Meet the (Soon-To-Be) Schools Chancellor

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We are very happy to begin today with New York City's incoming school's Chancellor David Banks, named by mayor-elect Eric Adams. They will both officially take office on New Year's Day. A little bit of biographical background. David Banks is 59 years old and got his first principal job 25 years ago. Before that, he had gone to law school and started practicing law but left after two years because he really wanted to work in education. He grew up in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, then Cambria Heights in Queens. His parents, I've read, were a secretary and a police officer. His brother is Philip Banks, who had risen to the post of Chief of Department in the NYPD and is rumored to be on Eric Adams' shortlist for Deputy Mayor for public safety.

David Banks is best known as founder of the Eagle Academies for Young Men, a group of public schools, now charter schools, launched in 2004. 10 years later, in 2014, Banks published a book called Soar: How Boys Learn, Succeed, and Develop Character. The education news website Chalkbeat says Banks was an early champion of infusing schools with culturally responsive curriculum and practices that celebrate Black and brown people. Banks had been close to Eric Adams for years and was widely expected to be named Chancellor, as he has now been.

Also, Banks' partner, Sheena Wright, head of United Way of New York City, was on this show recently, some of you will remember in her role as Eric Adams' transition chair. Chancellor Banks, we're thrilled that you're making this one of your early stops. Welcome to WNYC, and congratulations on your appointment.

David Banks: Thank you so much, Brian, it's my pleasure to be here with you today.

Brian Lehrer: Take out your red pencil and tell me how much of that bio did I get wrong. What's something important that I left out?

David Banks: I don't know. I think he captured it for the most part. I'm a product of the New York City public school system. You talked about the fact that my great mom and dad, and my father was a New York City police officer, tough guy, but very loving and nurturing. My mother was tough, too. They raised three boys in New York, and I'm the oldest of the three. I'm a very blessed individual to have had Phillip and Janice Banks as my parents. I always tell people, Brian, if everybody in the city had parents as great as I did, we'd have no problems in our schools.

Brian Lehrer: Well, that's a hot button issue, because I could fill up the board with people who would call in and say parenting is the key to schools, and schools itself, whatever you do as Chancellor, can only matter at the margins. That it's parent engagement, that it's parental choices,. You can have the best school with the best teachers in the world, and the best system in the world, and the kids from less intentional families, if that's the right word to use, are going to come in and have the same problems they'd have in a so-called bad school. How much do you think that's true or false?

David Banks: I think that parent engagement and the love and nurturance affirmation that parents give their children is essential. It's what everybody should get, but the reality is that a lot of our parents face many, many challenges and are not always able to give the kids as much as we would like for them to get. The school system doesn't have to be the mommy and daddy for the kids, but we've got to be really good at what we're supposed to do and at least playing our role. Critically important but sometimes the schools will use that as an excuse, I think, to say, "Listen, if the mom was more involved, they would be better off." We use that sometimes as an excuse for not doing what we're supposed to do.

We got to give the kids everything that we got as educators every single day to give them the best shot of success, whether their parents are deeply involved or not.

Brian Lehrer: Before we leave your childhood, I see you're about the same age as the mayor-elect, two years younger and he was also growing up in Southeast Queens at the time. I realize it's a big place, I'm from Queens too, but did you cross paths at all as kids?

David Banks: No, not as kids. He's a Bayside High School guy. I was Hillcrest High School and we used to beat them pretty regularly in basketball, though they had a good team, but no. I didn't know Eric as kids. I got to know him a little bit later on in life when he was on the police department. My dad did 27 years on the NYPD or retired as a lieutenant and was really a bit of a mentor to Eric as well. A lot of young officers will look up to my father Phil Banks.

Brian Lehrer: The mayor-elect talked on the show recently about being bused from his home in Jamaica to integrated Bayside High School, which coincidentally is my alma mater. He considered that very helpful to his educational development. I'm curious how your experience at Hillcrest began to shape your thoughts about education, if it did.

David Banks: I'm a graduate of Hillcrest High School, the class of '80. Shout out to the class of '80. We are close, hundreds of us are still close to this day. Some of the best years of my life. I graduated as the senior class vice president. I remember running for office. Hillcrest was an amazing place to go to, fully integrated High School, Black, white, Asian, Latino. It was a great place to go to school, and I had a great school experience there. I lived in Cambria Heights Queens, so it was a bus ride away, but everybody was hopping on buses for the most part at that time. Hillcrest had a great effect on me, on how I see the world, how I experienced school. It was just a tremendous place to go to school, I'll always be very, very proud of my Hillcrest experience.

