Schools chief done in month
City Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter, who took the reins of the nation’s largest school system midpandemic and served as its first Black woman leader, will leave her post when Mayor de Blasio’s tenure ends Dec. 31 to become CEO of a Bronx foundation, she announced Wednesday morning.
Porter will start in 2022 as chief executive of the Bronx Community Foundation, leaving the Education Department after a two-decade career and a nine-month stint as chancellor. Mayor-elect Eric Adams, who takes office Jan. 1, is widely expected to name David Banks, the founder of the Eagle Academy network of boys’ public schools, as his chancellor in the coming weeks.
“Throughout her entire career, Meisha Porter has shown up for the children of New York City,” said de Blasio. “Together, we fully reopened our schools, launched an historic academic recovery for students and made unprecedented gains for equity in our school communities. She has worked tirelessly and fearlessly to make sure our kids get the high-quality education they deserve.”
Porter took the helm of the city school system in mid-March, with many elementary and middle schools still open only parttime for in-person classes and high schools closed for in-person instruction altogether.
With two decades of experience in the Education Department, Porter was seen as a steady hand who could pull together competing interests in the department after the turbulence of school reopening debates during the summer of 2020, and pitched battles over racial equity under former Chancellor Richard Carranza. She faced an early test in launching an expanded summer school program, called Summer Rising, meant to offer a blend of academics and recreation to any child who wanted it.
The effort got off to a rocky start but ultimately served roughly 200,000 kids.
Porter oversaw the full reopening of in-person classes this fall and helped develop plans for spending hundreds of millions in federal academic relief funds. Those plans include an ambitious $200 million proposal to create a universal curriculum and a stalled $250 million effort to provide makeup services to special-education students who fell behind during the pandemic.
She also played a central role in pushing de Blasio to act on plans to reform the city’s controversial Gifted and Talented program — just months before he leaves office.
The new plan, which gets rid of separate gifted classes for kindergartners who score well on an entrance exam and seeks to offer enrichment services to all kids, will fall to Adams and his new chancellor to implement.