And yet, folks, be careful what you wish for. Converting “education” into a top-tier political issue doesn’t mean that voters will automatically, enthusiastically gravitate to the , productive education policy issues that wonky advocates would prefer. Voters in didn’t embrace thoughtful, nuanced debates about how to fund schools more fairly or ensure that they are transparent about how children are performing academically. 

No, a handful of prominent campaigns used mostly imaginary allegations under the banner of critical race theory to inflame a very real culture war (and spark an smokescreen of a conversation about American history and racial injustice). 

Can anyone thread the needle — impactful education policy idea that’s also politically potent? For instance, my colleague here at ����Ӱ��, Jo Napolitano, reported recently about districts across the country reconsidering the traditional 180-day calendar. It’s one of those rare wonky education policy ideas that seems to be attracting some political attention. As part of his since-abandoned run for governor, former offered a proposal for year-round school with extended school days. All New York children would have been eligible — and the $5.4 billion in new staff and operational costs would be paid for via increased income taxes on those making more than a million dollars annually. 

“This is how we give at life, give working parents peace of mind, and reduce inequality in New York State,” the former mayor said.

Start with economic inequality, where there’s no longer . American democracy cannot long sustain with growing gaps between wealthy and poor — and stagnating economic mobility. Reasonable people can disagree about precisely how to curb inequality, but it’s not difficult to make a case for raising taxes on people making seven- or eight-digit annual incomes — particularly in New York, (the highest share of any state). 

Year-round schooling also seems pretty well-aligned to the second goal: as far as supporting families goes, this is a slam dunk. As I’ve written in the past, U.S. school schedules work terribly for many families. School days rarely cover the standard 9 to 5 work window. So millions of families (including mine!) muddle through, scrambling together child care to fill the gaps, tacking on afterschool programming and/or summer camps — often at significant expense. For most of us, it’s an incoherent patchwork. If we align the school calendar to better match more families’ work schedules, we’ll save them time, energy and resources. 

: school schedules aren’t designed for working families. Before COVID, it was pretty rare to talk about mandatory, universal K-12 education in terms of what it means for the labor market or for working parents. When we argue about schools, we usually argue about how to make them work better for kids. But now, after many of us spent the better part of 22 months juggling full-time work and child care … the time is ripe for refitting schools to better meet families’ schedule needs. 

It’s the third goal — improving outcomes for kids — where the case for a year-long school calendar and longer school days is less clear cut. To start, the evidentiary case for more learning time is more complicated than you might think. Yes, more hours can help kids do better, but it’s not a simple addition problem. Indeed, , for extended learning programs, “The weakest outcomes were generally found among programs whose duration was on the extreme ends of the spectrum — programs that were among those offering the fewest or greatest number of hours.” That is, while more time can help students succeed, after a certain point, there are diminishing returns to simply staying longer at school.

As usual, it’s not just a matter of quantity — the quality of extra learning hours also matters. And that, naturally, runs smack into the central education policy design problem for U.S. schools: they’re profoundly inequitable in terms of resources and quality, and those inequities fall along racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines. As such, extending and expanding that system without intentionally addressing these injustices isn’t going to help kids who need it the most. That is, in under-resourced, segregated, and/or dysfunctional schools aren’t going to see dramatic, world-beating academic or developmental gains if they get extra time in those same settings. Predictably, meanwhile, most of their privileged peers will be spending their late afternoons and midsummers in high-quality learning environments, compounding their opportunities and advantages. 

It’s not super complicated to figure out how to keep kids safe and at school all year so that working families can stay on track. But figuring out how to expand and significantly change the school year in ways that actually serve kids’ best interests … that’s much harder. There are endless and complex questions to be settled in the planning and design. Would the additional time at school be spent continuing and accelerating what teachers and students were doing during the standard school day and year? Or would it be spent on new and different learning activities? Would enrichment be concentrated in the summer months or spread across the new schedule? Who will teach these programs — will credential requirements from the standard school calendar be a must, or will there be different expectations? To what degree would the answers to these sorts of questions fall under state control vs how much flexibility would local school districts get? How much of this will need to be worked out in collective bargaining — and how smooth will that process be? 

We need to think about the logistics here: schools are sticky, slow institutions. Leadership can’t simply flip a switch and make major changes to how they do things. Their processes and traditions have old roots snaking deep into their daily and yearly calendars. Teachers have lesson plans built around curricula that are designed for the current, standard, 180-day school year. It’s no simple thing to — BOOM — imagine year-round school into existence and make it effective and equitable for kids. 

In other words, expanding the school schedule is a serious, nuanced idea that requires lots of careful policy design and implementation. It’s the stuff of white papers and think tank panel discussions. Also, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t have the necessary political juice to spark a political movement. Parents — that is, potential education voters — activated about banning books in their children’s schools aren’t likely to switch their activism over to a technocratic discussion of how to make year-round school work for everyone. Indeed, year-round school was no balm for de Blasio’s gubernatorial ambitions: he abandoned his run .

Dr. Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. Find him on Twitter . The views expressed here are his alone. 

“Happy, excited,” she said, throwing her arms up to celebrate.

Her 5-year old sister, Mayari, who also got the shot, jumped in a circle to show off her “happy vaccine dance” outside the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, where both siblings got immunized.

Then the sisters, hand in hand with their father, skipped down the street back to their car.

Days after Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gave the final sign-off late Tuesday night to Pfizer-BioNTech’s pediatric coronavirus vaccine for use in children ages 5 to 11, shots are now rolling out and kids are — gleefully — pushing up their sleeves.