Brian Lehrer: Moving on in your bio. You became a lawyer, but gave it up after two years to become an educator. Is that right?

David Banks: Yes, I went to St. John's Law School. I always wanted to be a lawyer. I started having kids pretty early, which slowed down my ability to do that. I started teaching at PS 167, in an Elementary School in Brooklyn. After a couple years of teaching, I decided to go to law school at night, which I did. I was teaching in Brooklyn and going to St. John's Law School in the evenings. I did that for four years, probably the toughest four years of my life, while raising at that time it was three, and soon to be four children. I have three sons and a daughter, very proud of all of my children.

I worked for the New York City Law Department for a bit. I worked for the New York State Attorney General's office at a time when, you recall Brian, Oliver Koppell was the Attorney General, and Bob Abrams before that, who had been around for a long time. It was during that time that I realized that actually, my heart was really in education. I decided to go back, and I went back to school to get my administration license in order to be a school administrator, and then the rest is history.

Brian Lehrer: Now jumping ahead to 2004 when you founded the first Eagle Academy for Young Men in the Bronx. Why did you want to focus on education for boys, and why single-gender education at all?

David Banks: I've been a longtime member. Well, let me just say, give you some context. Before the Eagle Academy, I was the founding principal of the Bronx School for Law, Government, and Justice. As I was hired to do that job, that was the first urban assembly schools, a network of schools in a city called the urban assembly schools. When they selected me to be the founding principal, the head of the organization said, "I've got a young lady that's working here. She's about 22 years old, and she's great. Why don't you take her with you?" She worked with me as a special assistant. Then we made her a teacher, she became my assistant principal, and ultimately, the principal of that school when I left to go run Eagle.

That young lady was a young lady named Meisha Ross Porter, who went on to become Meisha Ross Porter, our current chancellor. I've known and I've worked with Meisha and she's worked for me from the time she was a very young lady, and she's one of the most brilliant, dedicated people you could ever meet. The best years of my working life, I worked side by side with Meisha as we created that school. The only reason I left, Brian, was because I'm a member of the 100 Black Men organization. It's a civic organization of professional men here in New York started by people like David Dinkins and Charlie Rangel, and [unintelligible 00:09:18], many years ago.

We were looking at the data. Columbia University put out a report that said 75% of the inmates from the entire state, come from seven neighborhoods in New York City. The graduation rate for African American males in New York City at that time was 32%. That means 7 out of 10 young men, Black boys, weren't even graduating from high school. How are they going to present themselves for possibilities for careers opportunities? We can't even graduate them from high school.

Brian Lehrer: 32%, what year was that?

David Banks: That was when we opened our doors in 2004. Maybe 2003, we were looking at the data. That's when we decided we needed to do something about that. People were writing books and policy papers and hold and having conferences and panel discussions, but we said, "Darn it, is anybody going to lean in and do anything?" It seemed like the most you could hope for was a good after-school program for 25 kids, that was as good as it got. We said, "We don't have all the answers but let's lean into this and try to do something." That's when we came up with the idea to create the Eagle Academy for Young Men. It was to first all-boys, public high school in New York City in and about 30 years since the days of Boys High in Brooklyn and Clinton High School in the Bronx.

Over the years, it somehow became politically incorrect to have single-gender schools, but a few years before we opened our doors, the Young Women's Leadership Schools were opened. The first single-gender schools in years, and they were all-girls schools. We came and balanced the playing field. We've never said it was a panacea. We just simply said people of means maintain all their options for their kids. Big schools, small schools, theme-based schools. We just said, for poor kids from the community and their families, they should have options as well, and single-gender schools should just merely be an option for the families to explore.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few questions from you for incoming New York City Schools Chancellor, David Banks. Let me say so we don't waste anybody's time, including your fellow listeners, that he's not in office yet and hasn't developed the specific answers to many specific policy questions yet. To avoid him having to say, "We're working on that," a dozen times, there's still plenty to say about his experience with Eagle Academies and everything else, and how that will inform his work as chancellor, and bigger vision kinds of things that are definitely fair game. I think you get it, listeners. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692 for David Banks, or you can tweet a question @BrianLehrer.

