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| Top Stories The survey says… What’s driving families to leave NYC public schools? A new survey offers clues. Chalkbeat, 4/11/2025 As enrollment in New York City’s public schools plunged in recent years, city officials said reversing the trend would be a major priority. New statistics offer some clues about why many families left: A desire for better instruction and concerns about school safety, according to survey results the Education Department released Friday. About 41% of families who left the system said more rigorous instruction was one of their top reasons for withdrawing. Another 40% cited a move away from the city. One in four families pointed to concerns about school safety. Bugs in the System ‘Technical issues’ take NYC parent council elections offline on first day of voting Chalkbeat, 4/25/2025 Just hours into the first day of voting for New York City’s elected parent councils, Education Department officials took the system offline to fix “technical issues,” a spokesperson said. …Debbie Kross, the parent of a high school student in the Bronx who is running as the Bronx borough representative for the Citywide Council on High Schools said when she logged in to vote this morning, she discovered that her name appeared on both the Bronx and Brooklyn ballots. …The advocacy group Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, known as PLACE, sent a press release just before 10 a.m. Friday urging the city to pause the voting process because of “incorrect ballots.” Lessons not learned Bad lesson on class size: Unfair Albany mandate undercuts NYC public schools NY Daily News Editorial, 4/11/2025 It doesn’t get much dumber than this: Though enrollment remains 100,000 below pre-pandemic levels in New York City’s largest-in-the-nation K-12 public school system, the Department of Education is being forced to hire new teachers by the thousands to comply with rigid class-size mandates imposed by the state Legislature in 2022, which write in stone that classes must be capped at 20 to 25 students depending on the grade level, down from 30 to 34 under current rules. Cutthroat Hiring NYC kicks off class size hiring spree with 3,700 new teachers Chalkbeat, 4/9/2025 New York City is giving schools extra funding to hire 3,700 teachers and 100 assistant principals to comply with a major class size reduction mandate, officials announced Wednesday. …Principals fear a cutthroat teacher hiring season …Other principals said they were glad to have the extra staff but worried about finding qualified educators. City officials estimate that they will have to hire between 7,000 and 9,000 teachers by this fall, up from roughly 5,000 in a typical year. “It’s going to be a battle,” said one high school principal whose request for additional teachers was approved and spoke on condition of anonymity. “I still don’t think there’s this core of great candidates out there who haven’t been hired yet.” Advocacy Corner PLACE NYC 2025 CEC Endorsements are Out PLACE NYC, 4/27/2025 Please help support PLACE NYC’s advocacy by voting for our recommended candidates for Citywide and Community Education Councils (CEC). These candidates are the ones we believe best align with our education advocacy based upon evaluation of: candidate statements, CEC forum participation, past CEC voting records, and statements made in public speaking sessions at education meetings (if available). We also took into consideration the candidates’ understanding of CEC’s roles and responsibilities, as well as personal leadership experience and commitment to helping NYCPS families. Cast your vote: schoolsaccount.nyc View PLACE Endorsements here Elections Watch Race to Gracie Mansion: An Interview with Curtis Sliwa City & State, 5/1/2025 Here’s who’s running for New York City mayor in 2025 City & State, 4/29/2025 Op-ed: It’s time for common-sense leadership in Queens QNS, 4/25/2025 Eric Adams Ditches Democratic Primary, Announces Independent Run The City, 4/3/2025 Cuomo picks up new wave of Queens endorsements in bid for mayor QNS, 4/2/2025 Six vie for Holden’s City Council seat Queens Chronicle, 3/27/2025 Other HeadlinesProposed ‘bell to bell’ cellphone ban for New York public schools draws mixed reaction ABC7, 4/29/2025 Are you smarter than a NYC 6th grader? Try solving these new math curricula problems. Gothamist, 4/28/2025 Qatar and China Are Pouring Billions Into Elite American Universities The Free Press, 4/27/2025 NAEP gets the squeeze A smaller Nation’s Report Card Hechinger Report, 4/24/2025 As Education Secretary Linda McMahon was busy dismantling her cabinet department, she vowed to preserve one thing: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card. …Less than two weeks later, on Monday of this week, substantial parts of NAEP came crumbling down when the board that oversees the exam reluctantly voted to kill more than a dozen of the assessments that comprise the Nation’s Report Card over the next seven years. Brushed under the rug The $40 Billion Issue the N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates Aren’t Discussing New York Times, 4/24/2025 For decades, politicians have cast education as a great equalizer and cornerstone of a thriving society. But in New York City’s competitive mayoral race, it is attracting scant attention. …The school system is charged with educating more students than the entire population of San Francisco, preparing them for college or the work force. The city’s Education Department, with more than 130,000 staff members, is among the region’s top employers. Its $40 billion budget is an unrivaled chunk of spending, exceeding that of the police, fire and health departments combined. But there is little to suggest how the major Democratic candidates for mayor would address the city’s middling academic performance, despite the latest results of a gold-standard federal exam that revealed alarming declines in reading and math skills among the city’s lowest-performing children. Nearly 200 Middle Schools Will Adopt Revamped Reading, Math Curriculum Patch.com, 4/22/2025 A plea for a home Queens High School for the Sciences at York College is a school without a home NY Post, Student Editorial, 4/22/2025 It’s an interesting feeling. The feeling when one’s school—a specialized high school—is nothing but the second floor and basement of a building that doesn’t even belong to it. When one’s school has barely enough money to support its community. And yet that is what 500 students feel when they walk into the Queens High School for the Sciences at York College (QHSS). 