Educator David Banks, who was appointed New York City Chancellor of Schools by Mayor-elect Eric Adams earlier this month, hinted at big changes in the city’s school system, including longer school days and summer classes. .
“A longer school day, and going to school on Saturdays and during the summer, has been absolutely critical,” Banks told our sister network NBC New York, this in reference to the programs that have been instituted in its network of schools. Eagle Academy. “We have to take advantage of the summer! We have to use Saturdays! We are late!”
Banks, a native New Yorker, rose to fame when he created The Eagle Academy Foundation in 2004, which aims to develop and support a network of all-male college prep schools for grades six through twelve in challenging urban communities.
Run by One Hundred Black Men Inc., the academy marked the first public boys’ school to open in New York City in approximately 30 years. Banks, now president and CEO of the foundation, said Eagle Academy’s academically rigorous college readiness policies work. And he plans to roll them out across the city.
“Teachers can often say ‘I don’t want to work Saturday, I don’t want to work all year,'” Banks told NBC. “But if we continue to do things the way we have been doing them, we will continue to get the same results.”
Banks added that if the teachers don’t want to work the weekends and the extra summer hours, then he will bring in community groups to fill in for the staff. The educator told NBC that he also plans to expand the limits of the classroom.
“You can have access to the best teachers from around the world, you shouldn’t just limit yourself to the teacher in your classroom,” Banks said. Imagine a great science teacher on the other side of town. And yet the young people who go to this school may not have a great science teacher. We can use technology and innovation to see how we connect the dots. “
Citing Eagle Academy’s success in engaging private sector companies in the classroom experience, Banks told NBC that he also plans to add courses such as corporate responsibility to the city’s existing curriculum. He added that he is also hopeful of implementing a citywide mentoring program.
“The youth of Eagle have mentors and these are lawyers, doctors, bankers and architects. We can expand that throughout the city,” he told the news outlet. “You may not be able to do that with all children, but in every school there are young people who are yelling for extra help.”
Banks also plans to completely revamp the ways schools teach reading, training early childhood teachers to emphasize phonetics and sound, rather than the “balanced literacy” method.
“I know I learned to read through a phonetic approach to reading, and I think we’re going to look to get back to that,” Banks told NBC. “Because if you don’t establish a solid foundation, whatever you do, you’re just fighting an uphill battle.”
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