“Good” news: Chronic absenteeism in the city’s regular public schools is down from the staggering 40% that The Post’s Susan Edelman revealed in April. Bad news: It’s still over 30%. Chancellor David Banks needs to do better.
More bad news: Flight from the system continues, with tens of thousands more families finding alternatives or skipping town entirely. Data from the city Department of Education show total K-12 enrollment down 121,000 from 2019, and only the influx of nearly 10,000 illegal-migrant kids kept the drop from being larger still.
Yet total DOE spending remains way, way up from when the enrollment was 20% higher, while city students’ scores on state proficiency tests have continued their post-pandemic decline.
Banks says he’ll turn both absenteeism and plummeting enrollment around by making city schools more attractive to students and their families. Yet he’s allowed some district superintendents to ax popular Gifted & Talented programs, and let others kill high-standards schools by nixing competitive entrance exams.
Next to that, the no-brainer of lifting the vaccine mandate for kids to participate in sports and other extracurriculars is a drop in the bucket.
We get that the chancellor feels he needs to move cautiously, since the City Council jumps whenever the teachers union says “frog,” while the state Board of Regents is lowering standards of achievement left and right.
But if Banks doesn’t start fighting for his own high-standards, pro-parent agenda — and hiring more school and district leaders who’ll do the same — the forces of mediocrity are going to win. It’s time to show results.