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum, located in the borough’s Crown Heights neighborhood, is one of to offer pediatric shots. Before the site’s 9 a.m opening, a modest line of roughly a dozen parents and children gathered by the front doors. A larger crowd came for shots afterschool on Thursday, when the museum first had doses available for the age group.

“It’s emotional,” said Kira Halevy, who was bringing her 6- and 8-year-old boys to get immunized. The pandemic has taken up about a quarter of her younger son’s lifetime, and the family jumped at the first opportunity to vaccinate their kids. 

“We’ve been waiting for this,” she said.

Leading up to the shots, her family used the event as a real-world lesson in biology and medicine, explaining the mechanics of the doses.

“The first shot tells your body what corona is,” recited Zeke, Halevy’s older son. “The second shot is telling your body how to fight it.” 

In New York City, nearly ages 12 to 17 have been vaccinated, well above the national rate reported by the American Academy of Pediatrics for that group. 

Now with shots available for the younger age group, a speedy and thorough rollout could significantly lower COVID’s hospitalization and death toll in the U.S. over the coming months and dull the impact of future variants, according to recent . Polling indicates, however, that nationwide will “definitely not” vaccinate their kids and others will “wait and see.” 

But the early-bird crowd on Friday was gung-ho.

“I was literally jumping up and down,” said Jenna Sternbach, describing the feeling when she received the email telling her she could sign her 11-year-old daughter Adlai up for a vaccine appointment. Now, having received the first dose and with a second soon to come, Adlai will soon be able to play soccer without a mask, which she looks forward to. 

The elder Halevy son, Zeke, can see himself very soon back at his friends’ houses, trading  Pokemon cards, he said.

And Wesley Francois, 15, who has been eligible for vaccines since the spring but was finally persuaded to receive the shot by a requirement for his basketball team, was excited to soon be able to ease up on masking.

“I’ll be a little more free,” he told ����Ӱ��.

Plus, the pain was only a 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, Mateo Vasquez, 7, estimated after his shot.

The nation’s largest school district is doing its part to encourage the vaccination effort. On Monday, New York City officials are setting up pop-up vaccine clinics at across the five boroughs.

Efforts to boost accessibility to the shots is key, said pediatrician Maria Molina, who practices in Manhattan and the Bronx.

“Now that we have a vaccine,” she told ����Ӱ��, “we have to make sure that every child has the same opportunity to get it.”

That extends to cultural factors as well, she noted. “I not only share the language of my patients, but I share the culture,” said Molina, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic and is now a member of SOMOS Community Care, a network of city health providers from diverse linguistic backgrounds. “It’s coming from someone who looks similar to them.”

The city has extended its for new vaccine recipients to youngsters as well, including those who receive shots at school. After first doses, families will receive an email explaining how to select between a prepaid $100 debit card, tickets to sporting events  or other perks.

“We really want kids to take advantage, families to take advantage of that,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Young folks told ����Ӱ�� that they had wide-ranging plans for their newfound cash: some planning to save or donate it to school fundraisers sending holiday gifts abroad, others are planning to splurge on the aforementioned Pokemon cards or Heelys sneakers, which come with wheels in the sole.

The mayor has not stipulated whether there is a student vaccination threshold at which schools would drop universal masking rules for the classroom — a move made by at least a dozen major districts across the country in recent weeks, with mixed opinions from health experts.

Parents at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum vaccination site on Friday said that they would prefer schools wait to scrap mask mandates until vaccination rates reach as many as 90 percent of students. 

“We’d rather have any form of protection,” said Kira Halevy.

Elsewhere in the U.S., Chicago Public Schools announced Thursday that it will cancel school Friday, Nov. 12 for the nation’s first “” in an effort to boost immunization rates.

It’s an “opportunity for parents and guardians to take their children five years of age and older to get vaccinated at their pediatrician’s office, at a healthcare provider, or at a CPS school-based site or community vaccination event,” schools CEO Pedro Martinez wrote to parents.

For those wary of vaccination, other effective safety measures against the virus may soon be on the way. Pfizer announced Friday that their new antiviral pill cuts the risk of COVID hospitalization or death by in vulnerable adults. That development, alongside President Joe Biden’s recently announced vaccine mandate deadlines for large workplaces, led Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb to tell CNBC on Friday that the pandemic “” by early January. Other health experts have their doubts, citing the possibility of new mutations of the virus.

Back in Brooklyn, Winona Winkel, 9, got her first vaccine dose Friday and is already counting the days to her second. 

“Then I can hug my friends,” she said. 

“This moment is what we’ve all been working for,” Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter said during an opening press ceremony at P.S. 25, a bilingual elementary school in the Bronx.

She implored families to get vaccinated so that children could safely learn throughout the pandemic and be “in the places where they’re loved by their principals, superintendents, teachers and parents — and the whole school community is wrapped around them.”

Porter was later joined by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona for a meet-and-greet with students and classroom visits at P.S. 121 Throop in the Bronx. Cardona, along with educators from across the country, was in New York this morning to host a “Coronavirus and the Classroom” town hall on the Today Show.

Thanks, for joining us at PS 121 for ! We are excited to welcome students back to school communities where they can learn and grow socially, emotionally, and academically.

— Chancellor Meisha Porter (@DOEChancellor)

One P.S. 25 parent wished she had been made aware that her child’s school would be the first stop on the DOE’s tour, feeling confronted by a swarm of press just after a night shift. Chancellor Porter and the DOE’s team went on to welcome students throughout the city’s five boroughs, including visits to a school vaccination site and soccer practice at two Queens high schools Monday afternoon.

