, lower-income districts could lose out, Rosa said.

Beyond the class size cap hurdles, Rosa and Samuels also raised concerns about the state’s Foundation Aid formula, which accounts for the majority of education spending. Because of changes made to the formula last year, New York City lost out on $314 million it would have received without the changes, Samuels said. Barring legislation that would tweak the formula again, the city will take a similar hit this year.

Samuels called on the state to adjust the formula to provide additional funds for students in temporary housing, English language learners, and students with disabilities, as well as better accounting for the higher cost of doing business in expensive districts like New York City.

Abigail Kramer is a reporter in New York City. Contact Abigail at akramer@chalkbeat.org.

Who is Kamar Samuels? Meet Zohran Mamdani’s schools chancellor.

2026-01-15T16:23:05+00:00

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Shortly after Mayor Zohran Mamdani tapped Kamar Samuels to run New York City’s public schools, the two visited a Brooklyn campus where they were swarmed by students jockeying for selfies.

Mamdani soon peeled away, but Samuels toured the school, Arts & Letters 305 United, where he ducked into a room of third graders and began counting students.

As a local superintendent overseeing dozens of campuses, first in Brooklyn and then in Manhattan, Samuels often informally surveyed classroom headcounts on his visits. He’d later check official registers to see how many students were missing that day, a key measure of whether students are engaged at school.

“I really don’t have to do this,” Samuels said with a laugh after leaving the room of 21 third graders. “It’s kind of like muscle memory.”

Mamdani told Chalkbeat he selected Samuels, 48, because of his granular knowledge of the city’s classrooms, learned during more than two decades as a teacher, principal, and superintendent. The mayor also cited Samuels’ track record of pursuing ambitious change.

In both of the racially diverse New York City local districts he oversaw, Samuels used school mergers to address declining enrollment and persistent segregation. He led a transition away from gifted programs, replacing them with International Baccalaureate offerings available to all students. And he helped guide a plan to diversify several Brooklyn middle schools by setting aside a portion of seats for low-income students.

Those moves sometimes generated pushback. But Education Department colleagues saw him as a leader who doesn’t shy away from thorny problems and crafts solutions based on input from schools and families. In nearly 20 interviews with educators, parents, and former and current city officials, Samuels was described as someone who builds deep community ties, listens to critics, and focuses on student outcomes.

“He has not been afraid to touch the third rail and have difficult conversations — be it around equity, low enrollment, the concept of rigor, and the disparities in test scores throughout our district,” said Jill Rackmill, co-president of the parent council in District 3 in Manhattan, which Samuels supervised as superintendent. “Ultimately, he makes the hard decisions and does the tough things.”

In his first week on the job, Samuels told principals that he will build on some of the prior administration’s biggest initiatives, including new career education programs and an overhaul of elementary school reading.

And the new schools chief has pointed to other big problems facing the system, including cratering enrollment and alarming rates of chronic absenteeism, in which 1 in 3 students now miss more than 10% of the school year. He recently gave the system’s overall performance a “C” grade.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of the Bank Street College of Education and a former top Education Department official, said he believes Samuels is up to the challenge.

“He’s politically gifted in a way that’s similar to the mayor,” Polakow-Suransky said. “He’s someone who inspires people and really gets them excited about his vision and supporting change.”

Samuels’ built a reputation for listening early on

Samuels, who moved to New York from Jamaica at age 15, originally pursued a career in finance, landing an accounting job at the National Basketball Association. He hated it.

He saw a subway ad for the city’s Teaching Fellows Program, a fast-track initiative that funnels career-changers into city classrooms. Within a few months, he was teaching sixth grade math at P.S./M.S. 194 in the Bronx.

Over the next two decades, Samuels rose through the ranks at the Education Department, earning a reputation for his strong rapport with community members.

Page Best-Hardy, a retired family leadership coordinator in District 23, which includes Brownsville and Ocean Hill, recalled that when Samuels was a deputy superintendent there nearly a decade ago an attendee at a back-to-school event confronted him about the poor performance of local schools. Samuels wasn’t defensive and won over the crowd by saying he needed their help to improve student outcomes.

