Expand — don’t eliminate.
That appears to be incoming Department of Education Chancellor David Banks’s stance on advanced academic offerings.
Banks told Pix 11 Monday that he will consider establishing new specialized high schools with reworked admissions criteria.
The eight existing campuses, widely considered the city’s top academic bastions, currently use a single exam to determine entry.
That structure has become a political flashpoint in recent years, with critics arguing that it’s a narrow measure of student ability that renders minuscule African-American and Hispanic enrollment.
Banks questioned the use of a lone exam to determine admissions in general, but suggested that a new slate of specialized schools could adopt a different format than those already in existence.
“Our goal is not to dismantle specialized high schools,” Banks said. “We want to expand it. The mayor-elect has said he wants more specialized high schools. And those schools might have an entirely different set of admissions criteria than the ones we are currently looking at.”
Asked about the imperiled future of the city’s Gifted and Talented programs, Banks said they would remain, but with changes.
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in October that he would replace the current format with a new system that would keep kids of all aptitudes in the same classroom while offering advanced material to some students.
While Banks did not go into detail Monday, he said that he hoped to enlarge the program rather than “gut” it.
“We are certainly not going to get rid of it,” he said. “We’re going to make some changes to it. But more importantly we’re going to expand it.”
Banks asserted that parents do not want the offerings eliminated, but do support modifications to the current admissions format.
“I don’t know that we need to be determining someone’s gifts and talents at 4-years-old when they take a single exam,” he said. “So things like that we’ll look to change. However, we want to expand Gifted and Talented programs all over the city. Not eliminate it because there’s been challenges with the way that it’s currently constructed and rolled out.”
Banks also issued a full-throated endorsement of keeping school safety agents under the control of the NYPD rather than handing the reins to the DOE.
Briefly a school safety agent himself, Banks said that school staffers and personnel view the unarmed officers as welcome members of the school community.
“If you speak to most school teachers and principals, they will tell you that school safety officers are invaluable and they are every bit as much a part of the culture of the school as the teachers are,” he said.
Banks contended that the agents enjoy better training and support under the NYPD’s purview than they did when the DOE handled school safety prior to 1998.
“If you ask them, they will tell you that the training and the support that they get from the police department is a greater source of support than what they got when they worked under the Department of Education,” Banks said.
The incoming schools boss also contended that kids feel more endangered on their way to and from school than inside their classrooms — and that a comprehensive approach to safety is critical.
