New York City’s health commissioner quit. The schools chancellor announced he’s leaving. Then the mayor got indicted.
I could not be the only one who wondered: But what does this all mean for the high school admissions process?
New York City runs on a massive, resilient bureaucracy. We will survive. And yet…
There are very real concerns over just how much governing the Adams administration can do as it fights – and a fight he has vowed – federal probes on multiple levels. As my colleague, Epicenter civics writer Felipe de la Hoz wrote last week: “his political capital is depleted, and he is not going to be able to govern effectively while fighting off federal charges. …a mayor can expend some political capital to move things along, but he’s got none to spare.”
This comes as New York City is reeling (still) from the devastating effects of Covid-19, a lukewarm real estate market, a challenging small-business landscape and a lackluster economy, despite Washington’s insistence that we are not in a recession. The cost of housing is sending people into lines at food pantries or out of the city altogether. Then there’s the crisis affecting people across the economic spectrum: a mental-health emergency leading to a fragility I haven’t seen since the days after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. We witness it on the streets and subways, but also in our classrooms and Zoom calls; a cloud hangs over much of this city.
Besides city government workers, New York City operates on a precarious network of nonprofits and community organizations, from tiny and grassroots to centralized and methodical. During times of uncertainty, the cruel irony is that the same economic headwinds that make budgets tighten (elections, interest rates, uncertainty) hit the communities we serve even harder. And so organizations are in a Catch-22 because those people turn to us more for resources (think: food pantries, free tutoring for kids, help staying in their apartment) but we are less resourced due to the same conditions.
On that note, in the midst of a political crisis, we can’t forget pragmatic everyday affairs that affect New Yorkers exponentially more than the ones in the tangled web of Adams and friends.
These are some of our hopes for these troubled times:
Pay vendors on time.
Governments are notorious for paying late. Mayor Adams and Comptroller Brad Lander tried to address this with the Joint Task Force to Get Nonprofits Paid On Time, which didn’t quite live up to its name. Still, the fear of an even more inefficient government looms (“who exactly is in charge?” is the question I have heard from many nonprofit heads over the last few days) and because so much of getting paid on time boils down to one piece of paper and one sympathetic bureaucrat moving that paper along and transferring funds, any disruption to a Byzantine system might mean the whole process has to start over.
Let me underscore this issue: being paid late essentially requires nonprofits and community organizations to work off credit and to keep borrowing money from other revenue streams to make payroll, execute programs and (see point above) serve New Yorkers at a time that they are needier than ever.
Already there were concerns that cuts to city agencies would delay payments. Now, the lack of leadership, departures and general confusion does not bode well for those of us trying to get by—and to just get paid.
Make policy changes– especially those affecting schools– clear and transparent across languages and platforms.
This one’s personal. I’ve got a child trying to get into high school right now. But in the last three years, the rules around school admissions have changed every single cycle. You might say they are small tweaks but word takes a while to get around in the country’s largest school system, and some of the least informed are the very people within said system.
While former Mayor Bill DeBlasio focused on equity in educational policy, he did not fully execute on those promises. That left Chancellor David Banks with a series of sweeping changes that he inherited but did not entirely agree with, such as lottery-based admissions for high school. Say what you will about his corrupt girlfriend (who became his wife over the weekend) and brothers, Banks has drawn kudos from the many sides of the educational aisles for some of his experimentation and implementation. That is near impossible in a space as diverse, sprawling and politically divided as the New York City public school system.
It is no coincidence that the day after the mayor’s indictment was released, the city issued yet another slew of guidance on middle school and high school admissions. You can read details here. What will get lost in the coming days is that official communications, across school websites, guidance counselors, parent groups, have yet to keep up with the changes. For example, families applying to high school can now list an unlimited number of schools, whereas most sites are still advising they can only rank up to 12. Middle school applicants can list schools across the city for the first time.
Who cares, you might say, as phones are being seized and heads are rolling and there are titillating details on airline upgrades and double dipping salaries? Well, consider the plight of those who are less connected to the machinations of City Hall, those who are not digitally connected or with time to sit on Facebook groups all day explaining these decisions, those who might not speak English or understand what the heck a lottery number made up of hexadecimals even means.
Besides admissions, there are a great number of policy decisions Banks appeared to be departing from predecessors on, such as implementing new reading curricula and a ban on cellphones in schools. All of this is actually wildly important and very personal; where your children attend school and what they were taught seemingly affects your life more than who the mayor is—and yet they are so interconnected.
Tell us who to call for mental health help and other quality-of-life issues.
I alluded earlier to the fragility after 9/11 in New York City. The way this time has been different is that services and the need to offer them are so much more ubiquitous now. And yet how to connect that help to those in need (unhoused people, emotionally disturbed folks on the subway, teens who are being bullied in school, teens who are bullies in school) to the range of services is very confusing.
The NYPD commissioner stepped down a few weeks ago and the health commissioner announced he plans to depart in January. Across the dozens of neighborhood lists I participate in via email and social media, a common refrain has become: “I see homeless people setting up outside my building. Who do I call?” Also: “I witnessed a sex act in the alley of my building. Will anyone do anything?” And then there are the complaints about street vendors, cat callers, and subway sleepers. I cling often to what Felipe has written before: “Big picture, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that New York City is experiencing a big resurgence of crime. …People are suffering from a confluence of events that often feed into each other. They might be struggling with mental health issues. They might be struggling with drug abuse issues.”
Stop fanning racism in New York City.
Eric Adams has repeatedly said he is the victim of racism and payback from the Biden administration for speaking out about migrants arriving in New York City. “I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target, and a target I became,” he said last week.
The irony of Adams is that he cries racism even as he spews it against Latinos. He has repeatedly scapegoated migrants for increased crime and blowing holes in the city budget when there’s really no evidence of that whatsoever.
Is there perhaps a double standard in prosecuting Adams because he – and so many of his loyal friends in high-powered positions in City Hall – are Black? Sure. But it is possible to both be the target of racism and be a crooked person. As criminal justice expert Elie Mystal tweeted: It is “…true that the white mayors of this city have done shady ass shit and not been investigated much less indicted by the white legal system. That doesn’t *absolve* Adams of his shady shit. He *should have known* Black people don’t get to play by white rules.”
That’s a lesson that the majority of New Yorkers—say, the 71% of us who identify as Black, Asian or Latino, or the quarter living under the poverty line, or the third struggling with rent insecurity—happen to know all too well.