In late August, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced all participating in “high-risk” sports are required to get one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by their first competition. Though there are not yet COVID-19 vaccine mandates for any other student group, all NYC school employees are required to get at least a first dose by Sept. 27 — staff cannot opt into weekly testing as an alternative, making it one of the country’s strictest vaccine mandates.

Last week, an arbitrator ruled that members of the with certain medical or religious exemptions must be offered non-classroom assignments while other UFT staff who refuse vaccination can either resign by Nov. 30 or be placed on unpaid leave through September 2022. The union represents most of the city’s 73,000-plus educators and other school personnel.

As the Delta variant surges, the city estimates that just about two thirds of New York youth over 12 are vaccinated. As a part of the DOE’s efforts to monitor and prioritize student safety, a mandatory must be completed daily by anyone entering school buildings.

The site temporarily this morning, likely due to surges in traffic across the city. Some schools turned to paper surveys to try and get students inside more quickly and alleviate crowded sidewalks, but parents and others were frustrated by the tech failure.

It’s the first day of school and I’m seeing first-hand from parents that the health questionnaire app is down! Luckily paper health screenings are being provided but this is going to add another burden to parents and students on an already fraught day.

— Gale A. Brewer (@galeabrewer)

And though Mayor de Blasio dubbed today’s return “joyous” during the press gathering at P.S. 25, for some parents, it was anything but. Discouraged by the in-person only model, loosened guidelines and vaccine ineligibility for children under 12, NYC parents threatened to strike and others have opted for alternative schools where virtual learning is still an option.

Fourth-grader Catherine Camila Estefens was one of P.S. 25’s earliest arrivals, patiently waiting for her classmates to find their line and join her along the school’s fence. A student at the bilingual school since pre-K, she is not among the thousands still seeking virtual instruction.

Estefens said she hated feeling isolated and is particularly excited to get back to in-person math.

“I’m happy because we don’t have to be in the house [any] more. I have no siblings, so I’m mostly alone,” she said.

Her peers huddled together in the schoolyard, hugging their teachers for the first time in over a year and a half. Some cried, having to face a school day without their family or at the reality of finally reuniting with friends. Here are some moments from their historic return:

All photos by Marianna McMurdock for ����Ӱ��. 

Despite last week’s on New York City’s return-to-school plans, during which Education Committee Chair Mark Treyger and a cohort of parents advocated for a remote education option, Mayor Bill de Blasio insisted that, , all students, vaccinated or not, would be required to return to school in person.

Soon after, I began hearing the idea of a parents’ strike, where families would keep their children home as a way to demonstrate just how many of them didn’t feel reassured by the safety protocols — and platitudes — they were being offered by the mayor and the city Department of Education.

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I asked parents whether they would support such an action. Here’s what they had to say:

Yes, Strike:

CV: I will be part of the parent strike and if there is no remote option, will pull my child from public school.

KA: I can’t bear that we are sending our kids into chaos and closures, with a heightened risk of COVID, when we are so close to a vaccine for children. I was already planning to hold my son back for the first week, as the DOE isn’t requiring any baseline testing to weed out vacation COVID cases.

JK: I made up my mind to hold off until the last minute and not send my kids to school. After many Zoom meetings with the chancellor, districts, principals, I feel they all are singing the same tune — a tune that is not sitting well with me for many reasons. All I hear is, “vaccinations and multi-layered approach to safety” — but is that all that it is? When I asked questions in forums, they were ignored. 

MRC: The lack of remote option is particularly concerning in light of the inadequate testing program — no pre-Kers, no kindergartners, no vaccinated individuals, only 10% of those who opt in (which is not required to attend school) and only every other week. The singleminded drive to get our kids in school, in person, at any cost is going to drive parents to leave NYC altogether.

SMC: We’ve already informed our daughter’s elementary school that she won’t be attending in person until she’s fully vaccinated. We were told that her absence would likely trigger an investigation, but we’re prepared to accept that.

EK: I’d support a strike over masks on 5-year-olds — the rest of the world does not mask small kids, the outcome is identical, why is this country doing this?

KP: Children’s lives should be more than just , and families should have a say in their education.

AE: We are in a global pandemic about to hit the peak of a worse variant than the original strain and yet we have increased classroom density and reduced testing. Even if only 2% of students are positive, that’s still 22,000 students taking their masks off to eat lunch with their peers with a prevalent variant that spreads in less time than it takes to read a board book, let alone a 30-minute lunch period. As if that weren’t enough, teachers and students who get their first dose in late September will not be fully vaccinated until NOVEMBER, though they will continue to be at school in the meantime. I will not send my daughter back in the school building. 

No, We Want In-Person Only:

CJC: Definitely will not support a parent strike or a remote option. We should not be trying to dilute an in-person school’s already scant resources to force a remote option in every school!

CC: I don’t want DOE to expend time and resources on a fully remote track when the pedagogical efficacy is questionable at best and the need unclear for any child who is vaccine-eligible.

MC: Parents can’t have it both ways, which is to use the and funding to get what they want. The DOE can’t be made to bend to the will of every parent who has a tantrum because they didn’t get the cookie they wanted. Enough coddling of parents who aren’t getting their way. I don’t want my children’s education impacted because some parents are kvetching.

LR: We fought for so long last year to get the kids back into school. A parent strike undermines our position on getting kids back into the classroom.

JJ: Masks, social distancing and the vaccine are all working. As someone who has worked in person for most of the pandemic, I have seen firsthand that it works in much more crowded situations than public schools. 

TL: All the relevant experts have concluded, taking into account the risks versus benefits, that in-person schooling is critical. Allowing a remote option that is open to anyone would send the message that in-person schools are dangerous, which does not reflect the science nor the data. We must base public policy decisions on rational decision-making that takes real facts and evidence into account, not hysteria or irrational fears.

