| Top Stories Devil in the Details Meet NYC’s new chancellor: Kamar Samuels on mergers, integration, and screened schools Chalkbeat, 1/8/2026 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. …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. …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…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. Number Overhaul Kamar Samuels says NYC will double down on literacy mandate — but signals changes to math overhaul Chalkbeat, 1/6/2026 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. Top Priorties NYC schools chief Kamar Samuels signals integration, culturally responsive education as priorities Chalkbeat, 1/5/2026 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.” Advocacy Corner NEW from PLACE NYC PLACE NYC Announces new podcast, Schooled: Inside the Nations Largest School District PLACE NYC, 1/8/2026 To start the new year, PLACE NYC has launched a new free podcast, Schooled: Inside the Nation’s Largest School District. The show will focus on the real issues shaping the future of the nation’s largest school system and the families who depend on it. Listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
Join a Community Board Most community boards in NYC have an Education Committee. Consider joining a community board as a way to stay involved. Applications have opened for the following:BrooklynQueens Other Headlines Radical NYC teachers group plans ‘Teach-In for Palestine’ on MLK day NY Post, 1/10/2026 The Rita Joseph fan club speaks out City & State, 1/9/2025 New York Legislators Push Schools to Teach About Jan. 6 Attack Wall Street Journal, 1/9/2026 By the Letters [Brooklyn] Tech is Switching to Letter Grades The Survey, 1/8/2026 In a faculty meeting on November 3, Principal Newman announced to Tech teachers that he will transition the school to a letter grade system starting in the fall of 2026. While Tech currently uses a 100 point scale, most public high schools in the country employ a letter grade system where percentages are converted to letters from A to F. While letter grades are further differentiated by pluses or minuses, they remain less precise and “riggable” than percentages. Some students, however, are dubious of this generalization. NY school districts ranked from 1 to 658 based on 2025 test scores in math, ELA Syracuse.com, 1/8/2026 Falling Behind Long Island students far surpass state averages in math and English, while NYC kids struggle to keep up NY Post, 1/8/2026 Long Island students are outperforming the average test takers throughout the state in math and English — while New York City public school kids are struggling to stay afloat, according to new data. Over 85% of Nassau and Suffolk County’s 37,000 combined students passed the English regents last school year — 10% higher than the state’s average — while nearly 70% made it through the new algebra regents, smoking the state’s benchmark of 56%, new data from the state Education Department detailed. Inside Mamdani’s reversal on mayoral control of NYC schools Gothamist, 1/8/2026 NY Childcare Expansion Hochul and Mamdani Announce Plan to Make N.Y. Child Care Universal NY Times, 1/8/2026 New York is poised to vastly expand free and low-cost child care for families across the state over the next several years, and to put New York City on track to become the first city in the United States to provide free universal child care. On Thursday, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood together to announce a plan that would begin by expanding child care options for nearly 100,000 young children, putting the mayor on a path toward realizing the most ambitious and costly promise of his campaign and handing him a significant political victory barely a week into his term. NYC parent coordinators: Mamdani says he’ll change your role. We want to hear from you. Chalkbeat, 1/7/2026 Mamdani’s Schools Chancellor Should Focus on Rigor, Not Integration City Journal, 1/7/2026 The Adams Legacy Mayor Adams’ Education Legacy The Bigger Apple, 1/7/2026 The role of a mayor in charge of education in a large city is twofold: ensuring students are learning and keeping the public school system financially and operationally sound. Mayor Eric Adams will be remembered for progress in the first area, and mistakes in the second. During the pandemic, Adams largely continued his predecessor’s policies, including school masking. It is now widely acknowledged that keeping students masked until March 2022, and toddlers in preschools until the end of June that year, was a mistake. Fuzzy math? Flushing High School under investigation by NYCPS as teachers claim they are forced to pass failing students QNS, 1/6/2026 NYC charter schools outperform city public schools, data shows amNY, 1/6/2026 New England’s liberal arts colleges are in crisis. Can their model survive? Boston Globe, 1/6/2026 More, please. Opinion: It’s time for abundance in specialized high schools City & State, by Tom Allon, 1/5/2026 Mayor Zohran Mamdani represents a lot of firsts, but one thing about his background is generally overlooked: he is the product of the New York City school system – both private and public – and is less than two decades removed from his senior year at the Bronx High School of Science, one of New York’s crown jewels of public education. Every year in the spring, the demographic results of these exams are announced and inevitably The New York Times will write a story about the meager amount of African American and Latino students admitted. There will be outraged criticism from some elected leaders about this “segregation,” and there will be calls to change the nearly century-old admissions system which relies solely on one’s SHSAT score. Within days, everyone will realize the test is too entrenched, will move on and nothing really changes. But there is a relatively easy fix for this issue… Talk nerdy to me: Teachers who use math vocabulary help students do better in math Hechinger Report, 1/5/2026 RFK Jr., CDC drop 6 childhood vaccines from recommended list NY Daily News, 1/5/2026 Chancellor Challenges Mamdani’s schools chancellor prizes equity over excellence NY Post, op-ed by Wai Wah Chen, 1/4/2026 Welcome back from the holidays, students — can you spell “integration”? Or better yet, define it? Probably not, since only 29% of New York City eighth graders are proficient in reading at grade level, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ “Nation’s Report Card.” …“Integration” is important when Kamar Samuels, the city’s newly appointed schools chancellor, is best known for “integration initiatives,” for which he scaled back gifted and talented programs, reduced middle-school screens for admissions and merged successful programs (sounds far nicer than “closed successful programs”) into lower-performing schools. Elite Colleges Are Back at the Top of the List for Company Recruiters Wall Street Journal, 1/4/2026 Meet the middle-schoolers keeping cursive alive, one swoop at a time Washington Post, 1/3/2026 Harvard Faculty Under Fire Garber Faults Faculty Activism for Chilling Campus Debate and Free Speech Harvard Crimson, 1/3/2026 Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said the University “went wrong” by allowing professors to inject their personal views into the classroom, arguing that faculty activism had chilled free speech and debate on campus. In rare and unusually candid remarks on a podcast released on Tuesday, Garber appeared to tie many of higher education’s oft-cited ills — namely, a dearth of tolerance and free debate — to a culture that permits, and at times encourages, professors to foreground their identity and perspectives in teaching. “How many students would actually be willing to go toe-to-toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?” he said. Why Universities Can’t Be Neutral Wall Street Journal, 1/2/2026 As Schools Embrace A.I. Tools, Skeptics Raise Concerns NY Times, 1/2/2026 |