I’m dropping out of school

Chancellor: If mayor loses control . . .

Schools Chancellor David Banks declared Thursday he has “no interest” in keeping his job if Mayor Adams doesn’t have the power to oversee local public schools.

“I have no interest in serving as the chancellor in a system where you don’t really have the authority to make real decisions,” the Department of Education boss said at a City Hall briefing. “I have no interest in that whatsoever. I’m gonna be very clear about that.”

His reaction came just days after Albany pols dealt Adams a blow in his fight to retain mayoral control of the nation’s largest school system by leaving out an extension of the mandate — which is set to expire June 30 — from their budget proposals. Banks doubled down Thursday on the need for Hizzoner to remain in charge, arguing that without mayoral control, there would be no one to regulate whether schools are complying with the new state-mandated class-size law.

Politics with kids

“We’ve got advocates in the state Legislature, legislators who are fighting for class size, right? We now have this class-size law. They’re promoting it. They believe that [if] we have small class sizes that kids have a better chance of being successful,” Banks said.

“How do you implement a classsize law unless you know who’s responsible for leading that work? I don’t know how you do that. If they don’t do an extension of this law by June, the system naturally will revert back to what it was before.”

The chancellor argued that Big Apple parents deserve to know exactly who is in charge of their kids’ education and to be able to hold that person accountable.

“You can engage in rhetorical flourishes all you want, but at the end of the day, taxpayers, parents in New York City, need to know there’s somebody they can go to who is in charge of the system and can direct what is happening,” he said. “We would be taking 10 steps backwards if we said, ‘The mayor is no longer in charge.’

“I grew up in a system where it was spread out across the city, and I knew personally people who had to pay for their positions to become a principal,” he said, pointing to a time before Mayor Mike Bloomberg when mayoral control was nonexistent in the city.

“You didn’t have a shot of being a principal in a particular district unless they had a community board you were close to or you were prepared to pay money for a four-year position.”

A lack of mayoral control would be playing politics with kids’ education, Banks argued.

Gov. Hochul has already backed Adams’ push to retain control by floating a four-year extension of the current system in her budget proposal earlier this year.

But opponents, including the United Federation of Teachers, have pointed to Adams’ record of school budget cuts and opposition to the class mandate law as reasons why he shouldn’t solely be in charge of making decisions.

Lawmakers could still pass an extension outside the budget — like they did last time mayoral control expired in 2022.