SH: Before they decide to go on strike, I would first like to see the vaccination card of these concerned parents. If they are ready to keep their children hostages at home, they should first show proof of vaccination — and, soon, booster shot — themselves. 

MV: What I WOULD support is a parent strike to require that all students eligible for a vaccine get vaccinated, just as we require students to get other vaccinations in order to come to school (with an exception for those who can’t get it for health reasons).

CD: Parents protesting for a remote option? Do they have any idea what this actually encompasses? The amount of teachers needed for this option to be available just isn’t realistic. The amount of money needed to pay those salaries just isn’t feasible. Do parents really want to outsource those positions to lower-qualified candidates because there is and will be a teacher shortage? Do parents really want the quality of education to depreciate just because they are afraid to send their child in? If teachers have to get themselves vaccinated against their will, then maybe parents have to send their unvaccinated kids into school to learn in person without a remote option against THEIR will. And then maybe they can understand what it’s like to get THEIR freedom taken away. Maybe they can understand what it’s like to be put into a dangerous situation against THEIR will. 

On that note, a teacher wrote: What will happen with teachers who would ? Will they be fired, sent on a leave or be required to be tested? The city has no clear plans at this time how to handle COVID at schools, and I highly doubt that the mayor’s deadline for the first dose of vaccine will ever come to fruition.

As of this writing, the city teachers union is of unvaccinated teachers.

The first day of school is this Monday, Sept. 13.

How many students will show up? How many teachers will be vaccinated?

What will happen in schools where there are more teachers than students, due to a strike?

What will happen in schools where there are more students than teachers because some have gone on strike themselves? Will substitutes be called in? Who will they be? Will they be certified in the subject/age group they’re assigned to? Will these be teachers who have been ? Will principals have any say in who is assigned to their schools? Will teachers be able to turn down substitute assignments? Will they be able to move from school to school or forced to pod?

And what will happen down the road to per-pupil funding if students continue to be no-shows, and teachers continue to refuse to get a vaccine — but the city can’t fire them?

Alina Adams is a New York Times best-selling romance and mystery writer, the author of Getting Into NYC Kindergarten and Getting Into NYC High School, a blogger at and mother of three. She believes you can’t have true school choice until all parents know all their school choices — and how to get them. Visit her website, .

After multiple rounds of vote tabulation triggered by New York’s new ranked-choice voting system, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams was declared the winner of the Democratic primary on Tuesday. With all other candidates eliminated, Adams edged past former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by a margin of roughly one percent. He is now seen as a heavy favorite in the November election against Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.

With early voting already underway in the New York City mayoral primary, a question hangs over the nation’s largest school district: How will the next administration help schools get back to business after multiple academic years have been profoundly jolted by COVID-19?

Whoever emerges as the party’s nominee will face a multifaceted challenge in leading New York’s school system. After a lengthy period of serving as mayor-presumptive (Democrats massively outnumber Republicans across the city, making November’s general election a likely rout) he or she will need to complete the transition back to in-person schooling, carefully steward billions of dollars of federal relief money, and help students recover from nearly two years of learning interrupted by the pandemic.

And there’s a further plot twist: Charter schools, perhaps the most controversial force in citywide education politics, have won the backing of most of the field’s leading candidates. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, entrepreneur Andrew Yang, and former city sanitation chief Kathryn Garcia have all signalled for the public schools of choice, which have seen their allies dwindle both in City Hall and Albany over the past few years. At the same time, one of the most strident charter critics, Comptroller Scott Stringer, struggled to build momentum even before his campaign was rocked by of sexual harassment.

It’s a situation that upends the political logic of much of the last decade, when Democrats across the country have increasingly broadcast their skepticism of the sector, even to the point of proposing full-on moratoriums on new charters. Now, in a city almost synonymous with liberal politics, most of the party’s top mayoral contenders appear to be taking the opposite tack. The causes for the shift are multiple, including the relative popularity of charters among minority voters, a traffic jam in the primary’s progressive lane, and families’ dissatisfaction with the district throughout the travails of the pandemic.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in an interview that charter schools and their allies are exploiting a hectic post-COVID environment in which K-12 education has taken a backseat to issues of public safety and economic hardship.

“Crime is on the rise, we’re coming out of the pandemic, homelessness is exploding,” Mulgrew argued. “There are so many other issues that are facing people. If this election was last year, when education was at the forefront…this phenomenon would not have happened.”

But according to Richard Buery — a former deputy to incumbent Mayor Bill de Blasio who served briefly as the CEO of the Achievement First charter network before that he would leave to head the Robin Hood Foundation — it’s entirely unsurprising to see Democrats talking openly about supporting and expanding charters.

“Charter schools are incredibly popular among the Democratic electorate,” he said. “The distinction between a charter school and a district school does not fundamentally matter to most people. What people are interested in is whether they have access to quality schools for their children.”

De Blasio backlash

The 2013 election of Bill de Blasio marked a turning point on school choice in New York. After years of enthusiastic support from Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, both Republicans at the time they were elected, charter schools faced a Democratic mayor who openly vented his frustrations with them.

It began in de Blasio’s first few months in office, when he three schools in the high-performing Success Academy network from co-locating in district-owned facilities. He was outmaneuvered by the schools’ allies in Albany, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo, guaranteeing charters the right to use space in public buildings. But the new mayor’s position was clear, and he has largely stuck to it throughout the remainder of his two terms in office — including at the National Education Association’s annual assembly that his fellow Democrats needed to be held accountable for being “cozy with the charter schools.”

