When Aaliyah Duah was 17, she realized one of the major differences between an underserved community like Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, where she grew up, and more affluent ones was early access to information on how to manage money.

In her public schools, she never learned about financial literacy — and had not heard the term — until she started going down a “rabbit hole” to educate herself on investing. She began to believe: To address the wealth gap in a systemic way, she needed to address the information gap. While a sophomore at Virginia State University during the pandemic, she started , creating workshops that teach personal finance to young people in straightforward, relatable, and fun ways.

Now 23, Duah continues to grow her organization, reaching students at more than 30 schools across Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. She uses examples like Roblox, sneakers, bacon-egg-and-cheeses, and Apple iPhones to teach about credit cards, interest, and retirement accounts. She’s soon releasing a coloring and activity book called My Financial ABC’s, designed to help kids ages 3–8 learn basic financial terms.

(The extra “n” in Revolutionn stands for “network,” because as Duah said, “I learned early on that building wealth requires knowing the right people and making sure the right people know you.”)

On Tuesday, Duah is being recognized for her efforts as a changemaker. She was named , which is essentially . Launched in 2020 by the Walentas Family Foundation, the prize awards $200,000, no-strings attached, to visionaries working to make a difference in the five boroughs.

Duah’s push comes as school districts across the country are embracing financial literacy. , New York state is . Next year, students in grades K-4 must also learn personal finance.

“Everything in our communities teaches us to spend our money poorly and to chase after quick success/financial gains meanwhile wealth builds over time,” Duah said. “I realized that I couldn’t just share this information with my closest friends, I needed to share this message with the world.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell us more about your own experience with school and/or financial literacy and how that affects your work today.

Growing up and even to this day I’ve watched many of my loved ones and peers make poor financial decisions due to a lack of financial education taught to them at a young age. This showed me the importance of learning early so that you don’t grow up developing poor financial habits.

As I learned more about financial literacy, there were accounts and information that I had access to that changed my life. This made me understand that the gap is truly in the access to information. After investing my money and seeing my account grow or building my credit and using it to buy my own car and apartment in my 20s without a cosigner or getting ripped off just because I knew how to manage my money at 17 shows how making smart financial decisions pay off. This drives me to continue to educate myself so I can provide the information to my family and the world.

The David Prize is all about the “power of people with the conviction to change the future of our city.” Tell us a bit about your vision for what’s possible with financial literacy in NYC and how it can help break the cycle of generational poverty.

Financial literacy can change the entire NYC landscape. I truly believe this because that is why some people fight so hard to keep it out of schools, because they know when you put financial education in the hands of all people it will level the playing field. If we provide financial education to people at a young age, they grow up avoiding years worth of making poor financial decisions, they can open accounts at a young age that gives them money to have options when they are older.

Additionally, when they become parents they know how to manage their money so they aren’t passing down financial trauma to their children and helping them establish smart financial habits at a young age.

Financial education helps build better communities and solve systemic issues. When we think of a community, a community is made up of individuals, so if each individual becomes financially savvy the whole neighborhood becomes wealthy. That changes the quality of life for all people who live there. That changes family dynamics, closes the wealth gap, fixes crime, and all the very systems that are hurting families.

What does your work look like with schools?

Every school gets the same Financial Revolutionn experience, but the way they receive it depends on the needs of the school. Some schools’ budgets allow for a six-session program while others can be a semester long. All programs end in a culminating activity which can vary from a stock analysis competition, business pitch competition, or students designing their financial future. The purpose of the program is for the students to come in with any understanding of finances and leave with a transformational experience.

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

My favorite lesson to teach is types of accounts and stock investing. Types of accounts is fun because I watch the students go through this aha moment where they are learning about new accounts they didn’t even know existed. For example teaching them about a 401K, which is a term they probably hear often but nobody has ever taken the time to educate them on what that is. I remember teaching a group of college students the difference between a high yield savings account and a regular savings account, and one of them asked me: If this is free and grows your money at a higher rate, how come everyone doesn’t have this account? I had to tell them the truth: It’s simply because people just don’t know these exist.

The stock investing class is always cool because I see students’ mindsets shift from thinking like a consumer to an investor/owning. They start to understand the power of compound interest and investing at a young age gives them more time for their assets to grow.

Many students have told us they think schools should be teaching financial literacy. What sort of feedback have you gotten from students?

I have students say my classes were the best classes they’ve ever had or they only come to school to come to my class, which is sad but the truth.

This is a big moment for financial literacy. New York is now requiring public schools to begin providing personal finance instruction. What are your thoughts on the requirement?

I love that the DOE is starting to be more serious about the financial literacy conversation and really implementing it into more schools. I just hope that they are intentional about how they implement it into the school system.

Financial literacy is very important and if it isn’t received well in the classroom, it would almost become like an English class where students need to know how to read and write but because they made the topic so boring, students don’t take it seriously.

What do you plan to do with the prize money?

I plan to utilize the prize money to invest into an online program that helps families learn about personal finances in an engaging and interactive way.

I also plan to use it to invest in a team to help expand my program into more schools so that we can impact thousands of families all over NYC.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at

Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.

Unfortunately, student newspapers are increasingly rare. A national found that fewer than half of high schools had student newspapers in 2021, down from almost two-thirds a decade earlier. The situation is even worse in New York City, the so-called media capital of the world, which must fully implement its “Portrait of a Graduate” framework by the 2029-30 school year. A found only 27% of the city’s 400-plus public high schools had a student newspaper — and that number was even lower among schools serving high-poverty communities and those with the lowest graduation rates. 

For five years, the nonprofit I lead, Press Pass NYC, has been addressing this gap by training teachers to advise student-led news teams, both online and in print. We’ve partnered with more than 40 schools across the city, launching brand-new news teams or revitalizing those that may have closed or had trouble getting off the ground. 

Because newspapers are no longer so visible or easily obtained as they were when New Yorkers used to leave them on buses and subways, many teens have never seen one until joining a news team. I realized this when I visited schools to watch how the teachers and students are working together. I got a few bewildered looks when I asked some students what kind of artwork or photo they thought should go with their articles. But as a former reporter, I was thrilled to see how much they love journalism when they realize what they can do with it.

Middle and high school students spent last year writing about controversial new policies like the city’s school phone ban. At one school in Chinatown, an editorial against the ban revealed that for students to use during class. A student at a Queens high school told me how interviewing people for an article on immigration taught him that writing a news article is different from an opinion piece. “ This is this person’s life, this is their story and you’re listening and you’re resonating,” he explained, with reverence. 

A Bronx River High School student, Lathania Williams, won a for teen journalism for her report on the impact of immigration enforcement on her community. “I didn’t know my voice could reach that far, or that I had power in my writing,” she said. The news team at a school in Brooklyn that a school lockdown had been caused by immigration enforcement agents (it wasn’t). One student who works on the publication said the article, “let people know what actually really happened instead of the lie or the rumor.”

At a time when 84% of U.S. teens have a of journalism, student newsrooms create a source of accurate local news, showing the whole school community the difference between journalism and the unvetted information kids get from social media. In the process, students learn through a collaborative workplace driven by a shared mission with deadlines and standards — the same type of skills “Portrait of a Graduate” standards will be looking for.

St is far more complicated than simply finding a teacher willing to advise one. An effective adviser must understand journalistic ethics, interview skills, audience engagement, newsroom management and the legal and editorial responsibilities that come with student journalism. Those professional skills cannot be acquired through a weekend workshop. And while artificial intelligence can help a student brainstorm questions or polish a headline, it can’t substitute for an adviser who knows when a source needs to be corroborated, when publishing could put a student at risk or when an administrator is improperly trying to influence editorial decisions.

Building those skills requires sustained professional development, practice and support. My colleague Lara Bergen, who founded Press Pass NYC five years ago, learned this the hard way. A former teacher, she had started a student newspaper at her New York City public high school and was thrilled to see how well it engaged her students. But she had zero training in journalism, and that limited what she could accomplish. Her solution was to create a three-year, in-depth Journalism Adviser Fellowship for teachers, a cohort model where teachers learn together from experienced journalism educators. 

This type of training is essential for a school-based newsroom to last. Unlike core subjects, very few states license teachers specifically to teach journalism. In most places, including New York, the subject is folded into the English Language Arts curriculum, which means an ELA teacher can get handed a newspaper or yearbook to advise with no real journalism training. Because requirements differ widely by location, the Journalism Education Association offers a designation for teachers to prove they are highly qualified.

For student journalism to help prepare the next generation of citizens, schools have to stop treating the person running the newsroom as just another teacher with room in his or her schedule. Journalism advising deserves professional preparation and ongoing support, and schools must treat advisers with the same respect as any other educator. That means building journalism into teacher credentialing, funding the sustained training that advising requires and counting the work of a student newsroom as evidence that a graduate can think critically, communicate clearly and engage as a citizen.

Wearing her school’s optional uniform and “ABC” bows in her hair, Mia excitedly entered the building, greeted multiple adults with “Good morning!” and hugs, and ran to the school bus balloon display for a photo opp. 

“Can I see Mia?” the precocious toddler asked, wanting to approve the picture. 

Her aunt, who dropped Mia off Thursday morning, said that when the family found out she had gotten one of the coveted 2-K slots — some 5,700 families applied — they were “so excited.” She said the rollout of the free early care and education program was a boon for the city at large — especially its toddlers.

“Sometimes at 2, if they’re not in daycare, they’re just sitting at home,” she said. “So this means a lot. It’s a wonderful opportunity.”

Mia’s new school, Innovators Prep, sits in a commercial building nestled between a hardware store and an urgent care on Church Street, in a part of East Flatbush, Brooklyn also known as Little Caribbean. It’s one of neighborhoods across four boroughs selected by the mayor’s office to participate in the initial 2-K rollout, based on economic need and high childcare demand.

Innovators Prep houses 24 of the , which kicked off Thursday as part of Mamdani’s signature early learning expansion plan. The weeks leading up to the launch were marked by an ongoing , which left a number of providers without months worth of city funding and scrambling to open.

Innovators Prep is still awaiting their contract registration but just received a bridge loan from the city on Monday, Polina Ioureva, the center’s founder and CEO, told ����Ӱ��. The center’s 2-K program opened two days early, on Tuesday, to align with opening day for its other early education programs, Ioureva said, and because it worked better for many of their families. 

Once inside, the school is all welcoming balloons, posters, toys and music, drowning out the sounds of the city’s bustling streets.

Mia’s aunt, who brings her niece to school because Mia’s mom is a teacher and has to be at work before the program’s 8 a.m. start, said the family fell in love with Innovators Prep on their initial tour. She described the first day drop-off as “smooth,” saying her niece is “so excited so far, and she just went right on in.” 

Already school has become one of Mia’s favorite things — along with Bluey and going to the park.

Not all new learners had as easy a time separating from their grown-ups. Two-year-old Giovanni, wearing a Scooby-Doo T-shirt and construction-themed backpack, initially bounded into the building and began posing for photos and squeezing the oversized, blow-up crayon balloons in the lobby. But as soon as his mom and siblings tried to leave, he began to cry. Wiping tears from his face, he was ultimately distracted with breakfast, a toy truck and his new teacher, who came out to greet him.

