Mayor Bill de Blasio and UFT President Michael Mulgrew announce the deal between the teachers’ union and the City and the school reopening plan. Image Credit: Mayor’s Office
Students will start their first week online and then return to blended learning on September 21nd. On September 1, 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio and DOE Chancellor Richard Carranza announced a deal with the teacher’s union to push back the start of the 2020 – 2021 school year to provide schools more time to implement COVID-19 safety plans and upgrades. The deal ends talks of a teachers’ strike out of fear that NYC schools were reopening too quickly without enough time to properly develop safety plans, scheduling and other needs. (more…)
City Council’s new legislation seeks to combat overcrowded New York City Schools through new efficient methods in choosing new school building projects. On September 12, 2018, the City Council announced it will require the School Construction Authority to disclose how it evaluates the location and time frame of new schools being built. City Council Member Ben Kallos authored the measure, Introduction 729, in response to overcrowding in New York City public elementary and middle schools and the City’s plans to build fewer school seats. This legislation intends to make the Department of Education and the School Construction Authority more transparent in their decisions, and create accountability. (more…)
Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Image credit: CityLand
(Editor’s Note: The Department of Education recently released statistics on the first round of 2015 admissions for New York City’s examination high schools. According to their report, offers to join the 2015-2016 incoming class at Stuyvesant High School counts just ten African-American and twenty Latino students. The following by Professor Aaron Saiger of Fordham University’s School of Law was published in the January/February issue of CityLaw.)
New York City is experiencing one of its periodic flare-ups over its eight selective “examination” high schools. As in the past, attention has focused upon what a United Federation of Teachers task force calls “the profound inequity in the admissions demographics” at the exam schools. UFT, Redefining High Performance for Entrance into Specialized High Schools 3 (March 2014). This inequity results from these schools’ practice of admitting students based exclusively upon scores on the standardized Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. Because the exam schools now function as one component in the broader current system of citywide high school choice, however, it is possible to argue that their test-only admissions in fact enhance the diversity of the system overall, their racial demographics notwithstanding.
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