It was a stance that caught on throughout the party and only gained steam after President Donald Trump appointed longtime school choice advocate Betsy DeVos to lead the Department of Education. Though he had previously served in the Obama White House during a rapid surge in charter growth, then-candidate Joe Biden had about charters while winning the Democratic presidential nomination last year.

All of which makes the current configuration of mayoral candidates somewhat surprising, at least from the perspective of K-12 schools. Yang, who polled in first place during earlier portions of the race before fading somewhat — has to a charter organization in the past. While he reportedly favors unionizing charters, Adams also that he would support the duplication of successful charter models. And Garcia has even on charters in New York, currently set at 290, dismissing the debate around them as a “political football.”

Those positions haven’t gone unnoticed. Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, said she was “incredibly disappointed” with Garcia’s proposal. And Scott Stringer, who has sought to during his time as city comptroller and of the UFT in April, has several charter-friendly financiers for making huge donations to political action committees that support Yang and Adams.

But the criticism hasn’t paid off so far. A familiar face in New York politics who many when the race began, Stringer has failed to gain much altitude. Of the field’s top tier, only Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney who worked in the de Blasio administration, seems to be generally running to the left on K-12 issues; even she is focused more on racial segregation and lowering class sizes than school choice.

No single candidacy of the progressive anti-charter movement than that of Dianne Morales. The experienced nonprofit executive had long before pivoting leftward during the primary; her includes proposals to end co-locations and prevent charters from accessing student recruitment data. But just as her campaign was gaining attention, amid allegations of mismanagement and discrimination. And as the primary is in its last gasp, Adams, Garcia, and Yang make up three of the top four candidates.

The UFT’s Mulgrew said plainly that he believed the turn on charters was the product of campaign contributions. A persistent critic of former Mayor Bloomberg, who worked energetically to spread more school options throughout the five boroughs, he argued that Wall Street donors who played an outsized role in charter expansion a decade ago were now hoping to control the debate again.

Bloomberg “had partners who financed so much of this, and we see these same people emerging again and being part of our political process right now in the mayor’s race through various IEs [independent expenditures] and different relationships,” Mulgrew said. “We feel very strongly that a small number of people who have a lot of money should not be influencing us.”

‘A huge disrespect to parents’

But support for charters doesn’t merely come from the financial and philanthropic realms. showed that a strong majority of New York City Democrats approved of lifting the charter cap. And while it was commissioned by StudentsFirstNY, a pro-charter advocacy group, its findings are mostly consistent with existing survey evidence demonstrating the popularity of schools of choice, particularly among who will play a role in choosing the Democrats’ nominee.

Families have already during the COVID era, with public data showing that charter school enrollment grew by roughly 10,000 students — about 7 percent — over the 2020-21 school year. While charter and traditional schools both spent long periods closed to in-person learning while the pandemic raged, the reopening process led by the district left many with its performance and the quality of virtual learning. In May, against both the mayor and Chancellor Meisha Ross-Porter to try to force an immediate full-time return to physical classrooms.

Dan Weisberg, CEO of the reform-oriented nonprofit TNTP and a Bloomberg-era executive at the New York City Department of Education, called the unpredictable pace of reopenings “a huge black mark on Mayor de Blasio’s record.”

“One of the guiding principles should have been respect for parents and students and families,” Weisberg said. “If that’s one of the guiding principles, then you don’t repeatedly change schedules and plans the night before, or with 24 hours notice. …And that was done again and again and again, and there is still significant anger about that, as there should be. It’s a huge disrespect to parents.”

Yiatin Chu is a New York parent and co-president of the group , which advocates in favor of strengthening gifted education programs and has recently co-endorsed both Adams and Yang. Much of her work focuses on fighting back the increasingly controversial admissions test to the city’s specialized high schools, but she has said that many of her fellow parent advocates also look favorably on the alternatives offered by well-regarded charter networks like Success Academy. After an “eye-opening” year of closures and remote instruction, she added, the respective stances of Adams, Garcia, and Yang held great appeal.

“While they’re not saying, ‘I believe in the single test,’ or ‘I believe in charters,’ you don’t get the sense that they’ll expend their political capital or energy to take down these schools,” she said. “We’ll see where things land, but at least in the campaign season, they’re saying things I think many parents want to hear.”

But according to Joseph Vitoritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College and an experienced chronicler of the city’s education politics, if charter backers are aiming to resurrect the Bloomberg-era disposition toward big, high-performing networks, they’ll have to do more than win a mayor’s race.

“I would think they’re encouraged by the fact that three out of the four top candidates are pro-charter — I mean, that’s a start,” Vitoriti said. “But the bottom line is that the decisions are going to be made in Albany, not City Hall….And I think that’s going to be a tough sell — tougher than ever.”

An end to the charter school cap can only come at the state level, where mayoral influence has often proved weak. The New York Senate, which was formerly held by a complex coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, flipped in 2018, and its newly liberal majorities haven’t shown a willingness to greenlight further expansions of school choice. Even more important, Andrew Cuomo, one of the charter sector’s most steadfast friends during the de Blasio mayoralty, could be in danger of in the next few months; even if he survives, it’s an open question whether he will seek a fourth term next year.

Robin Hood’s Buery said that, regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination next Tuesday, the place of charters in New York is now too firmly entrenched for either city or state leaders to dislodge. A combination of factors — more representative leadership at the school level, successful lobbying from political allies, and the consistent support of African American and Latino voters — have created a “fundamentally different world” for charters, he observed.