“We got one in!” exclaimed one of the center’s leaders, as Giovanni headed to his new classroom, green car in hand.

Throughout the morning, the lobby of Innovators Prep buzzed with the excitement, giggles, tears, shrieks and the general organized chaos familiar to any early learning environment.

Ioureva first opened the school in 2023, following a career as a preschool teacher, director and eventually instructional coordinator with the NYC Department of Education. In that role, she supported teachers in the same Brooklyn district she was a student in years ago and assisted with the rollout of 3-K under former Mayor Bill De Blasio. 

“Now I’m able to take everything I’ve learned and bring it into the classrooms,” she said, describing her career’s many “full circle” moments. It’s been particularly exciting to see the 2-K launch from the other side, she said, and to be able to support a whole new group of families.

Emmy Liss, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education, referred to this week’s launch as “our Super Bowl.” She said she’s already heard from many families who are “excited for what this is going to mean for their kids,” while also “allow(ing) them to save a tremendous amount of money this year.”

As of 2024, the annual cost of private childcare ranged between $16,900 to $26,000 annually, according to the A family would need to make over a year — the equivalent of 10 minimum-wage jobs — to afford the average cost of childcare for a single 2-year-old, according to the New York City’s comptroller’s office.

In response to questions around the delayed funding, Liss on Wednesday echoed Mamdani’s earlier comments, saying that this year’s delays “were unacceptable,” and noting that “our teams have been working around the clock over the last couple of weeks to expedite the contract registration process, get loans to childcare providers who said that they need them and just generally make sure that all providers have what they need to have a smooth opening day tomorrow.”

At the end of August, Mamdani pledged to ensure all classrooms would be operational by opening day; he also said he’d triple the number of staff working to approve contracts. The city, he said, has issued more than 300 loans and 500 contracts and was approving loans within

When asked if any centers would delay opening because of funding shortfalls, Liss replied, “At this time, we’ve been able to support all the centers who’ve reached out to us with any sort of concern.”

Still, some providers said they hadn’t received the promised bridge loans as of Wednesday and at least one Brooklyn 3-K and pre-K site sent a letter to parents saying they would be opening a week late because of funding delays, according to reporting from Others have taken out lines of credit in order to open their doors. 

Ioureva told ����Ӱ�� her center was never at risk of a delayed opening, partially due to other sources of funding she has since the site is also a 3-K and preschool. Still, she and the other leaders at her school expressed worry for providers running smaller, home-based programs, who they feared have been hit harder.

Funding and contract delays have long plagued the city’s early childhood system; they appear to be particularly brutal this year thanks to a confluence of factors, including a of the department under former Mayor Eric Adams.

Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at the early childhood advocacy organization , said system problems like the ones facing the Mamdani administration are to be expected because for years “we’ve disinvested in (early education) and made it everybody’s private responsibility instead of the public good it should be” so “we haven’t really put the money into building the infrastructure.”

“But (the 2-K program is) showing that we can build big things at scale … and that’s an important reminder for people that government can do … big things that are going to meaningfully help lower costs for families and make their lives easier,” she said.

The Mamdani administration has pledged that 2-K will grow six-fold next year, to serve 12,000 2-year-olds, and continue expansion until it is fully scaled, reaching all interested families, by the end of his first term. The first two years will be backed through a investment from the state, with funding beyond that still uncertain.

In the school year, almost 44,000 students were enrolled in NYC 3-K and just under 60,000 in pre-K. 

Pancakes and ‘Baby Shark’

In Mia’s classroom later that morning, she sat among friends at a small, wooden table for breakfast. “I like to eat pancakes!” she announced. After finishing her own, she turned to another 2-year-old to her left asking, “Can I eat your pancakes?”

Her teacher, Anasia Allard, greeted other students and moved around the woodland adventure-themed classroom. Beneath intricate vines made of construction paper that hung from the ceiling, Allard, an early educator for seven years, sang to her students and soothed some as they cried, reminding them of their breathing techniques.

Following their meal, a few students danced along to the viral hit song “Baby Shark,” before the entire class transitioned to circle time on the rug. There, Allard had all of the wiggly 2-year-olds take a seat and “catch a bubble,” a common phrase early educators use to ask students to turn off their voices and re-focus. She then sang good morning to each one, and went over the weather, date and days of the week. 

Students in the 2-K program at Innovators Prep have access to just over six hours of care each weekday, from 8 a.m. to 2:20 p.m. All families have to do is show up, and the center provides the rest, including diapers and other essential supplies. While at school, toddlers receive two meals and a snack; use of a rooftop playground; extensive programming and plenty of time for play. Students are also eligible to receive early intervention services and developmental screenings. 

In all, the center serves just over 100 kids, across 10 classrooms, two of which are 2-K. They currently have a 2-K waitlist of at least 200 families that at one point reached nearly 400, according to 2-K educational director Christine Wooding.

Mamdani’s expansion has also meant more 3-K and preschool kids can access programming at Innovators Prep for free, without having to navigate the city’s complicated voucher system. 

Wooding said the center’s working families have already expressed how thankful they are and a number are interested in extended hours.

“They are very happy,” she said. “They have a comfortable place (where) they know their child is happy and getting the support that they need.”

She . Even before she could report to the classroom, airplanes had struck the World Trade Center. The next year, she became a full-time history teacher at the High School for Environmental Studies. This year marks her 25th educating students there about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath.

Rosenberg’s first few years teaching about the attacks meant remembering an experience she shared with her students. There were school assemblies and moments of silence. But Rosenberg’s lessons gradually shifted from sharing memories to having students interview their parents about their recollections. 

By the 15th anniversary of 9/11, the students in her classes didn’t personally remember 9/11. About 10% of adults today were born after 2001, according to a recent report. Of those who are between the ages of 18 and 24, 60% first learned about 9/11 in class or through school assignments. 

“What’s starting to get different now is the growing share of parents who weren’t around for it either, or weren’t old enough to be aware,” she said. “This whole firsthand memory pipeline [of 9/11] in the household is thinning. That’s why I think it’s more important than ever to learn about it, because there’s so many different threads to unpack — how it relates to the current day and where we are today as a country and a world.”

An found that while at least 40 states currently expect or suggest that schools address 9/11 in some way, education standards vary widely in scope and framing. Some don’t specify what to teach. 

A 2019 University of Wisconsin-Madison of secondary school teachers found that educators usually spent a short period of time on the topic — often on the anniversary — and that it was common for the narrative to be oversimplified. 

States that have revised their standards to expand instruction around 9/11 in the past few years include Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, South Dakota and Utah. A 2024 requires fifth graders to track U.S. military conflicts, including those after 9/11, while juniors have to evaluate the country’s response to the terrorist attacks.

In 2022, Arizona lawmakers a requirement that every public school devote time to “age-appropriate education” on 9/11 around the anniversary. But the law was three years later to limit instruction to grades 7 to 12.

Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire and North Dakota have education standards that suggest the topic for consideration in classrooms. A few states, such as Wyoming, Washington and Vermont, don’t have any requirements at all, and Minnesota doesn’t mention 9/11 in its guidelines, according to the Associated Press analysis.

“Policy helps, and [9/11] being in the standards helps because, to me, the biggest challenge of 9/11 is there’s not a single aspect of the story that isn’t complicated,” said Jennifer Lagasse, education programs director at The National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City. “Where do you start the story? How do you make it age-appropriate? I fully understand why it feels like it might be easier not to talk about it, but if our students aren’t getting their information from us, the question becomes: Where are they getting their information?”

In New York, eighth graders are expected to learn about 9/11’s effects on national security, the Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the war on terror. Sophomores and juniors analyze global security and the government’s reaction to the attacks. 

The museum has published 9/11 lesson plans for teachers across the country to use for many years, Lagasse said. Its latest for the 25th anniversary.

“We have reinvested in laying a factual foundation of what happened on 9/11, because students are coming in with no lived knowledge and sometimes less received knowledge,” Lagasse said. “It’s crazy to think that it’s already been 25 years, which is a full generation. But at the same time, that means that 9/11 hasn’t made it into all of the history books or curriculums yet. So the amount of formal education that students are receiving can be very uneven.”

Lagasse said new teachers are also coming into the classroom without personal experience of 9/11, making it harder to educate children about the subject. 

Rosenberg said it’s become more difficult to teach about the terrorist attacks because students view it as just another tragedy that happened a long time ago, like Pearl Harbor and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, rather than an event that occurred in the recent past.

It’s also hard to get to events that happened in 2001 when American history lessons begin in 1492, she said.

“But even if you do, you’re going to have to rush through a lot,” Rosenberg said. “I think that it’s so important that kids understand the past 25 years of history, because 9/11 has — without them even realizing it — shaped their world, from ICE to the wars that we’re engaged in, to Islamophobia and civil liberties issues. The fact that we don’t have a lot of time to talk about that day, let alone recent history, is a big concern.”

In the 2019 , researcher Jeremy Stoddard found that of the 1,047 surveyed teachers, 50% who taught U.S. history said they provided instruction about Islamophobia or anti-Muslim attitudes. About 86% reported teaching about terrorism and 75% about Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the terrorist attack. 

“Our research suggests a major issue in how the majority of secondary school social studies teachers in the U.S. teach about the events of 9/11 and [the war on terror],” the report said. “There is little historical context or depth in their engagements with students. Further, by continuing to focus on 9/11 as a memorial event and emphasis on heroes and Muslim villains, with the U.S. as victim, teachers have likely reinforced rather than challenged the endemic anti-Muslim sentiment.”

On Friday — the second day of school in New York City — Rosenberg will dedicate a full day of instruction to topics around 9/11. She said she plans on covering issues like foreign policy and the Islamophobia that followed the attack. 

“You can hold those truths that it was a tragic, awful day, but also you know it was awful what happened afterward,” she said. “I think that not teaching all of that and just teaching it as a horrific day for America because people died and then moving on doesn’t tell the whole story — especially for kids to understand it and the complexity of history.”

But with the rise of social media and video streaming, some news articles are that the Western world is heading toward a post-literate society where the written word matters less than it used to. Sixty years ago, if you wanted to learn the capital of Zambia or how to fix a leaky faucet, you’d have to look it up in a book. Nowadays, Google and YouTube can answer such questions, and tools like Claude and ChatGPT can spit out written text without much input from humans.

And yet, as E.D. Hirsch more than 25 years ago, “it takes knowledge to gain knowledge.” The internet may have put an extraordinary amount of information at our fingertips, but we still need to be able to read it, understand it and connect it to what we already know. If anything, a world awash in information makes literacy more important, not less.

If reading remains the gateway to learning almost everything else, then one of the most important things a school can do is teach children to read well. So a year ago, ����Ӱ�� started looking for schools that were beating the odds in teaching kids to read. By comparing literacy and poverty rates for 10,000 districts, 42,000 schools and 3 million kids, we found more than 2,000 Bright Spots across the country and plotted them on an interactive map. 