“He didn’t say things were all rosy,” Best-Hardy recounted. “They didn’t expect that.”

As the superintendent of District 13, which runs from Brooklyn Heights to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Samuels not only cared about getting to know nearly everyone at the schools he oversaw, but he also was laser-focused on assessment data, said Emily Paige, principal of The Urban Assembly Unison School in Clinton Hill.

During one visit to the school, when he had come to evaluate Paige, she found him in the cafeteria introducing himself to the kitchen staff and sampling the food. He also spent time with Paige reviewing students’ scores on citywide reading assessments.

Samuels took a look at a chart of test scores Paige had prepared and homed in on a single student. “‘What is that telling you about this one child? What does that score mean?’” Paige recalled Samuels asking her. The conversation prompted Paige to think more carefully about how teachers should use the assessment data to tweak their instruction for students who are behind in reading.

That was a “really important moment for us as a school,” Paige said.

Mergers have tested Samuels’ leadership

As superintendent of District 13 and District 3 in Manhattan — a diverse district that includes the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, and parts of Harlem — Samuels became known for carefully crafting mergers.

In both districts, he combined schools with different demographic profiles to foster integration while addressing declining enrollment. The proposals sparked fraught conversations about school resources and race. But Samuels stuck to his plans, drawing on the relationships he had forged with community members.

In his first full week as chancellor, Samuels highlighted that record by hosting Mamdani at Arts & Letters 305 United in District 13. The school is the result of a merger between Arts & Letters, a more affluent and overenrolled Fort Greene school that served a disproportionate share of white students, and P.S. 305, an underenrolled majority-Black campus in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“I see a model and an example for the rest of the city,” Samuels declared to a group of parent leaders, school staff, and elected officials.

Samuels told Chalkbeat that mergers may become increasingly necessary, as K-12 enrollment has plunged in recent years. About 793,000 students attend the city’s public schools this year according to preliminary figures, a loss of well over 100,000 children since 2020. As schools shrink, they often struggle to afford basic programs because funding is tied to headcount.

P.S. 305 had slipped below 100 students, making it a prime target. But the merger, finalized in 2020, was at times contentious. Several P.S. 305 families feared it was a takeover of their school. Meanwhile, some Arts & Letters families worried about moving to Bed-Stuy — concerns that had racial undertones connected to neighborhood crime and the school’s concentration of homeless students, according to a case study on the merger released by the city comptroller’s office.

Education Department officials involved in the process were impressed with how Samuels engaged the school communities to build support and diffuse conflict — a sharp contrast with many other consolidations.

“By the time we got to the vote, there was broad consensus,” said Karin Goldmark, a former deputy chancellor who led a public hearing with Samuels about the merger. “It’s a testament to the depth of engagement that he did.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels visit students and staff at Arts & Letters 305 United, a campus Samuels helped merge in 2020.

Samuels’ track record of building community support was likely a selling point for Mamdani. On the campaign trail, the mayor vowed to give educators and families more input in Education Department decisions, though he backtracked from a promise to end mayoral control of the system. Samuels’ experience shifting schools away from gifted programs also lines up with another Mamdani campaign pledge.

Still, not everyone has been impressed with Samuels’ approach to community engagement.

Morana Mesic, a former parent at West Side Collaborative, an Upper West Side middle school, was devastated when the school merged into Lafayette Academy in 2023 — a proposal from Samuels that drew considerable backlash in District 3.

“We will always consider it the closure of our school,” said Mesic, who was the PTA president at West Side Collaborative at the time. The merger disrupted her son’s education. Mesic declined to send him to the newly merged school and struggled to find a campus that was a good fit, ultimately transferring her son to two different middle schools.

Mesic felt some details were left out of initial conversations, including that the school would lose its longtime principal and parent coordinator. She acknowledged that Samuels set up many community meetings to hash out the details but they felt performative to her. “They put a lot of dates on the calendar so they could say to reporters and the media, ‘Look how much effort was put into the process,’” she said.