“There’ll still be debates about how the sector should grow, and I don’t want to discount the challenges involved. I just think it’s a different kind of debate; we’re past the point of people asking, ‘Should there be charters?’”

When New York Mayor Bill de Blasio last month said he’s requiring all city students, teachers, and staff to show up to school this fall in-person, no exceptions, he stunned longtime observers of the nation’s largest public school system.

“You would think that online learning was some new frontier for the New York City Department of Education that had never been tried before,” said Tom Liam Lynch, a former teacher who is editor-in-chief of the parent-focused city website .

The reality, he and others say, is that the city has spent millions of dollars and much of the last decade leading the way on innovations in the realm of remote, blended, and personalized learning. For de Blasio to push for 100 percent in-person schooling, Lynch and others say, is a significant turnaround.

At the moment, more than six in 10 New York City students are still learning from home, but de Blasio on May 23 said that will soon come to an end, telling MSNBC’s , “You can’t have a full recovery without full-strength schools, everyone back, sitting in those classrooms, kids learning again.”

The change will affect about 1 million students.

For Lynch, who also directs education policy for the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, the announcement seemed to ignore educators’ efforts to strengthen the city’s distance learning capabilities — work that could have given students a leg up during the worst of the pandemic.

In 2010, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools Chancellor Joel Klein, the city’s Innovation Zone, or iZone, debuted with a ton of fanfare. At its heart was an experimental effort called iLearn, a blended learning system that sought to personalize instruction by allowing students in selected schools to learn remotely in many cases — schools used the system for everything from “occasional online credit recovery to full-blown blended learning and flipped-classroom models,” .

It debuted with 81 schools, a number that soon doubled.

iZone also gave 50 middle- and high-school leaders an opportunity to redesign their schools. And it incubated a middle-school math program, known as School of One (now called Teach to One), that allowed students to work independently online from within their school. A digital display, reminiscent of an airport “arriving flights” screen, directed students to individualized lessons from dozens of providers.

Among School of One’s most significant innovations was a back-end data system that gave teachers real-time reports for each student, guiding upcoming assignments and directing them to small groups for help. “It’s a model that seems certain to make us question assumptions about how we organize classrooms and schools,” the journal noted in 2011.

iZone’s high-tech appeal was “the easiest to grasp — and ‘iZone’ had ‘i’ in front of the name,” said Steven Hodas, who led the program until 2014. “But that was really just part of a theory of action that was about fundamentally rethinking time, space, and place.”

Sea change under de Blasio

iZone was expected to grow to 400 schools, but the program underwent what can only be described as a meltdown in 2014, after federal innovation grants dried up and de Blasio, a Democrat, became mayor. New Chancellor Carmen Fariña disbanded the office that oversaw the program, and soon several directors and staffers, including Hodas, resigned.

Simultaneously, Fariña worked with the city’s teachers union, United Federation of Teachers, to bring in its own “innovation program,” dubbed Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence, or PROSE.

The result: iZone’s budget shrank from $47 million in 2013 to $3.2 million in 2017, reported. It went from a staff of 65 to just 14.

Today, clicking on iZone’s URL delivers a saying it doesn’t exist.

Research on remote schooling is mixed. A 2019 by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center found that graduation rates at virtual and blended-learning schools were far lower than the national 85 percent average for public schools.

While have said iZone and similar ideas are promising for big-city systems, no large-scale evaluations of iZone have emerged since 2014. One small 2017 study by a graduate student at New York’s St. John’s University found that students in iLearn “blended learning” programs statistically significant greater mean scores in Algebra I Regents exams than their peers in traditional schools.

A few of the efforts, such as the personalized system under School of One, are still operating in a handful of schools, but observers say the effort has diminished in importance in the face of de Blasio’s new priorities, such as community schools and universal pre-K.

As for PROSE, a by the advocacy group StudentsFirstNY found that schools in the program displayed “limited innovation,” as well as “lackluster improvement,” producing lower reading and math scores than others in the city. It also said the program suffered from poor transparency, noting that the city took 14 months to respond — incompletely, as it turns out — to a public records request.

For Lynch, a parent of a city middle-schooler, the shift that took place around 2014 helps explain why New York, like other districts, has struggled to meet kids’ needs over the past year.

“This is not just a story of another big school district [that] just scrambled and tried to figure out online learning as best they could,” he said. “This was a system that had actually, infrastructurally been set up for online learning — and to scale it. …Who made the call to essentially disempower and, if not defund that work, to really just relegate it to the periphery? Because that makes what happened last March even more inexcusable. And it makes this announcement even more unacceptable.”

Sarah Cohodes, an economics and education professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said what’s most striking about de Blasio’s announcement is that it follows the city’s “huge investment” in getting devices and Internet access into students’ hands over the past year, even announcing a virtual end to snow days. “In my imagination, that was happening in the context of having some sort of remote infrastructure that could be turned on or off for more or fewer kids depending on the circumstances. So I’m not sure exactly what they are expecting those days to be like,” she said.

Longtime education researcher said losing remote learning will take a toll: “The great thing about New York has been that many different things have been available — alternative schools and alternative pathways to graduation. And some of those have actually been helped along by the development of pretty good online materials.”

Asked whether any schools would be allowed to operate remotely in the fall, city schools officials referred to the city’s reopening announcement. In it, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew says the union welcomes “the return to in-person instruction for all students in September.” But even Mulgrew has pleaded for a remote option, last month that the city should create “a small but efficient remote alternative for parents who still feel they need it.”

De Blasio isn’t the only leader cutting off remote learning this fall. Across the Hudson River, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on May 17 that the state’s public schools would similarly return to in-person instruction. In Connecticut, officials have said they “ the need to mandate” remote learning in the fall.