Since then, we’ve been speaking with teachers, principals and literacy coaches at a number of these Bright Spots schools, trying to figure out what they do differently.

A few takeaways from that search: 

The basics matter more than magic: Some schools were surprised to be on our list. They didn’t necessarily have an unusual program or practice in place, but across schools, we kept seeing the same organizational factors: they all have strong leaders who are resolutely focused on student outcomes, they pay attention to the quality of their curriculum and how it’s being implemented, and they closely monitor student performance data in service of continuous improvement. These feel like platitudes, but they’re essential elements to getting reading instruction right.

They focus on core instruction: The Bright Spots schools all seem to prioritize high-quality core instruction, for all kids. Notably, the Worcester County, Maryland, district getting “improbable” results explicitly protects its reading instructional time and doesn’t allow interruptions, even for providing a student with personalized help. Similarly, Connecticut’s Meriden school district earned several spots on our list in part by prioritizing a common reading block across the entire district.

They emphasize foundational skills. National data suggests that all boats rise when kids have strong foundational skills. Schools are emphasizing that lesson in different ways. For example, the Indian River district in Florida has an afterschool program that gives students who need extra literacy help explicit instruction on the letters or sounds they’re learning during the school day. In Illinois, a Rockford school saw strong gains after it shifted to skill-based, rather than grade-based, reading instruction.

They set high expectations. Many of the schools on our list simply set higher expectations than other places are comfortable imposing. A district in Florida officially adopted a goal of getting 90% of their students reading proficiently by the end of third grade and is holding itself accountable for it.

This also plays out in smaller ways. Worcester County schools asks parents to sign logs confirming that their kids read for 30 minutes every night. Over the course of a school year, that adds hours of extra practice time that schools couldn’t provide on their own. Schools in Steubenville, Ohio, where nearly all third graders read proficiently, by asking students to always respond in complete sentences.

Good schools are good across the board: One thing that surprised me, but maybe shouldn’t have, is that good schools rarely specialize. There are exceptions, but in general, schools that are good at helping some children learn to read are also good for other groups of students. Researchers analyzing data across 3 million students found that the most of whether a school is going to be good for a specific group is whether it produces strong learning gains overall. This is also true across subjects. Schools that are good at teaching reading also tend to be good at teaching math.

Charter schools were over-represented: In any given community, charters are often among the most academically oriented schools. They made up 7% of all schools in our sample but 11% of those that we identified as exceptional.

Poverty seems to matter more in some states than others. In some states, the connection between a school’s poverty level and its reading scores was very strong. In others, the relationship was noticeably weaker. My hunch is that this is mostly the result of how states are divided up into school districts and how concentrated poverty is in those communities, but it’s important for policymakers to understand what challenges students in their area are facing.

Find the Bright Spots: Documenting where students are struggling is important. But advocates and state leaders should spend more time identifying where students are succeeding despite the odds and what other schools can learn from these outliers.

Places like Steubenville and Worcester County show that demographics don’t dictate outcomes. Every state has schools that outperform what their circumstances would predict, and state and local leaders should find them, study them and figure out how to create more of them.

This year, the survey went out from February to April. Of parents queried, 446,743 responded, and they were strongly positive about their children’s learning experience. For example, 92% of parents of third grade students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that, “My child is progressing in reading the way I would expect.” Such high rates of agreement were consistent across grade levels and subjects.

At the same time the surveys were wrapping up, the kids were for state tests. And those results painted a much less rosy picture. In third-grade reading, just 44% of students scored proficient or above. To be sure, a child who starts behind can make meaningful progress while remaining below grade level. But the size of the gap is still remarkable.

In the early grades, for example, 92% to 94% of parents said their children were progressing in reading as they expected, and 92% to 95% said the same in math. Meanwhile, just 43% of New York City’s students in grades K-2 at or above the national median in reading, and just 42% did so in math.

Of course, Big Apple parents are hardly alone. The national nonprofit Learning Heroes has been working to raise awareness about the disconnect between inflated classroom grades and objective learning outcomes. Still, as ����Ӱ��’s Jessika Harkay reported earlier this year, many parents value grades over test scores. According to a recent , 71% of parents said grades are more important than tests in making decisions for their children, compared with just 8.5% who said test scores are more important.

But test scores are important, and early grade results are strong signals of future performance. A recent longitudinal from NWEA found that only 14% of students who started kindergarten in the bottom 20th percentile eventually read proficiently by third grade. The chances were even lower in math. Those results reflect the current status quo, but they underscore how important it is for parents and schools to identify learning gaps early and act quickly to address them.

The problem is that many parents may not be getting a clear signal that anything is wrong. If schools tell parents their children are progressing, classroom grades reinforce that message and parents discount standardized tests, then the students who most need additional help may be the least likely to get it.

Disclosure: The author consults with NWEA, but the conclusions drawn here are his own.

The claims that the council’s approval of bonuses for some of the city’s lowest-paid school employees is unlawful because it bypasses the traditional collective bargaining process. 

The bill, passed unanimously July 16, automatically became law Wednesday after Mamdani failed to sign or veto it. If he had vetoed the legislation, it would have gone back to the council and members could have overturned his veto with a two-thirds vote.

Similar legislation introduced last year was backed by the United Federation of Teachers in an effort to address the city’s paraprofessional shortage. After the bill failed to move out of committee, it was in February by multiple council members. 

New paraprofessionals earn in the city. The pay scale tops out near $57,000 for paraprofessionals with a bachelor’s degree and 15 years of service. Over the past 20 years, have increased nearly $12,000 for paraprofessionals, while the highest-paid principals have seen raises totaling $86,000. The bonus pay law will give full-time paraprofessionals four payments of $2,500 throughout the 2026-27 school year. 

The union said in a that the legislation was carefully drafted to ensure it didn’t violate the city’s . Michael Mulgrew, the union’s president, that the city’s claim it was suing to protect employees was “a joke.”

“The city council would not have introduced — let alone passed — this bill if it were illegal, and we would not have supported a bill that threatened our collective bargaining rights,” the union said on its . “Once again, the city has proven that it cares more about protecting pattern bargaining than protecting the most vulnerable children in our city and the paraprofessionals who keep them safe.”

The new law allows the council to reauthorize stipends each year as long as New York City Public Schools has a paraprofessional shortage or until the city changes the practice of — a local policy that lets the salary increases negotiated for one municipal union’s contract set the pattern for all the others.

The union and council members said pattern bargaining has contributed to low paraprofessional pay. Once an initial bargaining pattern is created, it’s challenging to get the city to grant better terms to another union, according to the .

Mamdani’s lawsuit argues that by sidestepping the collective bargaining process, the city council set a “perilous and unlawful precedent with huge fiscal consequences for the Department of Education and the city — and, by extension, the tax-paying public.”

“If the paraprofessional pay bill is allowed to stand, other public employees will undoubtedly seek their own ‘stabilization’ payments from the council, also outside of the collective bargaining process, or otherwise use council proposals for such payments as leverage over that process,” the lawsuit said.

Marie Wausnock is a New York City paraprofessional who co-founded Fix Para Pay, a union caucus that opposes Mulgrew. She said several paraprofessionals oppose the bonuses as a way to bump wages because the money does not count toward pensions and is currently approved only for the 2026-27 school year.

“You know what’s going to happen? I’m sure they will have people who will want to become a para. Because they’ll get an extra $10,000,” she told ����Ӱ��. “They’re going to work for a year. They won’t really see what the job is about, and if they won’t have another $10,000 [the following year], they’re leaving.”

City Council Speaker Julie Menin said in a Wednesday press release that council members unanimously approved the paraprofessional bonuses and that it’s unacceptable for some employees to receive only a $32,000 salary to support some of the district’s highest-need students.

“This law is not only the right thing to do, it is also the fiscally responsible thing to do, helping address the staffing shortages that contribute to the city’s $1.5 billion in Carter case costs,” she said.

New York City spends more than $1 billion annually on what are called — legal claims that allow parents to enroll children with disabilities in private school and seek tuition reimbursement from the district on grounds that it failed to provide an appropriate education, as required by law. 

Multiple city council members during the July 16 vote that the stipends are necessary as a first step toward solving the district’s paraprofessional shortage. New York City Public Schools was short more than 1,500 support staff last year. 

“This is not the answer,” Wausnock said. “The answer is fixing our longevity [pay increases]. It’s fixing our base pay.”

As assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education under George W. Bush, I had the privilege of helping to translate that research into policy. It was an optimistic time. We believed that if we could align classroom practice with what decades of research had taught us about reading development, we could dramatically improve children’s lives. 

Looking back, we were right about the science. But we were strikingly naïve about its implementation. 

Last week, New York released its latest state reading assessment results. The were discouraging. Reading proficiency had declined, particularly in grades 3 through 5, leading many to question whether — the evidence-based literacy program introduced in 2023 — was working at all.��

It’s a fair question. If all we have is a single set of state test scores, that conclusion is understandable. But state assessments capture only one moment in a much longer process of instructional change. To understand whether NYC Reads is making a difference, we have to look beyond a single test.

To answer that question, my team of researchers at New York University has spent the past three years in dozens of New York City classrooms, many in schools where reading achievement had remained stubbornly low for years. We weren’t looking for dramatic transformations. We wanted to understand whether the daily work of teaching and learning was beginning to change.  

At first, the changes revealed themselves in small ways. Children no longer looked immediately to the teacher when they came to an unfamiliar word. Instead, they looked back at the print. You could see them quietly sounding out the word, stretching the phonemes with their fingers, and trying again. During dictation, children held up their whiteboards proudly after spelling words they would not have attempted only months earlier. Teachers were no longer carrying the cognitive burden of every lesson; children were beginning to carry more of it themselves. 

The conversations had changed as well. Rather than asking children simply to recall a fact or identify a character, teachers pressed them to explain their thinking, justify an answer with evidence from the text, or connect a new idea to something they had learned the week before. Just as striking, children began asking their own questions — about insects, weather, communities or whatever topic they happened to be studying. 

Vocabulary was no longer treated as a list of words to memorize but as a way of making sense of increasingly complex ideas. Reading instruction felt less like a performance by the teacher and more like an intellectual partnership between teachers and children. 

But observations can be deceptive. Good researchers learn to distrust first impressions, no matter how encouraging they may seem. Were these classrooms simply more engaging? Were teachers becoming more skillful without children learning substantially more? Or were the changes we observed beginning to alter children’s reading trajectories in measurable ways?

We began looking beyond classroom observations to the children’s assessments. The first school we examined had struggled with reading achievement for years. Judging only by its reputation, few people would have expected dramatic progress. Yet the end-of-year assessments told a different story. Children who had entered kindergarten with little or no measurable word reading were now reading at levels that placed them well above national norms. One child finished the year at the 98th percentile in sight-word reading. Others reached the 90th and 86th percentiles. These were not isolated successes; they were signs that something within the school had begun to change. 

