Incoming schools chancellor David Banks vowed on Thursday to transform the Big Apple’s “fundamentally flawed” public school system, telling New Yorkers that “change is coming.”
“I have not accepted this assignment because I wanted to be chancellor. I didn’t come looking for a job. I came to do a job,” Banks said.
“You cannot change New York City if you do not change the state of education in the city. So that is where we begin.
The longtime educator was officially named head of the Department of Education by Mayor-elect Eric Adams at a Thursday press conference outside PS 161 in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights – the same elementary school he attended as a child.
An emotional Banks at one point held up a picture of Mildred Scott, his 4th grade teacher at PS 161. He credited the longtime educator with propelling him forward as a young boy.
“Mrs. Scott was a wonder,” he said. “Her spirit looks down on me in this moment because it was in this building that Mildred Scott taught me black history. Not just reading, writing and arithmetic, which is critically important and you need that. But she taught me who I was.”
Banks, who also held up a photo of himself as a fourth-grader, is best known for founding several city public schools — including a network that primarily educates boys of color.
“I know that every young person that attends our schools, across the city, is filled with brilliance, potential, promise and gifts,” Banks said.
“And I know something else, that they exist in a school system that is fundamentally flawed.”
Banks vowed to “turn the tables over” to improve the nation’s largest school system, which he is taking over as it reemerges from COVID-19 lockdowns that disrupted learning for the city’s one million students.
“I am deeply humbled, but I’m also ready. You cannot change New York City if you do not change the state of education and that is where we begin,” he said.
Banks, who was flanked by his mother, retired NYPD officer father, sister and one of his two brothers, as his new position was announced, took aim at current DOE bureaucracy, saying “it needs to be a transformation and it will start at the top. We will turn the tables over.”
He questioned why thousands of DOE employees in “these high-paid positions” were needed.
“The system will be reengineered from the bottom up… Today is a day to celebrate what will be a rebirth of this department,” he said.
Banks went on to criticize the low reading proficiency for black and Hispanic students, saying it was a “betrayal and we should be outraged by that.”
“We spend $38 billion dollars every year in this system, and 65 percent of black and brown children never reach proficiency,” he said.
“You can get those results if we didn’t have a Department of Education.”
Banks insisted that parent involvement was needed to help transform the school system, saying the current approach was “completely off.”
“The answers to how we re-engineer this system exist in the hearts and the minds of the teachers, the principals, the children and their families. If we want to create an innovative school system you cannot do that without engaging the community,” Banks said.
The incoming chancellor vowed never to announce a major policy initiative for the city’s schools unless he was “surrounded by parents and families who have cosigned what we are doing.”
Adams praised his new appointee, saying Banks has “spent his career fighting for students.”
The mayor-elect said he spent eight years questioning Banks ahead of naming him chancellor because he “wanted to see the character of the man I was going to hand my babies over to.”
“David Banks is built for this,” said Adams. “David Banks is ready for this. I didn’t have to do a national search and find someone that didn’t understand our city. I didn’t have to do that. For eight years I questioned him. I asked him what he stood for.
“Don’t tell me about your Ivy League degrees, don’t tell me about where you went to school and how important you think you are. Don’t tell me about what you are going to do,” Adams said of what he sought ion a schools chief.
“I don’t want to hear about your academic intelligence, I want to know about your emotional intelligence. How sound are you for this battle that we are in front of. This is a real fight.”
Adams added: “We are in a city where 65 per cent of black and brown children never reach proficiency, and we act like that’s normal. Let me tell you something, if 65 percent of white children were not reaching proficiency in this city, they would burn this city down.”
The mayor-elect slammed the current system as “dysfunctional” and said teachers hadn’t been given the resources they needed to provide for New York City kids.
“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine our education system – and David Banks is the right person to take on the challenge,” Adams said.
“As Chancellor, David will work tirelessly to implement my vision for a school system where every child is given the opportunity to succeed, regardless of ZIP code; where educators take a whole-child approach, instead of reducing students to a test score; where students with the learning disabilities get the support and resources they have been denied for too long; and where we finally recognize that education should be pregnancy to profession, not cradle to career.”
In an apparent dig at Mayor de Blasio’s previous chancellor Richard Carranza — who was brought in from Texas — Adams noted he “didn’t have to do a national search to find someone that understands our city.”
“David Banks is the product of New York City Public schools and a son of New York City who is ready to lead the nation’s largest school system because he spent his career solving the problems in his schools at Eagle Academy that the city has not been able to.”
The mayor-elect noted he “didn’t have to do a national search to find someone that understands our city.”
“This is his life work. This is his moment and opportunity. We’re going to spend our entire four years in office focused on educating our children,” Adams said.
Banks is set to take office on Jan. 1 after current chancellor Meisha Ross Porter announced she’d be stepped down at the end of the year.
He is the Mayor-elect’s first official appointment.
Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted his approval, describing Banks as a “consummate educator” that NYC families were “lucky to have him at the helm.”
Banks, a Queens native, pivoted from a legal career and served as a principal before launching the Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice in 2004.
He went on to establish the Eagle Academy for Young Men in the Bronx in 2004, an all-boys school that later expanded to a network of six campuses by 2014.
Banks already signaled some of his educational priorities in a May op-ed ahead of being named head of the nation’s largest school system.
Among his priorities was a lessened emphasis on standardized tests, widening the cultural breadth of curricular materials, and instilling students with a greater sense of civic duty on issues like voting and climate change.