Let me stay on that topic of educating boys for a minute. Men have most of the money and power in the US and the world compared to women, but girls do better in school. Girls are going to college these days at much higher rates than boys. I know you know that. Why do you think it's like that, given that men control the purse strings and men control the political strings?

David Banks: That's a great question, Brian. There are lots of thoughts that various researchers have around that issue. Some have called it the feminization of schools. There's been a lot of research and articles that have been written on that, that the overwhelming majority of teachers in our schools are white and female, and that girls by and large identify clearly with them and are very drawn to these kind of academically rigorous programs. That's a notion that's been explored. What I will tell you is that in the world of what I've been dealing with the boys of color in particular, boys don't think it's cool to be smart in school and to demonstrate their scholastic aptitude. That doesn't get you admission into the cool club. Particularly boys of color, 65% of boys of color are growing up without a father at home. Do you think about that?

When they're in the elementary school ages and they're lovable, huggable, and cute, that's one thing. As they start to get older, they begin to disengage from school, and a lot of it has to do with the approach that we take. Also, the books that we read, how we engage boys in school in a way that is action-oriented, hands-on approaches to school. We don't do a lot of that. If you talk to these boys, not only in America but all across the world, the one thing that they will tell you, the reason that boys disengage is because they're bored. Really being able to create systems that create a more fast-paced hands-on, the kinds of materials that boys like to read and work on is something that we have to do. Those are the things that we do at the Eagle Academy.

Brian Lehrer: What's an example of that? I saw you say on NY1 this week with Errol Louis that boys tend to be competitive. You use that to help engage them, with things like dividing them into groups called Houses. Do you want to take that or any example you want to give us of how educating boys is different from educating girls?

David: Well, and again, these are broad strokes. This is not for every single boy or every single girl, but we break them up into Houses. In Eagle Academy, all the Houses are named after iconic men of color, whether they're the Arthur Ashe House or the Langston Hughes House, or the Thurgood Marshall House. What we've found is that the boys really enjoy competing with each other academically, sports, citizenship. When we set up a construct that allows them to compete, they compete for points at our schools. It's healthy competition that really seems to drive them and they get excited about it. Listen, you see it play out in the streets in a negative way.

It's part of reason why boys are involved in gangs and my gang will then be in confrontation with your gang. This seems to be something that drives that notion to belong to a group and there's a brotherhood that connects there. Well, at Eagle Academy, we just figured out how to frame that through a very positive way to give the young men an opportunity. I had a neighbor, a woman who lives right up the block from our school a few years ago. She came to the school in the morning while we were having our town hall and she said, "I just want you to know that I lost and dropped my keys down into the sewer," as she was coming out.

She was distraught that she couldn't get to the key. She said, "You had two students from this school." She said, "I don't even know who they are. They saw that and they took off their book bags. One of them reached down and they were helping each other, and they got my keys." She said, "I can't imagine any kids that would even do such a thing." Those boys earned their House a ton of points. You should hear the kids saluting and celebrating. They're always looking for ways to be caught doing good things because it lifts and it celebrates and it affirms a goodness in them. That's just one small example, Brian, of the kind of thing that we've done and it has made all the difference in the world.

Brian Lehrer: What would you say to parents of girls who might be afraid you aren't going to be focused on their specific needs, especially given the imbalance of power in the world between the genders? Maybe some people are cringing hearing you say the feminization of education before?

David Banks: Yes, and I'm not saying that I believe in the feminization. You asked me what were some of the reasons why people think that that is.

Brian Lehrer: Correct.

David Banks: A reality is that those are just some of the things that have been said. I think any parent who has a daughter should know they're going to be in the best of hands with me. My daughter is now a teacher at my original school in the Bronx, the Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice, and I am beyond proud of her. I think that these young women are just absolutely incredible. They're filled with promise and potential, and all the gifts that they need to go on to be tremendously successful. I want to give them everything that I possibly have. I leaned into this space in my most recent years of my career around the boys because they were just so far behind, but it's not that I don't care about the girls. I care deeply about the girls and that'll be demonstrated and all that we do.

Brian Lehrer: Incoming New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks is our guest. Question from the listener via Twitter. Since Banks' parents were tough, curious to know what his approach to discipline in schools is?