A second school served predominantly multilingual learners. Here the picture was equally revealing. Many children still required intensive support by the end of kindergarten, reminding us how much work remained. But alongside them were classmates reading comfortably within the core range, some reaching the mid-90th percentiles on foundational reading measures. The averages alone could never capture that story because they concealed what mattered most: the distribution itself was beginning to shift.  

The school-level findings were encouraging, but they raised an even larger question. Were these schools exceptional, or were they revealing a broader pattern? Three schools, no matter how compelling their stories, cannot answer that question. To find out, we widened the lens.

We analyzed districtwide reading data collected before the initiative began and compared it with data gathered during the first years of implementation, following the progress of nearly 4,000 students. Unlike an annual state assessment, which provides a snapshot of performance at a single point in time, these nationally normed screeners were designed to measure growth. They allowed us to ask a different question: Were children making meaningful progress as readers?

The results closely mirrored what we had been seeing in classrooms. Across successive cohorts, children continued to make steady gains in reading, with growth evident across grades and among most student groups. The progress was neither dramatic nor complete. Too many children were still struggling to read proficiently, and important differences remained among schools. But the pattern itself was remarkably consistent. 

Classroom observations, school-level assessments, and districtwide screening data were all pointing in the same direction. Independently, each offered only a partial picture. Together, they suggested that meaningful instructional change was beginning to take hold.

So, when I look at the state assessment, I don’t see a contradiction. I see a different measure answering a different question. It reminds us that New York still has a great deal of work to do, particularly in the upper elementary grades where reading becomes increasingly demanding. 

But I do not believe those results tell us we are on the wrong path. Rather, classroom observations, school-level assessments, districtwide growth data and state results lead me to a different conclusion: meaningful instructional change has begun.

Looking back, I think this is another lesson we failed to appreciate when the National Reading Panel was first released. We assumed that once the science was clear, progress would reveal itself quickly. We now know better. Educational change takes time. The important question is not whether the work is finished. The important question is whether it is moving in the right direction.

I believe that it is. Educational change appears first in classrooms, then in children, then in schools, and only later in statewide results. This is not the moment to abandon course. It is the moment not to blink.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at

Reading scores sank in New York City last school year, with a nearly 14 percentage point decline among third graders, according to preliminary data released Friday.

Among students in grades 3-8, about half were proficient in reading, a decline of 6 percentage points. That nearly erases a the year before. Math scores were flat, with 57% of students considered proficient.

The declines in reading proficiency were most pronounced in grades 3-5. In addition to the dramatic decline in third grade, fourth grade scores fell nearly 6 percentage points, and fifth grade scores fell by 13 points. (You can find your school’s test results at the bottom of this story.)

The unusually steep drop in reading proficiency comes as the city is heading into its . All elementary schools are required to use approved curriculums that officials contend line up with the science of reading, a longstanding body of evidence about how children learn to read. A growing number of middle schools are in the process of adopting new reading curriculums, too.

City officials vowed to conduct an analysis of the sharp fluctuations in reading scores.

“School leaders across New York City are seeing dramatic swings in literacy proficiency reflected in this year’s state assessment results,” schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said in a statement. “These results raise important questions and deserve careful, rigorous analysis so we can ensure we’re measuring what students are learning.”

City officials noted that the state test scores diverged from the city’s own periodic assessments, which generally showed improvements in reading.

The city’s teachers union has supported the elementary reading curriculum changes, but criticized the Education Department’s approach in response to the latest scores.

“We have to refocus on what we know works in literacy — a clear plan, a tailored science of reading curriculum, and meaningful professional development for educators,” Mary Vaccaro, the union’s vice president for education, said in a statement.

She said the Education Department “abandoned that approach” last year and “piled on additional programs, assessments, consultant’s recommendations and curriculum in the hopes that ‘more’ would equal better, and we lost ground.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has vowed to double down on the literacy and math curriculum overhauls launched by his predecessor. In May, he announced plans to , a move the union also criticized.

Test scores alone can’t prove whether a policy is working because many factors influence them. But city officials pointed to the dramatic 7 percentage point spike last year as .

The reading proficiency declines mirror a similar . Some testing experts told Chalkbeat this week that whipsawing scores are unusual and raise questions about whether there are irregularities in the exams.

Andrew Ho, a Harvard professor who serves on a panel of experts who are paid to advise New York on its state assessment system, said the state exams are carefully constructed.

“It’s uncommon but not unprecedented” to see test scores significantly shift up and down, Ho said.

Observers should consider them in the context of other data, including the city’s own assessments and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, widely considered the gold standard assessment. A new round of results on that federal exam, including for New York City, are expected next year.

Others worried that there was an unidentified problem with the tests. Emily Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University who has studied patterns in state assessment results, said the swings were reminiscent of COVID-era disruptions but without an obvious cause.

“It’s just so implausible that there would be these kind of swings, and that they would be concentrated in some grades and some subjects and not others,” she said. “It just feels like there’s a mistake.”

EdTrust-New York, an advocacy group, called for an independent audit of the last three years of state testing data. “NYSED never adequately investigated or explained last year’s dramatic gains, making this year’s reversal difficult to interpret,” the group said in a statement earlier this week.

A spokesperson for the state’s Education Department said that the state conducts two independent audits of its assessments each year and those reviews have not flagged any problems.

As in prior years, the test results show deep disparities between student groups.

Asian American students saw the largest declines in reading scores last year among racial groups, with proficiency rates dropping to about 67%, down nearly 8 percentage points. A similar share of white students were considered proficient in reading.

Meanwhile, nearly 42% of Black students were proficient, a decline of 5 percentage points. About 37% of Latino students were marked proficient, 6 percentage points lower than the prior year. Just under 22% of students with disabilities were proficient readers.

Students who are currently learning English, or were in the past, saw the largest reading dips. Their proficiency rates dipped nearly 10 percentage points to 62.1%.

Math scores were more stable. Almost 44% of Black and Latino students were proficient in the subject, up less than 1 percentage point respectively. White and Asian American students’ scores dipped by about a percentage point each, to 74% and nearly 80%, respectively.

Curious about school-level test results? Here is a searchable breakdown of math and English scores across all of the city’s public schools (charters are not included).

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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On June 26, Children’s Aid was preparing to continue summer sexual health and youth development programming in schools, foster care settings and community organizations across New York City.

By the end of the day, the federal funding behind that work was gone.

The Trump administration terminated Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants nationwide with immediate effect, stripping Children’s Aid of $936,700 a year with two years still remaining on its grant. 

Children’s Aid has worked in under-resourced New York communities for more than 170 years. Its health and wellness division operates two community clinics and six school-based health centers and provides medical, dental, behavioral health, nutrition, family planning and health care management services.

Children’s Aid also provided programming at the Administration for Children’s Services Children’s Center, where children may stay while waiting for placement in the foster care system.

The organization had no time to prepare its staff, community partners or the approximately 1,200 young people it served annually.

Several nonprofit groups and local governments have filed a lawsuit challenging the administration’s termination of Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants and its changes to the program’s evidence-based framework. Separately, 79 members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus and the broader House Democratic Caucus sent HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a letter demanding that the canceled grants be restored.

In the meantime, Children’s Aid is grappling with what comes next.

The funding cut reaches across the predominantly Black and Latino communities in the Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn, as well as Staten Island, where Children’s Aid brought medically accurate information and trusted adults directly to young people. Nine staff members were affected, including six full-time and three part-time employees.

“We received notification on June 26 that effective June 26 our funding would be terminated,” said Rhonda Braxton, vice president for health and wellness at Children’s Aid. “There was no advance notification, and there was no runway to really end the program.”

Across New York City, the administration’s decision eliminated $4.3 million in annual funding from three grantee organizations and disrupted services reaching more than 19,000 young people.

At Children’s Aid, the loss extends beyond one program. 

It threatens work in schools and community spaces, specialized programming for foster youth and the organization’s Just Ask Me peer education initiative. The grant supported a network of adults and youth leaders who taught consent, healthy relationships, communication, medical advocacy and informed decision-making.

The government did not simply remove money from a budget. It cut through years of relationships built in communities where young people already face the greatest barriers to care. The administration canceled 53 grants nationwide as part of a broader overhaul of the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. Its new funding criteria direct organizations to teach abstinence as the only certain method of preventing pregnancy and place increased emphasis on marriage, fertility and preparing young people for parenthood.

The standards make little reference to preventing sexually transmitted infections and offer virtually no recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender young people.

The administration has defended the new direction as an effort to steer federal dollars toward abstinence-focused education. That approach reflects a broader conservative argument that comprehensive sexual health programs treat teen sexual activity as unavoidable and diminish parents’ role in guiding their children.  

When 19th News requested comment, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to the initial query.

But leaders at Children’s Aid do not describe their work as encouraging teenagers to have sex.

They described teaching young people how to recognize an unhealthy relationship. How to communicate. How to give or withhold consent. How to talk to a doctor. How to resist pressure from a friend or partner. How to make decisions that protect the future they want.

The organization had received federal teen pregnancy prevention funding since 2015. Through the grant, staff delivered evidence-based sexual health and youth development programs during the school day, after school and through community organizations.

Pascale Saintonge Austin, director of family planning and pregnancy prevention programs at Children’s Aid, said foster youth face distinct challenges that cannot be addressed by distributing generic health information. 

“We won’t be able to provide such a specific curriculum to them anymore that was tailored and made for them,” Saintonge Austin said.

The organization’s Just Ask Me peer health education program is also at risk. Known as JAM, the initiative trains high school students to co-facilitate programs, organize events, advocate for adolescent health and dispel misinformation among their peers.

The young people applied for the positions and were hired based on federal funding that the government withdrew without notice. Children’s Aid must now determine whether it can retain all of them beyond the end of summer.

“They love this work. They’re involved in this work,” Saintonge Austin said. “We will have to make some decisions toward the end of August or beginning of September about whether or not we can even keep all of the peers without some kind of intervention.”

Programs like the ones run by Children’s Aid have made a difference, federal lawmakers say, and Democratic members of Congress are demanding that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explain the terminations and restore the funding.

Rep. Judy Chu of California said in a statement to The 19th that the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program has provided medically accurate, evidence-based information for more than 15 years and has helped young people prevent sexually transmitted infections, unintended pregnancies and unhealthy relationships.

“There is simply no justification for abruptly terminating $68 million from programs with a proven record of improving young people’s health,” Chu said. “The Trump administration’s decision is reckless, indefensible and directly undermines the purpose for which Congress provided these funds. That’s why my Democratic Women’s Caucus colleagues and I are demanding answers from Secretary Kennedy about why these grants were terminated and calling for this critical funding to be restored.”

Another lawmaker, Rep. Kelly Morrison of Minnesota, an OBGYN, described the decision as both a physician and lawmaker.

“The administration has unilaterally taken away helpful and potentially life-saving resources from the young people that need them,” Morrison said in a statement to The 19th. “Canceling research-backed, evidence-based programs that prevent STIs, decrease teen pregnancy and save lives is a dangerous policy decision.”

The administration’s criteria place marriage and future parenthood at the center of adolescent sexual health.

