Less than three years after taking the helm of New York City’s school system, Chancellor David Banks is planning to retire at the end of the year amid widening probes of City Hall.
Banks’ stunning Tuesday announcement comes nearly three weeks after federal agents visited his home the day before school started and seized his phones as part of a broader investigation into members of Mayor Eric Adams’ inner circle. Investigators also confiscated phones from Banks’ partner, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, and his two brothers, Phil Banks, deputy mayor for public safety, and Terence Banks, a consultant and former MTA staffer.
Investigators are reportedly looking into clients of Terence Banks’ consulting firm who sought contracts with the city.
The announcement from the 62-year-old schools chief concludes a 40-year career in the city’s public schools that stretched from being a school safety agent to helping launch a network of public schools geared toward boys of color. Tapped by Adams, who said he never seriously considered other candidates to helm the nation’s largest school district, Banks promised sweeping change to a system he described as “fundamentally flawed.”
In his time in office, though, Banks focused narrowly on two goals: overhauling reading instruction and exposing students to career options before graduating high school.
In a Tuesday letter informing Adams of his plan to retire, Banks said he would do “everything possible to ensure a smooth transition.”
“Serving as Chancellor has been a profound honor and a deeply fulfilling experience,” he said. “I am confident that NYC Public Schools will continue to grow, innovate and excel under the next Chancellor.”
Banks did not acknowledge the federal investigations in his letter, and he said his intent to retire by Dec. 31 predated the start of the school year.
“On behalf of all New Yorkers, we thank Chancellor Banks for his service, and wish him well in his retirement at the end of the calendar year,” Adams said in a statement Tuesday.
Melissa Aviles-Ramos, who currently serves as a deputy chancellor overseeing family engagement, is expected to take the helm of the nation’s largest school district, according to sources familiar with the appointment. She previously steered the Education Department’s efforts to incorporate the wave of migrant students who began arriving two years ago, in an initiative the city dubbed Project Open Arms.
Adams is expected to announce her new role on Wednesday in the Bronx.
Banks’ announcement comes on the heels of a series of resignations of high-profile figures in the Adams administration, including former Police Commissioner Edward Caban, who stepped down earlier this month, and Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan, who plans to resign at the end of the year.
As members of his administration have left City Hall, Adams has faced pressure from some local and state officials to step down. Critics were quick to use the school chancellor’s announcement as further fuel for those calls.
Banks’ tenure has been filled with a host of challenges: prioritizing what programs to save amid fiscal pressures of evaporating federal COVID stimulus funding, figuring out how to meet the needs of thousands of migrant children, and responding to the ways in which ChatGPT and other AI technology are remaking the learning experience.
For much of last school year, the Israel-Hamas war has fueled tensions between students, teachers, and parents, thrusting Banks into the spotlight when he testified before Congress in May, defending the city’s record on responding to antisemitism.
In response to questions about the federal investigations, Banks told reporters two weeks ago he is someone “who lives his life with integrity.”
Several days later, he said there’s a “genuine fondness across the system” for his leadership. But roughly 32% of teachers surveyed this year said they were dissatisfied with the chancellor, the highest rate in five years and nearly double the figure in 2019, when former Chancellor Richard Carranza was at the helm.
Ties between Banks and Adams go deep
Banks has repeatedly touted his longstanding relationship with Adams, and their professional and personal lives are intertwined. In addition to Banks’ brother and partner holding key roles in the Adams administration, Adams’ girlfriend, Tracey Collins, and his sister-in-law, Sharon Adams, both work in the city Education Department.
Stepping into the chancellor role could prove challenging for Aviles-Ramos, as federal investigations continue to swirl, and there is no guarantee she will have enough time in office to put her own stamp on the system.
“One of the challenges of mayoral control is you’re basically hitching yourself to a mayor who may not be there that long,” said Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and longtime observer of the city’s school system.
The next chancellor also inherits a system that is still reeling from the pandemic — from student learning loss to deep mental health challenges — but with fewer resources to respond. Banks’ successor also may have limited room to pursue their own policy goals. The Education Department is in the midst of implementing a state class size mandate that will require negotiations with union officials and billions in new spending, limiting dollars that could go to other projects.
Enrollment remains far below pre-pandemic levels, and the system has a growing number of small schools. Decisions about whether those schools should be merged or closed are often politically fraught and can consume the school system’s leadership.
The arrival of more than 45,000 migrant children over the past two years has helped stanch deep declines in student enrollment, though the city has long struggled to properly serve English learners and hire enough bilingual educators to support them. It still remains an urgent task.
The new chancellor will serve under the supervision of a mayor whose political standing has been riddled by investigations into campaign fundraising practices. The mayor and his staff have not been accused of wrongdoing by federal officials, and Banks did not indicate that the political scandal played a role in his departure.
Still, Banks has at times appeared to distance himself from Adams, a mayor who has not staked out a detailed agenda for the city’s schools. In the wake of Adams’ threats to slash funding from the Education Department, Banks — who earned $363,346 last year, according to public records — often said he had no choice but to implement the budget he was given.
And in response to a raucous student protest over a teacher’s support of Israel at Hillcrest High School in Queens, Banks’ alma mater, Adams was quick to condemn it as a “vile show of antisemitism.” But Banks struck a more conciliatory tone, cautioning against painting the students with too broad a brush (though in congressional testimony he later said some students were engaged “in an act of antisemitism”).
Banks’ departure comes at a particularly delicate moment for his literacy initiative. He has staked much of his legacy on ridding schools of curriculums he says are subpar and replacing them with materials aligned with the “science of reading,” a longstanding body of evidence about how children learn to read.
The rollout of that program has been bumpy, with some teachers reporting that they have not received sufficient training in adopting new materials, and experts widely agree that such transitions often take years to execute. There is scant evidence of the program’s effect on student learning so far. Test scores dipped slightly more in districts that began using the new curriculums last year, which officials have characterized as an “implementation dip” as teachers get used to the new materials.
It remains to be seen whether the new chancellor will prioritize those curriculum overhauls, including a new Algebra I curriculum that is mandated across the city’s high schools. Many advocacy groups, including the teachers union, have backed them.
Aside from a separate initiative to expose more students to career opportunities before they graduate high school, the new chancellor will not inherit many existing policy efforts. Banks has resisted calls to focus on integrating the city’s schools, which are among the country’s most segregated, and has argued it’s more important to elevate the quality of all campuses.
Some observers said it was shrewd to focus on a small number of initiatives instead of trying to disrupt the system as a whole given how difficult it is to change a system of its size. Still, others contend the administration doesn’t have a clear set of education priorities that match their rhetoric about how schools often fail the most vulnerable students.
Michael Mulgrew, president of the teachers union, praised Banks as “an educator who sought to improve public education for all students.”
State Sen. John Liu, a Queens Democrat who chairs the Senate’s New York City education committee, said in a Tuesday statement on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, that Banks had been “a good Chancellor” for the city’s schools.
“But this departure is terrible news for our schools and the city, comes at the worst possible time, and will be a loss difficult for the mayor to recover from,” he said. “Heaven help our City.”
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.
Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering New York City. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org
Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.