‘I think it’s crazy’

Meanwhile, at least six states have created iZones of their own, according to .

“Around the country I’m hearing about more states, and more districts, that are really integrating innovation into their core strategy,” said Joel Rose, who founded and led School of One in its heyday. “They’re saying, ‘Look, remote learning didn’t work for everyone, but it did work for some kids.’ And the question is, ‘What can we learn from those experiences for when kids come back?’”

He noted that so-called , modeled after iZone principles, have taken root in Texas and are “growing quite a bit in popularity.”

Rose, who now runs , a nonprofit that is working to expand the School of One model nationwide, said the organization has seen “a significant uptick in demand for what we do” since the pandemic began.

Hill, who founded the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington-Bothell, said many students have realized during the pandemic that school “is a pretty tough place for them to be. And to kind of ignore all that, I think, is going to further weaken the support base of public education.”

After his Morning Joe announcement, de Blasio told a news briefing, “It’s time for everyone to come back, it’s time for us all to be together, time to do things the way they were meant to be done.” But iZone’s Hodas, now a senior fellow at CRPE, took issue with the idea that online learning is somehow inferior.

“I think it’s crazy that it’s being positioned as purely a negative space,” he said. In New York as elsewhere, many students aren’t thrilled with the prospect of “schlepping back to these shitty, oppressive environments five days a week to do pretend life.”

Older students, he said, could be working or helping out with family duties. “They could be progressing at their own pace at different subjects, and they can do something that’s much more competency-based. And it’s just nuts that de Blasio is acting as if, again, for high school kids, being back in school is like the Holy Grail. It’s not, for a lot of people.”

These were the right-time-and-place elements, converging in the spring of 2014, that allowed New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to reach a relatively little-watched but massive four-year agreement with union leaders to cut health care costs by $3.4 billion. The deal, which must hit its final savings benchmark in 2018, affects city workers and their families — nearly 1 million people, the city says.

For a workforce that had gone without raises for three years or longer under Michael Bloomberg, de Blasio’s term-limited predecessor, the package helped the city afford new contracts that included back pay and raises while continuing to spare union members from having to cover any of their health insurance premiums. (New York remains the only large American city where this is true.)

“We had an opportunity to completely change the nature of the relationship and to say that we are not here to simply tell you how we have to get these savings,” Robert Linn, the city’s energetic labor relations commissioner, said in an interview. “We’re here to create a process where we work together to do it.”

To de Blasio, New York City achieved the urgent and difficult task faced by government and the private sector everywhere: It “bent the arc” of health care costs downward, he said.

But budget watchdogs demurred; “some of the largest items have little to do with the current and future behavior and health of city workers,” said George Sweeting, deputy director of the Independent Budget Office, during a February 2016 city council hearing. He cited gains attributed to the agreement that were the result of unrelated trends that slowed insurance cost growth below city projections.

Over the course of the agreement, according to Linn’s office, $1.9 billion of the $3.4 billion in targeted savings, or about 56 percent, will come from lower-than-expected premium costs.

“It’s like taking credit for the sun coming up in the morning,” said Charles Brecher, senior adviser for health policy at the Citizens Budget Commission. The group argued that savings due to “economic trends,” rather than “actual results of specific initiatives,” should benefit all taxpayers. Instead, workers stand to earn bonuses if they exceed the health plan’s savings targets.

Another $200 million over four years will be drawn from dollars the city set aside in a stabilization fund, a reserve it finances alone but jointly controls with labor to cover higher costs of some city insurance plans. In the past, the unions would not allow Bloomberg to cut costs by tapping into that money.

The New York state comptroller determined, after accounting for dollars saved by slower premium growth and “administrative actions,” that the plan would directly save $544 million, .

Some critics have also complained that the administration agreed to negotiate practices that should happen anyway as a matter of good government. For instance, the agreement will achieve $400 million in savings from auditing insurance rolls for ineligible recipients, such as divorced spouses or adult children; Bloomberg tried to do the same thing, but the unions were able to block him.

Yet the former mayor’s difficulty in achieving some of the compromises de Blasio has won suggests that the ability to make even small gains, in a city with a still-powerful labor sector, can’t be taken for granted.

“I’m a little sympathetic to them,” said Brecher’s colleague Maria Doulis, vice president of the Citizens Budget Commission. “They’re establishing a precedent here to say: ‘We’re settling collective bargaining contracts and we’re putting in health insurance into how we think about this.’ It’s my hope that having accomplished that once it becomes part of how collective bargaining is done in New York.”

The city will find out next year: Many of the de Blasio union contracts are expiring this year or in 2018, including agreements with the United Federation of Teachers, DC37, the communications workers, and 1199SEIU, which represents health care workers and is the country’s largest union. The health care agreement, which was negotiated with the Municipal Labor Committee, a coalition of union leaders that represents nearly all New York City workers, ends June 30, 2018.

Barring an act of God, de Blasio will preside over City Hall for a second term, and unlike in 2013, when he wasn’t the labor favorite, unions began endorsing him more than a year before the 2017 election.

‘A historic and sweeping reform’

Mayor Bloomberg was never popular among workers, but he was initially The relationship deteriorated as large raises disappeared following the 2008 recession. By the time de Blasio took office, every municipal labor contract had been expired for at least three years, forcing the new mayor to reach terms with 150 bargaining units representing 300,000 workers impatient and demanding billions in missed and new raises

“This may be the hardest assignment that anyone in the history of labor relations in this city has taken on,” the mayor said when appointing Linn as labor commissioner on New Year’s Eve 2013. Linn had been former mayor Ed Koch’s chief negotiator in the 1980s, built a successful consulting practice, created benefit packages with a hospital union, and negotiated for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the rank-and-file police union.