But for Saintonge Austin, that framing fails to account for the actual questions young people bring into Children’s Aid classrooms.

Those questions are often about loneliness, acceptance, pressure, confidence and the struggle to establish boundaries. They come from teenagers trying to understand how to care for themselves while growing up in a world that does not always provide them with safe or reliable guidance.

Federal policy may define the program by the pregnancies it seeks to prevent. The young people inside it experience something broader: a place where they can speak honestly, learn whom to trust and develop the skills to enter adulthood with greater control over their lives.

“A lot of times people equate teen pregnancy prevention with sex,” Saintonge Austin said. “I always say it’s never that. It’s about, ‘I want my friend to like me. I want to know how to have a healthy relationship. I don’t know how to say no, or I don’t know how to negotiate.’ It goes beyond the physical act. It’s really about how to navigate a world, become a healthy adult and make decisions in a way where you can reach the goals that you want.”

The need for that work feels urgent in New York City, where the birthrate for teenagers not only remains above the national average, but has begun inching back up after a long decline.

“Congress specifically funded TPPP because evidence-based prevention programs work, and the Administration owes Congress and the American people an explanation for disregarding that clear directive,” said Chu. “We should be strengthening these proven programs, not jeopardizing young people’s access to the accurate health information and resources they need to thrive.”

Nationwide, the birthrate has fallen over the past 15 years, to 11.7 births per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19 last year, according to federal data. That’s a drop of more than 65 percent since 2010, when the rate was 34.3 births per 1,000 teenage girls.

have attributed the long decline to several factors, including fewer teenagers having sex and increased contraception use among those who are sexually active. Federal prevention programs have also been credited with helping young people delay sexual activity and make informed health decisions.

New York City was part of that trend for a long time. However, it has begun moving in the opposite direction.

In , three out of every four pregnancies among New York City teenagers were unintended, according to the city health department.

Those pregnancies were also concentrated in communities with the fewest resources. The teen pregnancy rate in neighborhoods with very high poverty was 3.6 times the rate in the city’s lowest-poverty communities, according to New York City’s Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equity, and many of these teenagers are Black and Latinx. They continue to face the effects of systemic racism, historic disinvestment and reduced access to health care and other resources that support healthy lives.

Saintonge Austin said the recent rise demonstrates what can happen when young people lose consistent access to sexual health education.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, much of Children’s Aid’s school-based programming was interrupted. New York City high school students did not broadly return to buildings until spring 2021, and schools facing enormous academic losses had to make difficult choices about which subjects and services to prioritize.

At the same time, teenagers were spending more time online, where accurate information competed with rumors and misinformation spreading across social media.

“It shows what happens when there’s this sort of disruption in mass education around comprehensive sexual health education,” Saintonge Austin said. “We were really getting back into the flow of it being integrated into their education and their spaces again, and now the funding was pulled.”

The disruption is occurring again, this time by federal design.

Braxton said Children’s Aid has tried to place affected employees in other vacant positions within the organization when possible. It has contacted school and community partners, notified elected officials and begun searching for other funding.

But replacing nearly $1 million each year is not a realistic short-term solution.

“We have very generous donors,” Braxton said. “We have not been able to fill that huge gap as of yet.”

The organization is also trying to preserve relationships built over years with young people who learned they could approach Children’s Aid staff members without judgment and receive medically accurate answers.

“Our concern is the loss of trusted relationships for our young people,” Braxton said, “and our inability to provide these much-needed, evidence-based, medically accurate services in an era where there’s a lot of disinformation and mistrust.”

was originally published by .

Roughly 2,000 families received offers for a spot in the inaugural year of 2-K, New York City’s new free childcare program for 2-year-olds, officials announced Tuesday.

Around 5,700 families applied for the , which were restricted to priority neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.

“Today represents a monumental step on the path to universal childcare here in New York City,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a press conference Tuesday morning in the Bronx. Mamdani made a key campaign pledge.

“We are writing a better chapter for … the generations of New Yorkers many years from now who will start families here in our city and who will not need to worry about leaving their job or moving out of the neighborhood they love to make it all work,” he said.

The release of the offers comes after city officials spent months spreading the word about the new program with events such as a “ in Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park and a judged by Cardi B and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

The initial interest in 2-K comes as welcome news for Mamdani after his administration’s efforts to boost publicity for the city’s 3-K and prekindergarten programs Those programs, while wildly popular and oversubscribed in some neighborhoods, have in other parts of the city.

Officials didn’t share any details about how the initial round of applications and offers were distributed between the priority neighborhoods: Washington Heights and Inwood in Manhattan, Canarsie and Brownsville in Brooklyn, Ozone Park and the Rockaways in Queens, and Fordham, Belmont, Riverdale and other nearby neighborhoods in the Bronx.

Emmy Liss, the executive director of the mayor’s Office for Childcare and Early Childhood Education, said the “majority” of the children who received offers live in the priority districts. Officials prioritized applicants who have siblings at the program they applied to, or were already attending that program, and those who live in the same district, Liss said.

More than 80% of applicants got into one of their top three choices, and more than half got into their first choice, officials said. Families that applied and didn’t get an offer will automatically be added to waitlists.

In a press release Tuesday morning, officials said that the application results from this year would help guide the expansion of the program next year. Mamdani has pledged that the program will grow to 12,000 seats next year and expand citywide by the end of his first term, though Gov. Kathy Hochul has only committed funding for the first two years. A found that it will likely cost around $9 billion to provide free universal childcare for all children under age 5, about $5 billion more than the city is currently spending,

Officials haven’t yet shared where the additional 10,000 2-K seats for next year will be located, except that they will likely add seats in the priority neighborhoods and some of the new seats will be in Staten Island, the only borough not a part of this year’s 2-K rollout.v

Seats are split between center and . Unlike 3-K and pre-K, which mostly follow the K-12 school calendar, .

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

So I asked the members of my what they wanted to say to this administration. They responded with recommendations for curriculum, discipline, technology, afterschool programming and teacher quality. 

Maria K. spoke for hundreds when she wrote, “I’d strongly urge to reconsider eliminating G&T programs for grades K-2. … If the objective is equality, then programs should be expanded, and underprivileged groups should be given wider access.”

“Create more of what is in demand rather than redistributing what already exists among different socioeconomic and ethnic groups,” Adam C. concurred. “Reinvest resources in schools that provide what families are specifically looking for: specialized high schools, academically screened middle and high schools, and high-performing zoned middle and high schools.”

“Everyone should have a default, large zoned high school that provides tracking by academic subject,” former Citywide Council on High Schools member Rachel Fremmer said. 

Regarding the quality of educators, one parent wished, “I would LOVE for all teachers to have education on how to recognize when a child is bored or struggling in school.” S. Meng from Queens suggested, “Survey which districts have higher percentages of lower-level students and employ better teachers with higher pay for that district to bring up the overall level average.”

“We need highly qualified teachers who hold themselves to the same academic standards we expect our children to meet,” agreed Natalie Iarko. “Teachers should model strong writing, communication and subject knowledge. My son’s pre-K teacher wrote in all lowercase with no punctuation. We need higher expectations for those entrusted with educating our children.”

“Teachers have given up on chaotic classrooms,” lamented CN. “Kids do whatever they want while the teacher attempts to teach until they all give up and watch cartoons together. I’ve spoken to many parents, and we are uniformly disappointed in the lack of discipline in school. It is basically low-value childcare. I went to low-ranking public schools in Queens, and even we got yelled at for clowning around in the classroom. Why won’t teachers discipline anymore?”

“Parents should be given the ability to formally evaluate teacher and administrator performance annually,” a Manhattan mom proposed. “These evaluations should be part of broader performance evaluations for school faculty and officials, tied to compensation and career advancement.”

“Strengthen discipline for both teachers and students,” Acel M. contributed. “If a teacher is not performing, make it easier to replace or downgrade or terminate them. Bad behaving kids should be disciplined and be expelled as a last measure.”

“Safety is important,” J.C. stressed. “In my son’s elementary school, there were children who were violent (repeatedly starting fights, etc.) and were simply moved to another classroom instead of detention or expulsion. As my son was the victim of this, I would like to see safety/protection measures for the victims of school violence, especially at the middle and high school levels.”

But families weren’t merely concerned with what happens during the school day.

“Every elementary school should offer afterschool programs such that parents don’t have to pay extra for childcare coverage until 5 p.m. every day,” one mom chimed in. “Working parents need this essential support.”

“Our kids need to have opportunities to be creative, work with adults and other kids and heck — PLAY,” Helen K., Queens mom of two, insisted. “NYC schools need to admit that the adoption of individual devices and online learning platforms for students is a failed experiment. In our middle school, there is rampant non-educational use of their devices. Let parents opt out of devices and online platforms!”

H.D. suggested: “Bring back pen and paper coursework and tests!” Then, on another note, offered, “Share resources among neighborhood schools such as for music. Third Street Music School has partnerships with some schools. A more citywide effort would be great.”

Finally, “A Black mother from District 9, Bronx,” summarized, “Schools don’t need blame — they need thoughtful, targeted investment. If children face more obstacles outside the classroom, then inside the classroom they should have the city’s strongest teachers, experienced principals, enrichment programs, arts, music, science, tutoring, counseling and the resources that help children thrive. Retain experienced teachers, support school leaders, expand tutoring and enrichment, and focus on long-term student success.”

The parents have spoken. The mayor and chancellor have promised to listen. Will they follow through?

Mom Carin Rosenfeld already has concerns. “I would like transparency regarding the process itself. How were [working group] participants selected? How were families and educators notified? What efforts were made to ensure broad representation rather than participation by only those already connected to political or educational networks? If City Hall and the chancellor truly want to hear from constituents, the process must be open, widely publicized, accessible and transparent from the beginning, not limited to a select group of stakeholders whose identities and selection criteria are unknown to the broader public. Public engagement in NYC education feels performative rather than substantive. If more parents truly knew what was happening in our schools, there might be a full-scale parent uprising!”

Similar legislation introduced last year was backed by the United Federation of Teachers in an effort to address the city’s paraprofessional shortage. After the bill failed to move out of committee, it was in February by multiple council members. 

If Mamdani signs the bill, full-time paraprofessionals will receive four payments of $2,500 throughout the 2026-27 school year. The allows the council to reauthorize stipends each year as long as New York City Public Schools has a paraprofessional shortage or until the city changes the practice of — a local policy that lets the salary increases negotiated for one municipal union’s contract set the pattern for all the others.

The United Federation of Teachers and council members said pattern bargaining has contributed to low paraprofessional pay.

“Once the initial bargaining pattern is established, it becomes an enormous challenge to get the city to grant significantly better terms to another union,” the United Federation of Teachers said on its .

New paraprofessionals earn roughly $32,000 in the city. Over the past 20 years, have increased nearly $12,000 for paraprofessionals but top $86,000 for the highest-paid principals.

“We are going to pass this bill and we are going to put it on the desk of the mayor of New York City saying that the paraprofessionals have been unjustly treated and we are in a crisis,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew at a at New York City Hall on Thursday. “And the paraprofessionals are dealing with that crisis each and every day with their work, going above and beyond, and now it’s time for our city to act and do the right thing.”