David Banks: My basic approach to discipline, and sometimes people want to hear the quick-hit answer on, "Kids act up, we got to be tough, we throw them out of school." I believe fundamentally that the approach to discipline is about the culture that we create in a school. Often all the international research tells us that discipline is a byproduct of relationships. When kids have great relationships with the adults in school, they do better, they're less counterproductive, and they're just involved in a way that works to their total benefit. Kids that really act up are kids who sometimes are just disconnected, disengaged, and so the goal here is always about how to build strong relationships in our schools.

Now, that being said, I grew up with a police officer at home. If we acted up, there were consequences. At Eagle Academy, there are consequences. You may lose access to certain benefits in the school and things that you might otherwise want to do. I think, more importantly, we built a culture where the young men are accountable to each other. That same group, that House that I told you about, that House model where you can earn points when you're caught doing the right thing, you can also lose points for your group when there's somebody who's a member of the House who's not living up to all that they're supposed to be, and otherwise getting caught up in negative behavior.

The entire group suffers. I think you find that when you do that, and they have to be held to account to each other, that's what builds the spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood and accountability one to another, makes all the difference in the world. I was a school safety officer, Brian, I don't know if you knew this?

Brian Lehrer: No, I didn't know that.

David Banks: For one year at Clara Barton High School. I wore the uniform and breaking up fights in the lunchroom. I know what it is to be in that space of school safety. I know what it is also to be in that space of school safety as a teacher who loves his children and his students, and a principal who would do anything that I had to do on behalf of all of my children. If they are in a place where everybody that's surrounding them loves them, doesn't look at their job as just nine to three, and then, "I can't wait to get out of here and go home." I think most of the teachers across our school system love and care for these kids deeply, and just sometimes need an additional level of support to provide a safe environment for everybody.

Brian Lehrer: Speaking of the teachers, I've read that you are friendly to charter schools, but you prefer to work in the regular district school system, as your Eagle academies do, and within union contracts, which charter schools don't. Is that all accurate? If so, why?

David Banks: I will tell you that. First of all, I came up in a traditional public school system. I'm a product K through 12, of regular public schools. I was a teacher. I was an administrator in a public school. My whole career has really been spent in public schools, and the work that I've done at Eagle Academy, sometimes articles have been written about Eagle where they cite us as being a charter school. Why? Because we do really innovative things, and the kids wear uniforms. We have an extended day, the kids come to school on Saturdays very often. How we use the summer. People equate all of that to charter schools.

We were very intentional when we created our schools. We've got one in every borough in the city and one in Newark, New Jersey. I've got 3,000 Boys, as I stand here now. The work that we have done, we were intentional about it being done within a traditional public school system. Why? Because we wanted to show that you could actually have a form of innovation and creativity and move the needle within the traditional public school system that you did not, in fact, have to be a charter school to be innovative. That's the work that we have been committed to. Now when I say we're friendly, I'm friendly to everybody. We're open, and I know most of the charter school leaders across the city. I think parents are having an option and choice for good schools, I don't ever want to limit any option that any parent has.

I know my parents would not have wanted anybody to limit their choices, and I certainly am not going to stand in the way of limiting choices. My job as Chancellor is to build up these traditional public schools and to make sure that they are phenomenal, and so that the same way that those parents are running the charters, I want them to run the regular public schools that are right down the block as well. I will tell you one last thing on that, Brian, the schools as they currently, there are some amazing things that are going on in our public schools. We just got a bad marketing strategy. Parents don't know about the great things that are actually going on or schools.

The charter schools have done a great job of promoting all the good stuff that they do. The public school system, to the contrary, always plays defense and does not promote the positive things that are happening. That's going to change once I'm the Chancellor. I want the whole city to know the amazing teachers and the amazing principals and the amazing schools that they never hear about. Not only for the parents to know that, but I want to scale their work so that more schools can get better by learning from what everybody else is doing. That includes the charter schools.

Charter schools, as you recall, they were designed initially to be laboratories of innovation to then feed that information and those strategies back to the public schools. Somewhere along the line that went awry and they became entities unto themselves. I'm going to seek to change that. I'm going to seek to get charter schools and these great public schools all listening and learning together so everybody can win. This system has been designed for winners and losers, and I want to change that. I think all of our children and all of our schools can win.

Brian Lehrer: If the graduation rate for Black boys that you cited was just 32% in 2004 when you started the Eagle academies, do you know what it is now city wide after, what, 17 years of attempted reforms by Bloomberg and then de Blasio?