He targeted teachers, nurses, and hospital workers, who hadn’t received raises in five years. Just four months into the term, de Blasio announced that Linn had cinched a deal with the powerful UFT, which included an 18 percent wage increase over nine years, retroactive to 2009.

“The Bloomberg administration was willing to let city worker health care costs rise, rather than negotiate meaningfully with the municipal unions,” Michael Mulgrew, president of the 200,000-member teachers union, said in a statement. “But the de Blasio administration has worked with us, and the result is real reductions in what would have been the increase in health care spending.”

The UFT agreement was funded by “a historic and sweeping reform of public employee health care,” City Hall said in the first public mention of a savings agreement, which hadn’t yet been agreed to by the other unions. How these savings would be realized wasn’t explained.

Linn had also been shopping the health savings plan with Harry Nespoli, the Municipal Labor Committee head, who took a shot at Bloomberg. “I heard more worthwhile proposals in the first 45 minutes than I heard the previous three years,” .

Nespoli did not respond to numerous calls for comment.

The commission approved the deal a few days after the UFT announcement, agreeing to meet savings targets of $400 million in fiscal year 2015, $700 million in 2016, $1 billion in 2017, and, in 2018, $1.3 billion. The $1.3 billion would recur annually, Linn explained in a later interview, because it lowered the starting point of ensuing years’ costs.

As a carrot and a stick, unions would receive any surplus up to $365 million above the $3.4 billion, but they were also responsible for delivering each year’s targeted savings even if they were unable to reach them through the agreement’s initiatives.

A labor official said savings were on track to exceed the target, but Linn said he was “not ready” to reach that conclusion.

In June 2014, a month after the agreement was reached, the citizens budget group criticized it as “a collection of one-time or temporary savings.“ A report cited surveys that forecast small growth in insurance premium costs. The city’s much-higher projections were responsibly arrived at “to protect taxpayers from damaging results,” the report said, but “do not reflect the contemporary dynamics of the health insurance market.”

“If insurance premiums decline due to economic trends,” it said, “and not because of any affirmative actions to improve the delivery of health care by the city and the MLC, those savings should be used to offset the expenses of city services, as they always have been, and not to fund raises.”

In April 2015, Linn explained to dubious city council members, who were just then seeing the actual reform measures, that it was on track to meet its $400 million first-year target.

“Many thought this was smoke and mirrors,” . “I think we’ve demonstrated they were absolutely wrong.”

As the watchdogs had feared, however, the city also realized first-year savings of $55 million because the premium costs of HIP HMO, the mostly widely used city plan, increased by 2.89 percent rather than projected 9 percent. Likewise, the premium costs for GHI Senior Care — a Medicare supplement — increased by 0.32 percent rather than 8 percent.

The pushback against counting these as savings created by the agreement was loud enough to move Linn and Dean Fuleihan, New York City’s budget director, to respond in . They said city budget officers had made “prudent” projections based on growth rates over the past 15 years.

The reality of the system

In June 2017, Linn reported expected savings for the remainder of the agreement. Its incentives and price controls, over its last two years especially, appeared to be encouraging better use of medical care. To reduce use of emergency rooms for routine care, for instance, co-pays for visits were tripled from $50 to $150. Programs for managing diabetes and radiology fees were said to have saved millions, as was improved extended care for those with prolonged illnesses or needing rehabilitation.

When it expires in 2018, the agreement will have saved $136 million over four years on specialty drugs, nearly $400 million from discontinuing benefits to those who aren’t eligible, and $135 million by a switch from the HIP HMO plan to the HIP HMO Preferred Plan, according to Linn.

“It is true that we were fortunate that the HIP rate did not go up or the Senior Care rates did not go up as projected,” Linn acknowledged. But, he says, without an “overall structure” that included savings from lower premium increases, the city wouldn’t have been positioned for other savings.

He said he doesn’t think people understood the magnitude of the changes. “Say the MTA has a 2 percent employee contribution to health. [It does.] That would save the city maybe $300 million annually. That is well below the $1.3 billion annual savings that we’ll achieve by the end of the contract,” he said.

“The most important thing was that it helped change the whole relationship between labor and management looking at these problems.”

Some still see the agreement as at best a blown opportunity.

“To present it as a sacrifice on the part of the workers is what’s misleading,” said Bill Hammond, director of health policy at the Empire Center, a right-leaning think tank. “That’s how this was framed to begin with: ‘These are things we traded for at the bargaining table. We gave them raises, they gave us health savings.’

“They should be bargaining for health savings at the table, but they shouldn’t be things the city can do of its own authority. They should be things you need to bargain for.”

The Citizens Budget Commission’s Doulis gives the city credit for getting the union to play along.

“The unions sue over everything, so things that seem like low-hanging fruit, that should have been done 20 years ago, should be done consistently, they sue and they win,” she said. “It blows our minds, but that is just the reality of the system we have here.”

To this way of thinking, those who believe Linn has oversold the agreement may not have accounted sufficiently for the difficulty of collective bargaining in New York City, even if only to change from a plan to a preferred plan or to find out if anyone is getting insurance who shouldn’t be covered.

Health care costs continue to rise, at any rate: about 4 percent annually in the city over the past four years, which Linn compares to about 7 percent nationally. The city comptroller projects 7.4 percent annual growth over the next three years. say they have trouble paying their medical bills, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“When we said we would bend the health care curve, we didn’t say we would turn it negative,” Linn said. “We changed the trend dramatically.”