Mamdani supported the bill while campaigning but expressed concern after he took office, compensation should be handled only in the collective bargaining process. He has 30 days to decide whether to sign the bill, according to the . If he vetoes it, the legislation will go back to the council, and members can override his veto with a two-thirds vote. If he doesn’t sign or veto the bill, it will become law.

Priscilla Castro, president of the paraprofessional chapter of the United Federation of Teachers, said several paras from each New York City borough gathered at City Hall as the bill went through a committee vote. 

“Today, we’re making a change. It’s a movement. We will not stop until we get this legislation passed and bring it home,” she .

During the council vote, members said paraprofessional pay raises were overdue and are crucial to rewarding some of the hardest-working school employees in the city.

Shirley Aldebol, chair of the council committee that passed the bill, said during voting on Thursday that the payments are the first step toward fixing the city’s paraprofessional staffing crisis. New York City Public Schools was short more than 1,500 support staff last year. 

“Paraprofessionals are critical members of our school environment, providing instructional, behavioral and physical support to students with disabilities,” she said. “I have a deep respect for the collective bargaining process. This bill’s structure does not interfere, in my view, with mandatory subjects of collective bargaining, as it does not attempt to legislate wages or benefits and matters that must be resolved at the bargaining table.”

I taught math in a New York City public high school before I read a single study about how children learn. I was equipped with some basics, like making sure I checked if my students had understood the day’s lesson. At the end of every class, they would answer a few questions on paper while I moved around the room, reading over their shoulders to see what had landed and what had not.

Back then, blended learning was the hot thing: putting kids on screens for personalized instruction while I was supposed to circulate and answer questions. It did not work for my students, so I abandoned it and built my own lessons instead.

Fast forward to now, and the fight playing out in city councils and statehouses over . But that is the wrong battle. Screens are not the enemy of learning. The real enemy is older than any device: a classroom where students sit isolated and a teacher is too swamped with grading and paperwork to notice who is falling behind until it is too late to help. Technology can deepen that problem or solve it. It depends entirely on who you build it for.

There is a better way. I watched it this past school year in the Bronx.

At P.S. 83, a middle school in District 11, technology barely appears until the final minutes of math class. A lesson is projected at the front of the room, and students work through problems together on paper, talking and arguing as they go. Then, with a few minutes left, they open their school laptops and answer a short set of questions about the day’s work.

As they type, the teacher watches the answers appear, one student at a time, on a dashboard on his or her own screen. Rather than collecting stacks of papers to grade that night, the teacher can see, in real time, who understood the lesson and who did not, and offer help in the moment. By the time class ends, the teacher knows exactly where each student is stuck, and what needs to happen the next day: a quick conversation with one child, a small group lesson for a few others or a separate session for the handful who missed the same step.

That dashboard is part of a tool called , created by the company I co-founded, Kiddom. This past year, in a pilot program, District 11 added Atlas to the curriculum its teachers already used through the math initiative. The partnership became a co-design: District 11’s teachers shaped the tool, and Kiddom is now bringing it to schools nationwide. But the tool is not the point. The point is what it handed back to teachers: time and information early enough to act on. Those are the two things every teacher is short of, and they are essential for catching children before they fall behind.

That is harder than it sounds. American schools are notoriously bad at catching kids up. A student who starts behind usually stays behind, year after year — not because teachers are not good enough, but because no human can grade, diagnose and personalize for 20 or more children every single day. The math defeats them.

The early results from District 11 are worth a look. Across nearly 5,700 students and 179 teachers, Kiddom’s analysis found that children in classrooms using these quick daily checks most consistently outscored other District 11 students whose teachers used them rarely. In seventh grade, for example, District 11 classes scored an average of 68% on these checks, versus 52%. That’s a 16-percentage-point difference, which works out to roughly five additional months of learning in a single year.

District 11’s results were also measured against a demographically comparable district using the same curriculum without the real-time tool. District 11 still came out ahead, by 11 to 13 points in sixth and seventh grades. The effect was smaller in eighth grade, but the pattern still held, and it tracked with how teachers worked. The biggest gains came in classes where teachers returned graded work in under three days. When the tool handled the grading, teachers could respond to students faster than their colleagues elsewhere. 

Word has traveled. Since District 11’s superintendent, Cristine Vaughan, adopted this time-saving tool, senior city schools officials and parent advocates have come to the Bronx to see it for themselves.

Notice what is missing from this story. The children are not on screens all day. District 11 students spend class time talking, reasoning and writing by hand. The technology serves the teaching and finishes the paperwork.

This is what the screen-time debate keeps missing. The is not whether technology belongs in classrooms. It is who the technology is built for. Point it at the child, and you get a generation doing its thinking on a black mirror. Point it at the teacher, and you get educators who know, in real time, what each student will need the next day.

This is not a preview of some distant future. It is a public school district closing gaps right now for students who are behind, with the same children and the same curriculum it already had, because its teachers got their time back.

So keep pencils in children’s hands, but take the paperwork off teachers. It would make a catch-up crisis so often called intractable look a great deal more solvable.

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides financial support to Kiddom Atlas and ����Ӱ��.

New York City public school kindergartners will automatically receive $1,000 for college expenses, up from $100, under a budget deal announced Tuesday between Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council.

The budget also restores a handful of education programs that Mamdani proposal and were at risk of cuts, including a mental health initiative that operates clinics in schools and a program for students with disabilities who have sensory issues that interfere with their learning.

The $125.8 billion budget agreement marks the end of Mamdani’s first budget cycle since taking office. Though he initially warned of a multi-billion shortfall, the mayor indicated that the deal with the City Council “balanced the budget without slashing the services that New Yorkers rely on.”

“Above all else, this budget offers a roadmap for the years to come,” Mamdani said shortly after shaking Council Speaker Julie Menin’s hand.

The mayor steered clear of some potentially controversial cuts. Earlier this month, city officials indicated that they will spend $290 million next year to , a pandemic-era “hold harmless” policy that many school funding experts argue should be phased out. Former Mayor Eric Adams tried to wind that program down, but and reversed course.

Still, Mamdani scaled back other education initiatives. He initially planned to spend to comply with a state mandate to shrink class sizes. After convincing the state legislature to , Mamdani .

Here’s what you should know about the budget deal.

A tenfold boost for college savings accounts

All kindergartners in New York City public schools will automatically receive college savings accounts with $1,000, money that is invested in a tax-advantaged 529 account and is expected to grow before students tap it for higher education expenses. (Most charter schools have opted into the program, too.)

The NYC Kids Rise program, which launched about a decade ago, previously doled about $100 per student. Making the program more generous was a who framed it as “one of the most effective ways we can truly address income inequality” and ultimately boost students’ future wages.

The money can be used for vocational schools, community college, or four-year programs. Menin said the $64 million initiative is the largest universal college savings program in the nation. Families, businesses, and other organizations can contribute as well.

City Council’s initial proposal called for depositing $3,000 into accounts for low-income families, but that did not make it into the final budget deal.

A slew of programs spared from the chopping block

Similar to prior mayors, Mamdani did not include funding for several existing education programs until he faced pressure to do so from advocates and City Council members. Those programs, restored in next year’s budget, include:

• Mental Health Continuum ($5 million) , largely in the South Bronx and Brooklyn as well as several school-based clinics.
• Restorative justice ($6 million) Supports schools to to student misbehavior, such as peer mediation and circle discussions.
• Sensory Exploration, Education & Discovery ($8.4 million) Provides that interfere with their learning.
• Outreach to immigrant families ($4 million) Helps fund efforts to communicate with families in their home languages, including translation services and in local ethnic media outlets.
• Student Success Centers ($3.3 million) Trains youth leaders to help high school students navigate the college admissions process.

The Coalition for Equitable Education Funding, a constellation of more than 120 advocacy organizations, praised the funding restorations.

“These programs are currently benefiting thousands of students and families, and we thank the Mamdani Administration and the City Council for ensuring these critical programs will continue for another year,” the group wrote, which reported the dollar amounts that were restored. (A City Hall spokesperson did not immediately confirm them.)

Fate of popular school data contract remains unclear

Mamdani vowed to slash wasteful spending in outside Education Department contracts, but his budget proposal included cuts to just one: A portal that . Many educators say it is a useful tool that saves countless hours that would otherwise be spent combing through creaky databases by hand.

City officials did not immediately respond to questions about whether the $8.9 million contract with the nonprofit New Visions for Public Schools would be restored in the final budget deal. A slew of educators, advocates, and lawmakers have called in recent weeks for the city to reverse the decision to cut the contract.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at . 

The heart of New York City’s initiative are the caring adults in schools who check in with students living in temporary housing, build relationships with families and help connect them to support during difficult moments.

Every public school and Department of Homeless Services shelter in NYC has access to the , a planning, case-management and interagency operations platform. It’s built to let school teams, shelters and partner organizations do the daily work of moving individual students toward promotion, graduation and postsecondary outcomes.

The success of this initiative has reinforced for me how relationships need infrastructure behind them to translate into system-wide change. That’s now at risk as the city considers cutting funding for the portal.

The Portal integrates student data from NYC Public Schools with families’ shelter information from DHS, helping school staff better understand how to support students living in temporary housing conditions. The ECFIK initiative builds additional features and functionality into the Portal by supporting the day-to-day work of caring adults — social workers, teachers and other school staff who volunteer to serve as the primary point of contact for a student in temporary housing. This allows these adults to document check-ins, coordinate referrals and access key information in one centralized place.

Families experiencing housing instability are often already carrying enormous burdens. The last thing they need is to repeatedly retell painful situations to different people because systems are disconnected. Having one caring adult serve as a single point of contact solves part of the problem, freeing families from having to navigate a rich but labyrinthine system of available resources across nonprofits and agencies throughout NYC. 

Technology addresses the other part of the problem. Better coordination helps preserve a family’s dignity. It allows schools and support staff to meet families with greater care and continuity, giving families the sense that people are really working together on their behalf and are coming to each interaction prepared to meet their needs. School staff cannot support students and families effectively — and thereby maintain trust and strong relationships — if critical information is fragmented across systems, buried in email attachments or dependent on staff chasing down phone numbers and updates from multiple places.

Importantly, the initiative’s integration with the Portal ensures that students’ needs and plans for support do not live in separate systems disconnected from the rest of the educational experience. A student needing clean laundry should rise to the same level of importance as a failed state exam, and the initiative makes that visibility happen.

Within the portal, caring adults and school staff see student support information alongside attendance patterns, academic performance and other school data, all following strict data privacy protocols and permission rules that respect students’ privacy and limit information to the adults who are supporting them. Having plans and outcome data living together allows schools to respond in real time instead of reacting too late and to pivot if an intervention doesn’t work. 

Caring adults all using a common platform designed with and for them also allows central program leaders to identify patterns, such as how families’ needs change in the last 10 days of the month or how the resources families seek differ across neighborhoods and boroughs. Instead of information living in scattered, static spreadsheets on individual computers, the data becomes a real-time tool to support deeper system-level understanding and action. 

