Adams fights over schools
Sez he needs control, hits ‘professional naysayers’
Mayor Adams railed against “professional naysayers” in Albany on Wednesday for delivering a legislative proposal he claims will “water down” his authority over city schools.
Adams made the comments at a Manhattan breakfast for city business leaders, in reference to a bill introduced Tuesday in Albany to extend mayoral control of city schools by two years, instead of the four Adams asked for, and dilutes mayoral influence on the oversight panel that monitors the city Education Department.
“If you water it down, if you take away the tools that we need, if you don’t give us the opportunity to do so, then we are failing our children again,” Adams said. “We have good partners in Albany, who are fighting hard for us, but there are some professional naysayers that I believe, a small number of people there, we need to be clear on this, a small number, they’re not on Team New York and get things done.”
When asked which legislators he was referring to, Adams accused a reporter of misrepresenting his remarks, and said, “I don’t have to do name-calling.”
The mayoral control extension bills were introduced in the state Assembly and Senate Tuesday following months of negotiation over if and how to extend executive control over city schools, which is set to expire June 30.
The legislation would extend mayoral control by two years and add eight members to the Panel for Educational Policy, the oversight body that approves Education Department contracts and budgets. Four of the new members will be appointed by the mayor, and four by parent leaders. The legislation also makes it more difficult for the mayor and borough presidents to remove their appointees from the panel in an effort to give panel members more independence.
Schools Chancellor David Banks called the two-year renewal “too short a time to provide our students with the certainty they need” and “a marked departure from the longer extensions given to previous administrations run by mayors who did not even attend city public schools.”
He added that the expansion of the educational panel would “put more bureaucracy in the way of making real change for kids.”
State Sen. John Liu (D-Queens), the chairman of the Senate’s New York City Education Committee and one of the leaders of the negotiations, told the Daily News on Tuesday that the two-year time frame and changes to the structure of the Panel for Educational Policy represented the “consensus” of state legislators.
Some state lawmakers took issue with Adams’ swipe at unnamed “naysayers.”
Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani (D-Queens) pointed to remarks that Adams made as a mayoral candidate in February 2021 suggesting that mayoral control should have to be renewed “every two years, go back and see it for review. You should earn the right to have that level of power.”
Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou (D-Manhattan) suggested getting “professional naysayer” printed on T-shirts for “all the parents and students who expressed their legitimate concerns to legislators across the city and state.”
The mayoral control bills weren’t the only pieces of legislation to come out of Albany this week and draw Adams’s ire.
Legislators also unveiled a companion bill that would require the city to reduce class sizes at all public schools to between 20 and 25 students depending on the grade by 2027 unless the school qualifies for one of several exemptions.
Adams argued in a Tuesday night statement that unless the state provides additional funding to help the city comply with the mandate, schools “will see cuts elsewhere in the system that would harm our most vulnerable students in our highest need communities — including the loss of counselor positions, social workers, art programs, school trips, after-school tutoring, dyslexia screenings and paraprofessionals.”
The Education Department estimates that the class-size reduction will cost $500 million a year for elementary school alone, with Banks calling the legislation a “multibillion-dollar unfunded mandate.”
Liu argues the state recently committed to fully funding its school budget formula — a change that will pad the Education Department’s budget by more than $1 billion per year by 2023 — and that the city has a responsibility to use some of that money to lower class sizes.