Still, Mesic is a fan of Mamdani and is willing to give Samuels time to prove himself as chancellor.

The new schools chief has wasted little time trying to earn that trust. His first order of business was to launch a whirlwind tour to visit schools in each of the city’s 45 districts during his first two months in office.

Many of those early visits have included informal roundtable discussions with students, parent leaders, staff, and local elected officials. At Arts & Letters, Samuels gave a short overview of his background and high-level priorities around rigor, safety, and integration before taking questions on the tiny number of school librarians and how he would support parent leaders.

Unlike some of his predecessors, Samuels has avoided making waves in his first days in office.

Before he lays out how he thinks the system should change, Samuels said he needs input. The goal isn’t to get everyone to like him, he said. It’s to generate buy-in for the solutions he ultimately proposes.

“It’s not just about, ‘Do parents like you?” Samuels said during his first meeting with the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council. “It’s about: What are we achieving when we work together? And are we solving the biggest problems together?”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Exclusive: NYC schools chancellor Kamar Samuels on mergers, integration, and screened schools

2026-01-08T23:32:01+00:00

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On Kamar Samuels’ fourth school day as chancellor, he brought Mayor Zohran Mamdani to a Brooklyn school he views as a blueprint for tackling two major problems: segregation and sagging enrollment.

Samuels played a leading role merging two different school communities into Arts & Letters 305 United five years ago. The move combined P.S. 305, an underenrolled majority Black campus in Bedford-Stuyvesant, with Arts & Letters, a highly coveted more affluent school in Fort Greene serving one of the district’s largest shares of white students.

“I see a model and an example for the rest of the city,” Samuels told a group of parent leaders, educators, and elected officials, vowing not to “ugly cry” during Thursday’s visit. “It’s beyond what I had dreamt about.”

Deploying school mergers with an eye toward integration has been a hallmark of Samuels’ leadership. He used the strategy from his time overseeing schools in Brooklyn’s District 13 and brought it to his next role as superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3.

In an exclusive interview with Chalkbeat, Mamdani said he selected Samuels because of his deep knowledge of the city’s public schools and his track record taking on thorny problems.

“I told him that we needed a leader who was fluent in the system,” Mamdani said. “In him, I have seen someone who has been able to tackle the challenges that we have become used to as well as deliver the results that we haven’t always seen.”

Before the opening bell, Mamdani greeted dozens of families who circled him in the schoolyard. Some parents snapped selfies while students rushed into the scrum to shake the mayor’s hand. “Have a great day at school,” Mamdani scribbled in fifth grader Rafi’s notebook before offering his autograph. “Yo, I’m crashing out,” a student shouted after recognizing the new mayor.

After Samuels toured the school, Chalkbeat caught up with the schools chief to ask how he hopes to address school segregation, boost results for students who are struggling academically in the wake of the pandemic, and whether he agrees with the mayor’s assessment that charter schools siphon resources from district schools.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You moved here when you were 15 from Jamaica. I’m curious what your schooling was like both in Jamaica and when you moved here.

I started out in school in Jamaica — in a school that was one of the first schools that integrated physically disabled students with able-bodied students.

It was an experiment that they were doing in Jamaica. There was a lot of stigma associated with physically disabled students. And my parents signed up. They believed in having an inclusive environment. It was called The Hope Valley Experimental School.

And then after that, in Jamaica, you can take a test, or you could, at the time in fifth grade, it was called the common entrance test. And then you could go to what we call high school, which essentially is from seventh grade to 12th.

I went to this high school, Jamaica College, and then I ended up graduating high school in Jamaica when I was 15 and I moved here. It was too late to apply to college, and my mom was like, ‘You’re too young to do any of that.’ So for the first semester, she sent me to Evander Childs High School in the Bronx. I was there for probably a semester after which we applied to the CUNY system. Bronx Community College was close to me. So I went there for a little bit, and then I transferred to Baruch College. I graduated college when I was 20.

