Dennis A. Clark
With Tuesday’s insipid “State of Our Schools” address, Chancellor David Banks proved himself profoundly unserious about teaching the city’s kids.
The only metrics he cited in his hour-long remarks were: 1) 1,000 schools are participating in a climate-change program, and 2) the city Department of Education has registered 85,000 high schoolers and adults to vote in November.
No numbers on academic achievements — not test scores, proficiency rates or even grade-point averages.
No word on how his vaunted NYC Reads and NYC Solves initiatives are (or aren’t) getting public-school kids on the right track in literacy and math.
Nor even a mention of the truancy rates that soared in the wake of the pandemic school closures.
He didn’t touch at all on the hard reality of education in the Big Apple, instead offering such platitudes as “Public schools are the foundation of both this city and our administration’s priorities” and empty boasts that students graduate “equipped to be a positive force for change.”
Plus, a laundry list of new initiatives: an accelerated-college-prep high school in Queens, free tele-therapy for teens, paid work experiences, virtual after-school coursework.
He didn’t just skip reporting test scores: He argued for doing away with standardized testing on the bizarre grounds that generative AI could better “understand student performance through authentic assessment” than their actual human teachers.
Maybe it can — someday, if the tech advances that far and city bureaucrats can identify the right software, and union contracts allow it.
For now, his “vision” of AI providing personalized learning plans for every child is just pie in the sky.
Anyway, that’s meant to solve the problem of teachers struggling to “cater” instruction for students at a range of academic levels, when the obvious answer is just to bring back tracking so every classroom is at about the same level.
Weirdly, Banks ended his remarks by having his audience of DOE functionaries, politicians and students recite the poem “Invictus,” which “instructs us in how to be resilient.”
Project much, Mr. Chancellor?
Banks took over the school system promising to un-bloat the bureaucracy; nearly three years later, he talks like he’s gone native instead.