At a recent town hall, Nikole Hannah-Jones asked Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels about his plans to address segregation in NYC public schools. He responded that his priority is addressing declining enrollment, which disproportionately affects schools with a majority of Black and Hispanic students.
This is the right approach.
Over 60% of NYC public school students are Black and Hispanic, with Black students leaving the system at the fastest rate. The most effective way to increase diversity is to improve school quality and encourage families of all backgrounds to enroll.
Declining enrollment is an urgent and challenging issue, and not an easy one to tackle. The School Construction Authority projects a loss of over 150,000 students in the next decade.
Currently, more than 130 schools have fewer than 150 students, and 25% of schools operate at under 60% capacity. These schools cannot function within their budgets, which are based on enrollment, and so the city has spent nearly $2 billion since 2020 on ‘hold harmless’ policies that keep funding schools based on their pre-COVID enrollment.
There is even a high school that is so tiny it can only afford one math teacher, and students must take night school to get enough credits to graduate—all for $46,000 per pupil.
The NYC Council addressed this issue at the FY27 Education budget hearing, where Councilmember Phil Wong asked Chancellor Samuels, “At what point do we acknowledge that we are funding empty seats, and is there a long-term plan to phase this out?”
Education Committee Chair Eric Dinowitz stated that “mergers should be on the table” and noted that small schools “lose economies of scale and it does make it more challenging to program properly.”
This month, Chancellor Samuels proposed closing Urban Assembly School for Global Commerce, which has only 112 students this year. In District 2, a merger is proposed between PS 131, a middle school with 224 students, and PS 126. Additional merger proposals may be presented at the next Panel for Education Policy meeting.
Since taking office, Chancellor Samuels has expanded the Adams administration’s strongest initiatives, NYC Reads and NYC Solves, to improve reading and math instruction, and while NYC Reads faces implementation challenges, including a low-quality curriculum in many low-income districts, it remains a significant improvement over the prior balanced literacy approach.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has proved to be more moderate on education than his campaign rhetoric would have had you believe and should stay the course—prioritizing strong instruction and addressing declining enrollment.