My mom said, ‘You are good at math, you should go do accounting.’ So I did accounting. I absolutely hated it. I hated it so much. I said to myself, ‘If I try to get a job in sports, just to be an accountant in sports.’ I worked for the National Basketball Association for a little bit, and I said, ‘If I can’t love accounting doing this, I’m never gonna love it.’

I had tutored students with disabilities at Bronx Community College, and I really liked the connection [we had]. And so I’m going home on the train one day, and I saw [a sign] that said, ‘Do you remember your first grade teacher’s name? Who will remember yours?’ It was the New York City Teaching Fellows Program. I went home, applied the same day, and I was in the classroom probably three months or four months later.

One of the biggest challenges facing the education department right now is declining enrollment and the growing number of really small schools. You obviously have some experience as a superintendent pursuing school mergers, so I’m wondering how you’re starting to think about that systemwide. Is there a threshold below which you think a school is too small to be sustainable?

What decides for me whether a school is too small is the resources that it’s able to garner for kids. And there are schools across the city that aren’t able to have the best enrichment programs. An eighth grader might not be exposed to Algebra because they don’t have the resources. That is something we have to take a look at across the city, especially when we think about our class size mandates.

And I don’t think of class size as a mandate. I think of class size as an opportunity to meet the needs of every student in the classroom. We have to use the fact that we’re in this cycle of lower enrollment as an opportunity to think about how we utilize different spaces.

You’ve also talked about wanting to prioritize school integration. What kinds of integration efforts might you be interested in pursuing?

I really believe that a school that’s socioeconomically integrated — especially as we think about our city and the diversity that it brings culturally — is a school that I want my own children, who are in the public school system, to be a part of.

I remember my first parent-teacher conference when I realized I had the cab driver’s kids, the police detective’s kids, the home health aide’s kids. It hit me that all these people want the best for their kids, and it was my job to really make sure that their kids were seen and heard. And I think that’s the part of school integration that people often miss: We want to make sure that we have high expectations for all kids, and we want to make sure that they feel affirmed in school.

A larger share of New York City middle and high schools screen students for admission than almost any other school system in the country. Will you be looking at ways to reduce screening?

There are fewer screened schools today than they were prior to the pandemic — and the way that we’re doing screens today is different. Instead of focusing on test scores, like we used to do, we’re now focused on academic report card grades. If we’re going to do screens, [course grades are] more aligned to what I would want to support.

When we look at [District 3] where I was a superintendent, we didn’t bring screens back wholesale, except for our citywide [gifted] program under the Anderson School. It was because that was a community-driven process that I listened to folks. Not everybody was in favor of it, but certainly there was a majority of parents in favor of that, and we moved in that direction.

We’re going to continue to listen to parents. If there are places where people don’t necessarily want to do that, then we’ll listen.

New York City’s lowest performing students have been struggling to recover from the pandemic. Do you have ideas about how specifically the system should better support those students? What about schools serving mostly students below grade level?

We have invested incredibly in New York City Reads. And a part of New York City Reads is this idea of MTSS [multi-tiered system of supports], which I know is confusing for folks. What is that? It’s essentially a structure that makes sure every child gets what they need when it’s implemented well, and that during the school day. So during the school day we’ve been clearer than ever on what interventions mean, when we do them, how we create time to do them.

We’ve done so much work around that during the school day. Some schools do great work with high dosage tutoring and we’re going to have to continue that. The one thing I do think gets in the way of all of this is chronic absenteeism.

And so since the pandemic, no matter your demographics, what we’ve noticed is that you’re likely to come into school fewer days than before. And folks need to understand that if we’re not in school your child is going to miss work. I’m doing a lot of thinking about different ways to address chronic absenteeism.

During the campaign, Mayor Mamdani indicated that charter schools siphon resources away from traditional public schools, shouldn’t have space in city buildings, and also should be audited. Do you agree with that position?

Kamar Samuels believes in a great school, no matter what kind of school it is. I know there are some charter schools that do really, really good work. I think charter schools will continue to do that work, and I know that they can do that work within the cap that they have.