David Banks: I don't have the number off the top of my head right now. I know the graduation rate across the city for all children hovers now a little over 80%, but for Black and brown boys, I believe that number is still in the high 50s, maybe low 60s. The numbers have gone up, but we still have a long way to go.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I want to express my concern to David Banks about rumors of schools going remote. Please prioritize keeping schools open with strong mitigation in place. Kids need school, they need consistency and social contact. Please don't go remote." Another person writes, I think with the opposite interest, frankly, "If COVID cases increase in schools, what is the threshold to go remote for David Banks?" I know you don't have a specific policy developed yet, but I did also see you on TV talking about this conceptually. What can you say?

David Banks: Conceptually, Brian, I will tell you this. I'm in full agreement that the best thing for kids by and large is for them to be in school. I get it, and everything that we will do will be to try to make sure that we can be as close to that as possible, but we're also seeing these cases are spiking now in recent days. We got to pay very close attention to what that looks like. That was one specific caller who asked that question. I can tell you that you might have the next caller say that, "Remote learning worked for me and my child, how come that's not even an option for me?"

My gut tells me that while most kids should be back in school, there is a small percentage of kids who the remote learning worked for them. Why not create that as an option? Why does it have to be one size that fits all for everybody? I fundamentally don't believe that. I believe in choice. I believe in us being nimble, and flexible, and to the degree that we can create a system that can in fact meet the needs of all the kids. That's what I want to do. Now, finally, on this remote/virtual learning. I will tell you, I think, Brian, the world has changed. I don't believe that all education has to exist within the four walls of a school. There's so many things.

If you want to be an astronaut when you grew up, why can't we put you in a position have access to scientists at NASA? You may not be able to go there, but you can certainly access them and their expertise. The whole world is open to us now, if we positively and strategically are using technology. Technology never replaces a good teacher, and I get it, but we also don't have to be limited. If you've got a teacher who's teaching math at a school in Queens who's not particularly strong, well, why should the kids be doomed because they just happen to not have a really good math teacher if there's a math teacher on the other side of town who's great?

Why can't we figure out ways for kids to get access to that? With the advent of technology, I'm just saying the possibilities are limitless. We need to activate all possibilities, and not just come up with these answers that, just one answer, "No remote option, everybody has to be in school." I just think that we should be a lot more nimble than that.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask what you think conceptually of tracking? Does it really help slower learners or those starting further behind to learn in the same room as the faster or more advanced kids, whatever label you want to use? Does it hurt the fast or advanced kids to be in a mixed group, as many of their parents apparently think it would?

David Banks: The answer is yes and no. Here's the yes to it. When gone well, there's a lot of research that shows how students who may not be as accelerated in their learning can pick up more and advance their learning a bit more quickly when they are around their peers who get these concepts and can actually help them. There's research that also shows that if you're an accelerated learner, you deepen your learning when you're able to explain your learning to somebody else. It helps you understand it even more. It becomes a win-win for everybody. The challenge is that we don't often do it well, and when we don't do it well, everybody suffers.

The accelerated learner is now having their learning experience stifled, and the slow learner is the one that the teacher is doing their work geared more toward the middle and toward the slow learner. That's the reason why people are so anxious about these gifted and talented programs and accelerated learning programs. I've heard you mention that gifted and talented is really a misnomer, and I agree. It's really accelerated learning program and really accelerated readers more than it is anything else. I think that that's part of the issue that we have. That's why this job is so complex, Brian, there's just so many pieces to this.

There are no single, easy answers, but we are going to generate the best ideas and thoughts from parents, from students, the students themselves who have so much to say. Our teachers, our faculty, our administrators, we're going to be listening to everybody. One thing you'll probably find with me is that there will not be a one size that fits all for every school. We have 1,800 schools in the city and I think innovation really gets activated from the bottom up, not from the top down. Everybody doesn't have to do everything the same way, but we've got to make sure that whatever way they're moving, it's in a constructive way that really works for kids and their families.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I say that you quoted me back to myself accurately there. I can say the incoming School's Chancellor did his homework on me before coming on the show.

David Banks: [laughs] Well, I listen to you, Brian. I listen to the show regularly.

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad to hear that. We will have to leave that here for appearance number one as we are out of time. Chancellor Banks, best of luck. If you succeed, the city succeeds. We look forward to inviting you back in your new role many times. Thanks for coming on today.

David Banks: Thank you so much. My pleasure. Looking forward to rejoining you at a later date. Take good care and happy holidays to you.

Brian Lehrer: And to you. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

 

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