An of the initiative’s first year found that the students involved experienced stronger academic performance and fewer mid-year transfers when compared to similar students who weren’t in the program. In elementary school that translated into a 8.8 percentage point gain in math. In surveys and focus groups, caring adults reported stronger relationships with families and a shift in school culture toward more empathy and support for students experiencing homelessness.

Beyond the data, the initiative has seen caring adults respond to needs both large and small, making life-changing impacts for their students’ families. One caring adult helped a family experiencing domestic violence secure relocation support after hours during a moment of crisis. Another helped a mother get haircuts for her two sons so they could return to school feeling confident. Many others have been the sole reason a student showed up to school that day: Because someone cared about them, was expecting them, was ready to listen if they needed anything. Because they felt known. 

The Portal didn’t get those boys their haircuts. It didn’t take the midnight phone call. It didn’t sit with a mother and figure out what comes next.

What the portal did was make sure that when someone was ready to do those things, they weren’t starting from zero.

That’s the part I care about. Not the software itself, but what it makes possible: that caring adults got to spend their attention on a family instead of on a spreadsheet.

That is what this initiative represents to me: technology that works behind the scenes, so the relationships front and center can hold and transform the trajectory of a family’s outcomes, one check-in at a time.

Tucked in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s sprawling universal childcare plan is a little-talked-about milestone: In September, the city will open what appears to be the first free daycare for municipal workers in the country. 

The center, called , is a pilot program that could prove to be a model for cities across the country that are childcare curious, but not ready to take the big universal swing. 

Housed in a renovated space on the first floor of the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building in Manhattan, home base for more than 2,000 city workers, the Little Apple will offer free care to the kids of full-time staff. All workers in the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), a city government support agency, can also take advantage of it regardless of their work location.

The center will be small — just 40 seats for children ages six weeks to 3 years old. To pay for it, the city budgeted about $1.5 million, or $35,000 per child.

“This is what Wall Street could call a good investment,” Mamdani . “We know that after housing, the cost of childcare is what is pushing working families out of this city.” 

DCAS Commissioner Yume Kitasei told The 19th said the solution came about as a retention strategy, responding to the needs workers shared. In surveys, workers enthusiastically embraced the idea. One worker described access to free childcare as “life-changing.”

That’s probably not hyperbole. Childcare affordability is a national problem that has only grown more acute. Childcare costs an average of nationwide; in New York for an infant at a center it’s closer to on average. Paying for a daycare now vies with housing costs as , so much so that some parents have had to move or . 

Cities, meanwhile, have been since the pandemic. Benefits like childcare, which some cities and private companies have dabbled with, can help address the quality-of-life issues that are pushing workers out of jobs. 

“This is a great time for us to sort of be thinking about: How can we make our jobs even more attractive to people and also retain the city workers that we have?” Kitasei said. “This is one piece of that puzzle.” 

Kitasei added that a “healthy” number of staffers applied for The Little Apple and the department expects to fill its 40 childcare seats. Anyone who doesn’t get a spot will be put on a waitlist.

There is an appetite across the country for childcare solutions that could help bring down costs for certain workers, and cities are already taking on creative fixes. 

Several already have childcare centers in municipal buildings or for city employees, including , , and , Colorado, though none of them are free like New York’s. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the county school district and a local childcare center known nationally have partnered to provide childcare for the children of teachers inside unused classrooms in schools. Boone County, Missouri, is . 

In the private sector, and closed longstanding childcare centers they operated on their campuses in recent years, but efforts continue elsewhere. Patagonia has operated at its California headquarters since the 1980s, a move it argues has lowered turnover from employees who use the site by 25%. Overstock.com also has an at its Utah headquarters. Both are subsidized, not free.��

“As cities in every region of the country compete with the private sector and other municipalities to attract and retain workers and elected officials, ensuring access to childcare offers an opportunity for local governments to build a representative workforce and invest in the future of their communities,” said Quincy Midthun, an outreach specialist with the Mayors Innovation Project at the High Road Strategy Center, a think tank focused on solutions to social problems.

The Little Apple, and New York City broadly, reflect a when it comes to childcare. 

The announcements of universal childcare in New York City and in the last year received an enormous amount of attention across the country. Both places took an idea that for many years was floated as a pipe dream — treating childcare similarly to public education — and turned it into reality. In New York, it’s one of the few issues that Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat, . 

Voters are also hungry for more solutions: In poll after poll, they assert that spending money on childcare is a . 

Emmy Liss, who heads Mamdani’s childcare office, said childcare is at a “political tipping point.” 

“We’re in this moment where folks across all political, socioeconomic, demographic spectrums recognize that childcare is essential, that childcare is something families are struggling to access, and know that the market economics of childcare don’t work without public investment,” Liss said. “We see recognition of that.”

With Little Apple, New York is testing what it looks like to commit to its promises of free care for all, but doing it first for its own employees. 

“If we are asking folks to report to work in person in parts of the city where childcare is expensive, as it is all over the city, I think that we have to recognize that childcare is an important part of how we keep people in the workforce,” Liss said. 

Mamdani and Hochul have been working to make childcare universally available to children in the city through a phased rollout set to conclude in four years. For 2-year olds, the mayor announced that will be available in the fall in four largely low-income areas of the city. Another 12,000 are planned for 2027. For 3-year-olds, about 2,000 new seats will be added in the fall, as well. The city has an existing universal childcare program for 4-year-olds. 

Universal childcare as Mamdani envisions it will cover kids ages 6 weeks to 5 years with a price tag of about $6 billion annually, making it the most expensive pillar of his affordability agenda. Mamdani is expected to push to fund the program with a tax increase on the wealthy, a strategy Hochul for, though the state is . Mamdani has not yet unveiled what his universal childcare program would look like for infants and young toddlers.

How New York City’s program rolls out and its sustainability are being closely watched by proponents of universal care, who argue it’s also an anti-poverty measure.

“We know that other places are watching as we try different things out, including the work at the Little Apple,” Liss said.

In New York City, 21% of working parents experienced some kind of childcare hardship in 2024 that forced them to forgo care or use inadequate care, particularly families living in poverty, single mothers and Black parents, from Robin Hood, an anti-poverty organization, and Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy.��

An average of 3,400 2- and 3-year-olds were pushed into poverty between 2022 and 2024 specifically due to the cost of childcare, a from the same organizations found. An estimated 4,100 2- and 3-year-olds would be lifted out of poverty each year if they had access to universal 2-K and 3-K education. That would reduce poverty for this age group .��

Rebecca Bailin, the executive director of the parent organizing group New Yorkers United for Child Care, said the problem has reached such a fever pitch that thousands of parents started to organize around the issue in 2023 and helped push the agenda that was central to Mamdani’s election. 

Bailin, who has a 1-year-old, said she can now depend on a 3-K program when her child turns 3 and likely a 2-K program, as well — a savings of about $100,000. The 2-K program Mamdani is rolling out will also be full-day care rather than partial-day care that wraps up around 2 p.m. like the existing 3-K program, addressing a top ask from parents.

“People are stoked,” Bailin said. “People feel like they can stay in the city.” 

The Little Apple is a small part of the larger effort, but, “if we want to retain people, we have to do this,” Bailin said. 

“This is something we want to see scaled. If city workers can’t afford to live here, that’s a real problem,” she continued. “This is really critical and we need this for everybody.” 

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of .

Unlike needs-based programs that are limited to households where students qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch, families with of the median for their area would be eligible to apply for a Federal Scholarship Tax Credit from a participating organization. An estimated could benefit.

This could be a game-changer for New Yorkers currently struggling to afford educational opportunities for their children. At the same time, the scholarships could also prove an incentive for even more public school students to exit already . 

Since they would be the ones most immediately affected by it, I asked the New York City families subscribed to my and social media how they felt about Hochul’s announcement.

To begin with, there was general confusion about how the program would operate.

One anonymous poster asked, “(Does) ‘donate money to an eligible scholarship-granting organization’ means you gift a school $1,700 per year and that gets deducted from your tuition? Otherwise, how does this increase choice for parents? Also, can I donate $1,700 to a tutoring company and get $1,700 worth of lessons?”

That is not how it would work. Donors could not directly benefit from their donations, and the reason supporters believe the program would increase school choice is that it would give parents who otherwise could not afford private schooling a break on tuition.

As the majority of NYC private schools charge upward of $60,000 a year, detractors scoffed that a measly $1,700 wouldn’t make a meaningful difference. But that’s assuming the scholarships given would be only $1,700 per family. If 40 benefactors donated $1,700 to a private school like Trinity, Horace Mann or Dalton, one child could receive a full scholarship, or two children could get half-off tuition.

In addition, NYC is home to dozens of parochial schools, which charge much less than the independent schools name-checked above. Some Catholic elementary schools cost $6,000 to $10,000 per student per year, as do some Jewish yeshivas and Muslim madrassas. An increase in donations from the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit might make it possible for many new students to attend at a discount.

This doesn’t sit well with NYC mom Rebecca Garte, who wrote that the program would be “publicly subsidizing private institutions.”

That’s true, but public money is already being used to subsidize city private educational organizations in a variety of ways across all grade levels. 

The only way then-Mayor Bill de Blasio could get his signature initiative, universal pre-K and, later, 3K, off the ground was to pay private schools, including religious ones, with public money. The majority of afterschool programming in public elementary and middle schools is who are paid by the city. And there are , which students can use for public and private colleges — again, including religious ones. 

Nevertheless, parents like Elizabeth Kelly don’t care about precedent. Her position is simple, “I am against the tax credit.  Let’s just make our public schools better.”

Yiatin Chu, parent of an NYC public school ninth grader, on the other hand, recognizes how the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit would help families like hers. She says, “I support the federal tax credit scholarship program because even middle-income families are eligible, a segment of public school families that don’t get much help. I like that the scholarship can be used for SHSAT (Specialized High School Admissions Test) and SAT preparation or extra tutoring on any subject that our children might need. If Gov. Hochul doesn’t renege on her support, I hope to use it for my child’s SAT prep.”

In the end, opinions in support ran 3 to 1 versus those against. Those who were for the program expressed sentiments similar to those of mom Desiree Milin, who said, “Since the NYC public school system is not equal for all children, I would have no problem helping parents pay into a private school education. We switched our child into Catholic school after he did not get any of his public middle school choices. A good education should be accessible to all children.”

As of now, have signaled that they plan to opt into the program. Only three of them are headed by Democratic governors: Colorado (Jared Polis), North Carolina (Josh Stein) and now, New York. With New York City being the largest school district in America, the results of the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit here could become a case study for all those still on the fence about bringing it to their respective areas, and answer questions— not to mention address misconceptions — that many still have about it.

Despite New York City’s last-minute withdrawal of, parents, students, and educators packed this week’s school board meeting to speak on AI anyway.

More than 100 New Yorkers testified at a nearly seven-hour-long meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP, earlier this week.