And I do believe that there are charter schools, like some district schools, that may not be doing as well as we want them to do, and I think those schools should be held accountable.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Kamar Samuels says NYC will double down on literacy mandate — but signals changes to math overhaul

2026-01-06T22:05:29+00:00

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A reading curriculum overhaul launched by Mayor Eric Adams isn’t going anywhere, schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels told principals Tuesday. But he signaled changes could be coming to the prior administration’s math mandate.

“I completely believe in academic rigor and excellence — that’s why we are doubling down on what we’re doing with New York City Reads,” Samuels told principals during a Tuesday morning webinar, according to a recording obtained by Chalkbeat.

“We’re going to probably take a little bit of a different approach to New York City Solves, so you might see some shifts there,” Samuels said of the math mandate. Neither Samuels nor an Education Department spokesperson elaborated on what changes he is considering.

Under Adams, the city required all elementary schools to adopt one of three approved literacy curriculums. The program, known as NYC Reads, marked a major shakeup for a system that has long given principals freedom to choose what materials their schools use. Meanwhile, high schools had to adopt a standardized Algebra 1 curriculum, and a growing number of middle schools have been required to use new math programs, too.

Samuels’ comments indicate that key pieces of Adams’ education agenda will continue despite the transition between mayoral administrations — echoing sentiments shared by Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the campaign trail. The new schools chief also told high school principals “not to worry” about the fate of another key Adams initiative that created new career education pathways at over 130 schools, known as FutureReadyNYC.

That may be a relief to some school leaders who often fear promising programs could be discarded when the city’s political leadership changes. Still, Samuels indicated he is willing to make changes to the city’s math mandate, which has proved less popular with many educators and school leaders.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said he is encouraged that Samuels is taking a closer look at the math program. Some educators have raised concerns that the Illustrative Math curriculum, which emphasizes open-ended activities and discussion, is not in sync with the state’s exit exams that are currently required for graduation. The program’s critics say it can be a struggle for students who are behind or don’t have enough background knowledge in the subject.

The union leader said many teachers appreciate the curriculum’s approach but are frustrated with some of the implementation challenges. Mulgrew praised Samuels as a “practical” leader who could help troubleshoot. “He’s an educator — he gets the fact that you can’t start the first unit with something children have no baseline knowledge of,” Mulgrew said.

Samuels also praised some of the prior administration’s efforts to ramp up assessments to identify children who are struggling and standardize how schools help them catch up. For the first time this school year, all of the city’s public schools must pick from a list of approved programs to help students who are behind.

“Our most vulnerable students need to learn how to read,” Samuels said. “That is our number one goal.”

Samuels has also recently touted his own record on literacy. As superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3, Samuels presided over an increase in reading scores. Scores in his district climbed just over 3 percentage points last year, to 67.4% proficiency, after implementing a new reading curriculum. Citywide, about 56% of students were considered proficient last year, a roughly 7 percentage point increase, matching the gains statewide.

In his address to principals, Samuels reiterated his commitment to school safety and integration, an idea he said should go beyond shifting classroom demographics and focus on culturally responsive teaching.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools chief Kamar Samuels signals integration, culturally responsive education as priorities

2026-01-05T22:26:25+00:00

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In a letter to Education Department staff on Monday, New York City schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels began sketching out some of his priorities, including school integration and lessons that reflect the system’s diversity.

“I believe that every student — starting in early childhood and continuing through graduation — deserves a school that is academically rigorous, safe, and truly integrated,” Samuels wrote in the letter obtained by Chalkbeat.

Families, he added, “should be able to expect that our system reflects New York City’s rich multiculturalism, both through the diversity of our schools and through culturally responsive curriculum and practice.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not campaign on a detailed education agenda, but he cited school integration as one of his goals — an issue former Mayor Eric Adams largely sidestepped. It remains to be seen how Samuels may approach diversifying one of the nation’s most segregated school systems. As a local superintendent, he pursued mergers and admissions policy changes with an eye toward integration.

In recent years, city officials have rolled out lessons that focus on historically marginalized groups — from the global African diaspora to LGBTQ communities. Samuels’ letter suggests he is interested in building on that work.