500, because that is the most amount of students that could fit. We’ve endured for 23 years, ever since 2002. …We have done so much, worked so hard, and yet when people come, fascinated, to visit our school, they will find only a tiny school building that belongs not to us, but to the college across from us—York College. Schools push career ed classes ‘for all,’ even kids heading to college Hechinger Report, 4/21/2025 The Disaster of School Closures Should Have Been Foreseen The Atlantic, 4/17/2025 Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong? New York Times, 4/13/2025 Stuyvesant profile Specialized: A Stuyvesant Teacher Speaks Out: The past, present, and future of Stuyvesant High School Center for Educational Progress, 4/11/2025 The story of New York City’s Stuyvesant High School is a story about changing public perceptions of excellence in education. For decades, Stuyvesant has offered extraordinary educational opportunities to the students who pass its objective, standardized admissions test, yet it remains completely free of tuition. The Education Department Asked for Reports of DEI. It Might Get Something Else The 74 Million, 4/10/2025 Standardized Tests Beats Grades New research backs standardized tests as predictor of ‘college success—without bias’ The College Fix, 4/8/2025 A research team is on the cusp of releasing a new study that may contribute to the discussion about whether standardized test scores should have a place in the college admissions process. …“Standardized test scores predict academic outcomes with a normalized slope four times greater than that from high school GPA, all conditional on students’ race, gender, and socioeconomic status,” the researchers wrote. Harvard University: The Ivy League teaching remedial math NY Post, op-ed by Rikko Schlott, 4/5/2025 This Mass. college cracks $100,000 a year — and others are close behind Boston Globe, 4/3/2025 Does Reducing the Role of Testing Decrease Bias or Increase It? Zaid Jilani, 3/30/2025 Demands Grow for New Queens SHS CEC 26: Queens needs more specialized high school seats for local students QNS, 3/26/2025 Community Education Council 26 (CEC 26) has approved a resolution urging the city to site a specialized high school at a school currently under construction on 88th Avenue in Jamaica in order to address a major shortfall of specialized schools in the borough. CEC 26 noted that Queens High School for the Sciences at York College at 94-50 159th St. is currently the only specialized high school in Queens, with the school’s 511 seats accounting for just 3.2% of the 15,732 specialized high school seats in the city. Queens High School for the Sciences is also the smallest specialized high school in the city. Trump Is Dismantling the Education Department—With or Without Congress Wall Street Journal, 3/25/2025 What comes next now that pandemic aid for education has ended? Brookings Institute, 3/24/2025 It’s not just the phones Michael Bloomberg: Kids Are Spending Too Much Class Time on Laptops Bloomberg, 3/19/2025 Over the past two decades, school districts have spent billions of taxpayer dollars equipping classrooms with laptops and other devices in hopes of preparing kids for a digital future. The result? Students have fallen further behind on the skills they most need to succeed in careers: the three R’s plus a fourth — relationships. Today, about 90% of schools provide laptops or tablets to their students. Yet as students spend more time than ever on screens, social skills are deteriorating and test scores are near historic lows. NYC mandates extra prep for kids on cusp of passing state reading tests Chalkbeat, 3/18/2025 Harvard announces it won’t charge tuition to families with incomes under $200,000 Boston Globe, 3/17/2025 Demands Grow for New Queens SHS Parents urge chess be included as a sport in NYC public schools NY Post, 3/15/2025The Citywide Council on High Schools on Wednesday called on the Public School Athletic League to recognize chess as a sport. The PSAL currently oversees 25 sports in city high schools, from football, basketball and baseball to soccer, table tennis and double Dutch. NYC schools first deputy chancellor reflects on 5 years since COVID shutdowns WNYC Podcast, 3/14/2025 NYC school leaders tight-lipped on contingency plans amid threats of federal funding cuts NY Daily News, 3/13/2025 Plagued by absenteeism Long Past the Pandemic, Kids Skip School in New York Wall Street Journal, 3/11/2025According to a new study from the Manhattan Institute, more kids in New York City public schools are attending class less often. Chronic absenteeism, defined as missing 10% or more school days in a given academic year, climbed from 25% before the pandemic to 34.8% last year, which is well above the national average. Broken down by grade level, the chronically absent rate for the 2023-24 school year was 40.7% for kindergarten, 35.4% for first grade, and 32.4% for second grade.America’s STEM Leadership Problem City Journal, 3/10/2025 Rethinking College Why Some Schools Are Rethinking ‘College for All’ NY Times, 3/6/2024 For three decades, “college for all” was an American rallying cry. The goal inspired a generation of educators, offered a north star to students and united political figures from George W. Bush to Bernie Sanders. Thousands of new K-12 schools were founded to achieve this ambitious vision, often focused on guiding low-income students toward bachelor’s degrees. …In response, some high schools that once pushed nearly all students toward four-year colleges are now guiding teenagers toward a wider range of choices, including trade schools, apprenticeships, two-year degrees or the military. Designer of new math curriculum in NYC schools urges patience after criticism Gothamist, 2/24/2025 NYC council postpones school segregation hearing amid fears of Trump administration scrutiny Chalkbeat, 2/24/2025 Some NYC families can get $120 per child in summer food benefits. Here’s how to apply. Chalkbeat, 2/21/2025 |