Community members repeatedly argued that the Education Department is rolling out AI tools without clear rules, transparency, or adequate knowledge of the technology. Students said AI was already reshaping classrooms, and surveillance practices, like the, are already in use at 150 city schools. Educators expressed concern that the increasing use of various technologies in schools conflicts with the the city released in March.

One parent from Park Slope approached the microphone with her two toddlers in tow, holding one in her arm while clasping the other tightly by the hand.

“I’ve never been an activist before, but I feel so strongly about this: It is starting. Gen Z is turning against AI; I’m turning against AI. The city is telling us that AI is inevitable, but won’t tell me what devices and applications my children are using. You tell us you are spending our money to give artificial intelligence to our children?” she said to a chorus of cheers at Wednesday night’s packed meeting.

The had little to do with AI. It centered on the Education Department’s capital plan, the estimated budget for the coming year, and the updated Fair Student Funding weights that shape how money flows to schools. The panel also voted on 30 separate contract agreements, from cafeteria equipment repairs to special education services.

But the bulk of the seven-hour meeting involved parents, children, and educators arguing against the city’s spending on AI and educational technology contracts and the city’s preliminary AI policy. Although the Next Generation High School proposal was removed from Wednesday’s agenda following backlash over its AI focus and selective admissions, speakers said those concerns would extend to future school plans.

“Many feel AI is teaching a dangerous message that results matter more than the learning process. Some of the most important learning happens when students struggle, make mistakes, ask questions, and improve over time,” said student panel member Julia Nasef, of Staten Island’s Tottenville High School.

AI discussions surface issues with current Department of Education process

Throughout the night, speakers expressed waning confidence in the Education Department’s and its ability to protect students, educators, and families from a complex and rapidly-changing technology.

Most of the speakers were opposed to any AI in the classroom.

Panel for Educational Policy Chair Greg Faulkner admitted on Wednesday that he was a “baby boomer” with limited understanding of AI, and that he wanted more thorough engagement with both the community and Education Department in future AI-related proposals.

But he also thought that Chancellor Kamar Samuel’s move to pull the AI-focused school proposal for Next Generation High School aligns with the schools chief’s priority to better engage and respond to the needs of local communities.

“Under previous administrations, the general assumption was that the panel votes yes on all DOE proposals. But the chancellor’s decision and the panel’s back-and-forth discussion on Wednesday showed us that the old model isn’t working anymore,” Faulkner told Chalkbeat on Thursday.

Faulkner said the “AI question” has him considering proposing changes to some of the Education Department’s policy-making processes. He said he would like the panel to work more closely with the department’s AI policy authors — the names of whom are not public — so the panel can get up to speed on AI research and better share community concerns.

Education Department officials said that the initial AI guidance was shaped by the Department’s central Academics and Instruction team, with input from stakeholders and various internal Department subcommittees.

“We have not had any briefings on AI research, and while I am concerned about a moratorium, I don’t know enough about this technology,” said Faulkner.

Nasef, the student PEP member, said at the meeting that many of her peers acknowledge that AI can be helpful when used “intentionally” to help them understand math and science concepts, for example.

She urged the panel to “support clear, student‑centered guidelines for AI implementation.”

The, released last month, did not include guidance on how or if students can use AI for homework, nor did it differentiate AI use for students in different grades

Panel greenlights controversial tech contracts as AI policy lags

Of the 30 contract proposals up for a vote, three included three educational technology products. Just one was voted down.

One of the contracts approved covered the full line of K-12 digital learning products from , a global educational services company that has in their digital test prep products. Several speakers who testified at Wednesday’s meeting mentioned the company’s recent privacy breach affecting the personal information of. Despite those concerns, the PEP approved the company’s $500,000 contract.

A representative for AI-based software tailored to early childhood education , spoke at the meeting. He assured panel members that the software could be “turned off at any point” because “teachers have complete control of what is going on in the classroom.” This was the only contract that the PEP voted against.

Naveed Hasan, the panel’s de-facto technology expert who had previously supported the AI-focused high school, announced at the meeting that he now supports a two-year moratorium on AI use in schools, saying the city needs more time to address data privacy infrastructure and learning concerns.

The term limits of all current panel members expire at the end of June. The Education Department’s full AI policy is also expected to be released that month, and the Education Department is asking families and educators for through May 8.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Anyone familiar with NYC knows that while it has some of the most iconic green spaces in the world, from to the , it also has a shocking number of neighborhoods with almost .

This is where schoolyard transformations come in. Every NYC neighborhood has a public school, and most of them have outdoor yards. For years, various initiatives have taken those city-owned spaces, often covered in asphalt, and opened them up to millions of students and nearby residents for recreation and relaxation.

Nationwide, the Trust for Public Land and other partners have transformed — including New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota and California — over the past 25 years, playing a vital role and combatting by planting trees and replacing blacktop with permeable surfaces.

But there’s another, unexpected benefit from this work. It turns out that involving students in the design process has been a powerful lever for learning and leadership, unlocking children’s creativity while planting seeds of inspiration and ambition.

Engaging students as young as third grade gives them something they rarely experience elsewhere: genuine agency. For many, it may be the first time they’ve had a real say in shaping their everyday environment — and their first real encounter with collective decision-making and the democratic process.

It gives them purpose and ownership and helps them see how their input matters through consultation with an array of stakeholders, from school principals and city agencies to PTAs and community groups. 

Our design process starts with a schoolwide assembly where the project is explained and the outcomes explored. That is followed by a survey where every student can offer ideas about what the new playground might look like.

About 30 student volunteers are then selected to make up the design team — in cases where an elementary, middle and high school share a schoolyard, the design team will have representatives from all three levels.

During four sessions over a three-month period, students measure their schoolyards, visit completed projects for ideas and interact with landscape architects, general contractors, engineers and other professionals about the project — getting invaluable exposure to career opportunities along the way.

We emphasize to the students the importance of making the schoolyard design work

for everybody. They figure out what they want during the day, but they also have survey input from parents and other community members about how they’d like to use the space after school and on weekends.

The kids are often the ones who come up with the most innovative and impactful ideas. 

At a Bronx elementary school, girls loved playing basketball, but boys often took over both of the playground’s courts at recess. So the girls asked if one of the courts could be painted pink. Of course, anyone could play there. But the boys tended to avoid it, and the girls finally had an equal chance to play basketball in their yard.

At a Harlem elementary school, students wanted a space for braiding hair during recess, so they designed one: a two-tiered seating area built for exactly that. It’s the kind of idea no adult would have thought to ask for.

Meanwhile, at an elementary school in Queens, students wanted a wildlife viewing area, so they selected plants known to attract butterflies — such as lavender and Joe Pye Weed — and planted them in the schoolyard. They added birdhouses and bat boxes, too, turning a concrete corner into a small urban sanctuary.

The payoff of these transformed spaces extends well beyond recess, yielding numerous positive effects in the classroom. There’s research showing that exposure to nature can help . It can also lead to . 

That’s a fantastic perk for any public school. Now, imagine multiplying that across an entire city. In New York, more than 240 schoolyards have been reimagined throughout the five boroughs, but there are about 950 citywide, so there are plenty more waiting to be transformed.

The potential is enormous — not just for more equitable access to green space, but for young people to discover that they can make their voices heard, make a difference and actively shape the world around them.

Having access to Algebra 1 in eighth grade can often make or break a student’s path to , which in turn, is often a gateway to selective colleges as well as science and engineering careers.

But many eighth graders can’t take Algebra 1 — regardless of how well they did on their seventh grade state math test. And when New York City parents are exploring middle school options for their fifth graders, they might not realize the consequences a school’s math offerings might have for their students’ education trajectory.

Across New York state, more than 1 in 4 schools don’t offer Algebra 1 to eighth graders, , a group convened by EdTrust-New York. Schools that disproportionately enroll Black, Latino, and low-income students tend to have less access to Algebra 1 in middle school.

“When we have qualified kids that are denied that opportunity, and it impacts them in high school and beyond … it is such a critical inflection point,” said Jeff Smink, deputy director at EdTrust-New York, an advocacy group focused on improving outcomes for students of color.

Smink hopes to raise awareness about the importance of Algebra 1 for eighth graders so parents can advocate for it.

“If there’s no demand, then schools aren’t going to respond to it,” he said. “They’re going to offer the easier, simpler option, which is just tracking kids to the standard eighth grade class, which is going to avoid kids struggling, it’s going to get potentially better test scores.”

While 58% of New York’s seventh graders scored proficient (a 3 or 4) on their 2023-24 state math exams, in the following school year — 2024-25 — just 37% of eighth graders enrolled in Algebra 1, representing a gap of 20,000 proficient students, the report said. More than half were estimated to be from low-income families, and nearly half were students of color.

In New York City alone, there were 8,000 more students proficient on seventh grade state exams than enrolled in eighth grade Algebra 1, according to the researchers.

The state’s gaps were starkest for Black and Asian American students: while 38% of Black students and 75% of Asian American seventh graders were proficient, 13% of Black and 14% Asian American eighth graders the following year enrolled in Algebra 1, the study found.

Drilling down into the data,, reveals vastly uneven access across New York City’s 32 local districts.

The top three districts with more proficient seventh graders than eighth graders in Algebra 1: Queens’ District 24, Brooklyn’s District 20, and Staten Island. Each had gaps of more than 1,400 students, researchers said.

In five districts, fewer than half of their schools offered Algebra 1 for eighth graders: Manhattan Districts 4 and 6, Brooklyn’s District 13, and Bronx Districts 7 and 12.

Eight districts appeared to be outliers, with either more than or an equal share of eighth graders taking Algebra 1 last year compared to the percentage of seventh graders who scored proficient on their state math tests the year before: Manhattan’s District 3; Bronx’s District 11, Brooklyn Districts 15, 19, 23, and 32; and Queens Districts 27, 28, and 30.

Equity gaps in proficiency remain, however, and three of those districts — 19, 23, and 32 in Brooklyn, which overwhelmingly serve Black, Latino, and low-income students — had fewer than half of their students who were proficient.

The report recommends the state adopt an automatic enrollment, or opt-out policy, for all eighth graders who score proficient on seventh grade state tests. They want an $8.5 million investment to help 15 high-needs districts expand Algebra 1 access as well as fund tutoring, staffing, and public data tracking enrollment and completion by race and income.

The report comes at a time when Gov. Kathy Hochul, , called for an overhaul of math instruction, getting “back to the basics,” New York City’s schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, a former math teacher, has also argued for a emphasizing memorization of math facts along with a focus on creative problem-solving.

Samuels

Under former Mayor Eric Adams, the city required nearly all high schools to use a single math curriculum from Illustrative Math for Algebra 1 — Education Department officials are also .

“We are working to strengthen early math instruction, expand equitable pathways to Algebra 1 by eighth grade, and ensure every student has access to rigorous, high-quality curriculum,” Education Department spokesperson Chyann Tull said in a statement.

Several states and cities have focused more attention on eighth grade access to Algebra 1, , which has offered the class online and has covered educators’ training costs to get credentials to teach algebra.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.