When Samuels led Brooklyn’s District 13, he worked with school communities to phase out gifted and talented programs and led an effort to bring the International Baccalaureate curriculum to schools across the district. Mamdani has also pledged to scale back gifted programming for the city’s youngest students.

In his Monday letter to school staffers, Samuels emphasized the importance of having “high expectations” and “high-quality learning,” while also noting the importance of foundational literacy skills and “class sizes that allow educators to meet students’ needs.”

Samuels indicated he will take community input seriously. On the campaign trail, Mamdani promised to end mayoral control of the city’s schools, arguing the system has not been responsive enough to community voices. He reversed that position last week, though the mayor has promised to come up with new ways to strengthen community input.

“I also believe deeply in transparency, accountability, and meaningful engagement,” Samuels wrote. “Our work will be strongest when educators, families, and students know their voices are heard — not symbolically, but in practice.”

The new schools chancellor began his first official school day at P.S./M.S. 194 in the Bronx, the campus where he got his start in the city’s school system in 2001 as a sixth grade math teacher. He met with educators, students, and parent leaders, according to an Education Department spokesperson. (The visit was not open to the press.)

Samuels also emphasized in his letter that he has a personal stake in the system. Two of his children — a first grader and an 11th grader — are New York City public school students, while his youngest is not yet school-age.

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Zohran Mamdani to tap Superintendent Kamar Samuels as NYC schools chancellor

2025-12-31T01:51:01+00:00

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Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is expected to tap Kamar Samuels, a Manhattan superintendent, to run New York City’s public school system, according to a transition committee member briefed by administration officials.

As the superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3, Samuels supervises schools with widely varying demographic profiles across the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights, and parts of Harlem. Samuels has led school integration plans and played a role in a previous effort to scale back gifted programs, initiatives that Mamdani has vowed to revive.

Samuels also has experience executing school mergers — a task that is often complex and controversial — which could be valuable as the city grapples with a growing number of tiny campuses. Those mergers, however, have tended to have an explicit integration focus in what is one of the nation’s most segregated school systems.

Before his tenure in District 3, where he oversaw several mergers, Samuels was the superintendent in Brooklyn’s District 13, which spans from Brooklyn Heights to Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant. While there, he oversaw the move of Arts & Letters, a coveted pre-K-8 school, from its home in Clinton Hill to an underenrolled school building in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

He also spearheaded that district’s move away from gifted and talented programs — amid growing concerns from parents about racial disparities — and laid the groundwork to move toward implementing International Baccalaureate programs districtwide. The International Baccalaureate is recognized globally as a rigorous program, and District 13 aimed to use it to create a more inclusive schoolwide approach to enrichment as an alternative to gifted education, serving only a select group of students.

Samuels started out as a teacher in the Bronx nearly two decades ago before becoming a principal at the Bronx Writing Academy, or P.S. 323, where he took advantage of a teachers union program allowing schools to experiment beyond the confines of the contract: he staggered start times for teachers, adjusted class lengths, and incorporated online learning through a city program known as iZone, which paid for the school’s new computers.

His expected appointment was first reported by City & State.

He will face a series of challenges as New York City’s schools chief. As enrollment in public schools has plunged, the incoming administration will have to answer difficult questions about whether to close or merge more schools. Rates of chronic absenteeism, which skyrocketed during the pandemic, remain elevated. A state class size mandate will require finding thousands of new teachers and billions of dollars. Though reading and math scores have ticked up on state assessments, the city’s performance is widely considered middling given the agency’s nearly $43 billion budget — and there are wide gaps that cleave along lines of race and class.

Perhaps the trickiest task for the incoming chancellor will be managing one of Mamdani’s most significant education promises: to end mayoral control of the nation’s largest school system and give families and educators more of a say.

Mamdani has yet to outline how he would give up some of his own power over the school system, but it’s possible those moves would dilute the schools chief’s authority.

Some education observers were quick to praise Mamdani’s decision to elevate Samuels.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist who has written extensively about inequity in New York City schools, praised the move on social media as “outstanding news for those who still care about school integration and equality.” She added: “In the face of the national attacks on civil rights and dismantling of enforcement at the U.S. DOE this pick by Mamdani sends a powerful message.”

Others who have worked directly with Samuels said he is known for navigating thorny debates about inequity in the system and incorporating feedback from parents and other community members.

“He is savvy and respected,” said David Adams, the CEO of Urban Assembly, which supports a network of New York City public schools. The decision “reflects a mayor who is looking for a chancellor who knows how to operate within the system.”

Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat

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Curriculum overhauls have sparked debate

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5 new public schools opening this fall in the Bronx and Queens

Academy of Cultural Excellence

Long Island City, Queens

Bronx School of Arts & Exploration

Highbridge/South Crotona, Bronx

The Bronx School of Hip-Hop

Claremont, Bronx

Queens Academy for Innovative Learning

Astoria, Queens

West Q Elementary (P.S. 437)

Woodside, Queens

The AI rebellion grows in NYC: Over 100 New Yorkers demand moratorium on AI use in schools at marathon board meeting

AI discussions surface issues with current Department of Education process

Panel greenlights controversial tech contracts as AI policy lags

NYC pulls contentious proposals to open AI-themed high school, close Upper West Side middle schools

Next Gen raises questions about AI, equity

District 3 proposals test city’s commitment to parent engagement

Where is NYC’s 2026-27 public school calendar? Kamar Samuels says it’s coming next week.

An alternative to gifted education: Why some NYC schools are embracing International Baccalaureate

Leaning on IB to tackle enrollment declines

The move to IB can be challenging

A middle school IB program helps students find their ‘voice’

P.S. Weekly: NYC student reporters press Chancellor Kamar Samuels on integration, AI, and more

NYC’s homeless students struggle to get to school. Advocates want more funding, coordination.

Transportation barriers drive down school attendance

Will NYC school budgets take a hit next year? Education Department officials are mum.

NYC’s Education Dept. is releasing a long-awaited AI policy. Some schools already have their own.

NYC schools struggle to keep up with growing AI use

Enterprising staffers take the lead

As schools develop AI policies, they dig into the gray area

Next phase of NYC reading overhaul? Schools chief wants to help struggling middle, high school students

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Here are the new faces in Samuels’ cabinet.

Here’s who is returning to their former post.

Kamar Samuels to unveil new Education Department cabinet as old deputies exit

NYC reverses Upper West Side middle school closure after mom’s viral racist remark sparks outcry

Deputy chancellor for family engagement is stepping down. Will a broader reshuffle follow?

Plans to close Manhattan middle schools test Mamdani’s parent engagement pledge

District 3 plans represent broader issues facing the school system

Samuels has pulled off controversial school moves, but parents are deeply concerned

Fight over school closures comes at an awkward time for Mamdani

Safety, academic rigor, integration: Kamar Samuels embarks on 5-borough tour to discuss priorities

Staten Island, Feb. 10, 6:30-8:00 p.m.

Manhattan, Feb. 24, 6:30-8:00 p.m.

Brooklyn, Feb. 28, 10:30 a.m. to noon

Queens, March 7, 10:30 a.m. to noon

Bronx, March 10, 6:30-8:00 p.m.

Manhattan, March 14, 10:30 a.m. to noon

Queens, March 17, 6:30-8:00 p.m.

Brooklyn, March 24, 6:30-8:00 p.m.

Bronx, March 28, 10:30 a.m. to noon

Staten Island, April 11, 10:30 a.m. to noon

NYC might miss class size targets, education leaders say

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Samuels’ built a reputation for listening early on

Mergers have tested Samuels’ leadership

Exclusive: NYC schools chancellor Kamar Samuels on mergers, integration, and screened schools

Kamar Samuels says NYC will double down on literacy mandate — but signals changes to math overhaul

NYC schools chief Kamar Samuels signals integration, culturally responsive education as priorities

Zohran Mamdani to tap Superintendent Kamar Samuels as NYC schools chancellor