Leonie Haimson: Mayoral Control of Schools Has Failed in NYC

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, writes about the latest developments in New York City. Major Eric Adams was indicted on multiple charges of corruption. His top aides resigned, including his schools chancellor David Banks. Adams says he is innocent and won’t resign. Leonie worries about what will happen to the city’s public schools, which are controlled by the mayor. Some of us–Leonie and I–long for the end of mayoral control and a revival of an independent Board of Education. Checks and balances are a very important part of democratic government. Under mayoral control, there is more cronyism than accountability.

She writes:

Mayor indicted, Chancellor resigning, and the Panel for Educational Policy eliminates its Contract Committee; so much for Mayoral control!!

Mayor Adams has now been indicted on five federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Chancellor Banks is resigning as of Dec. 31, 2024, to be replaced by Melissa Aviles-Ramos, current Deputy Chancellor for Family Engagement. This follows the announced resignations of other top officials, including the Police Commissioner and Commissioner of Health, in the last two weeks.

We should recall the false narratives promoted by those including Governor Hochul who insisted on extending unchecked Mayoral control for two more years last April, with no strings attached: that any other system invited corruption, instability, and inefficiency. The Mayor himself insisted on renaming Mayoral control “Mayoral Accountability,” and Chancellor Banks threatened to resign if the governance system was altered in any significant way. And look at what has happened since.

The only minor tweak the Legislature made to Mayoral control was that the Chair of the Panel for Educational Policy chair would be appointed by the Mayor from among three nominees put forward by leaders of the Legislature and Board of Regents. And yet it turns out that the new Chair will be exactly the same man who already held that seat as a Mayoral appointee, Greg Faulkner. The only difference is that now the Mayor will get an extra PEP appointee, to further cement his control over controversial educational policies, as well as questionable contracts and spending.

The Chancellor himself was reported having privately met with the CEO of 21stCentEd in October of 2022, and subsequently greenlit a major contract with this company that had hired his brother, Terrence Banks, as a lobbyist. According to the Daily News, 21stCentEd has since received more than $1.4 million in business from the Department of Education for providing a variety of services. In cases where a family member is involved, the city requires that a Conflict of Interest waiver be obtained. And yet Banks never applied for one. Both Chancellor Banks and Terence Banks have had their homes raided and their telephones seized by federal investigators.

Terence Banks also apparently lobbied for a Florida-based tech firm called Saferwatch which markets “panic button” apps to be used to alert authorities in case of school emergencies such as fires or active shooters. The NYPD signed a contract with Saferwatch which was piloted in several schools last year.

We have seen tremendous privacy problems with Teenspace, an online mental health program for NYC students 13 and up, relentlessly promoted by the Mayor and the Chancellor, after the Department of Health signed a $26 million dollar with the parent company Talkspace last year. And yet as we have discovered, Teenspace collects, shares and uses personal student data for marketing and commercial purposes with multiple social media “partners” that would be illegal if the contract was with the DOE rather than the Department of Health. When a NYC student visits the Teenspace website on their phone, their personally identifiable information is collected by 34 cookies, and shared with 15 ad trackers, as well as Facebook, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft among other companies. The company has also been sued in California for sharing personal data with TikTok, including the mental health data of minors. One should not be surprised to learn that lobbying firm for Talkspace is Oaktree Solutions, the firm owned by Frank Carone, a close associate and a former chief of staff to the Mayor who was with him last night when Adams was huddling with his attorneys after learning of his federal indictments.

Shortly after he was elected, Mayor Adams own partner, Tracey Collins, who already worked at DOE, was promoted and named the “senior adviser to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” and received a 23% boost to her salary to $221,597 a year . Shortly thereafter, Sharon Adams, the wife of the Mayor’s brother Bernard Adams, was hired by DOE, at a salary of $150,000-a-year.

The whirlwind of scandals and investigations surrounding the Mayor and his top appointees, including the Chancellor, should give rise to a new call for more accountability, oversight and checks and balances at DOE, but I fear that no lessons will be learned by those in power , because their interests lie in maintaining one-person rule, and ignoring the voices of parents and teachers. Indeed, there have been many cases of large-scale corruption at the DOE under previous administrations.

Eric Goldstein was hired in 2004 during Bloomberg/Klein years as a deputy overseeing food, transportation and high school sports, and promoted to chief executive in 2007. Goldstein was just recently sentenced to two years in prison, for a corrupt scheme he was involved in 2015-2016, during the De Blasio administration, by receiving bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to tainted food served to public school kids — including chicken tenders laden with plastic, bones and metal, causing choking.

There is also the recently revealed, shocking case of DOE staffers in the Queens office who took their own kids on trips to Disneyland and other trips by using federal funds meant to provide educational experiences for homeless children. For some reason, the DOE failed to ask for restitution for the stolen money; and neither the DOE nor the Special Investigator for Schools reported the alleged fraud, forgery and misuse of federal funds to any authorities for possible prosecution. To make things even more bizarre, the SCI held off posting its findings report, dated January 2023, for nearly two years after it was completed, and when they did so, they posted it quietly without any press release or notification, perhaps in hopes of it would be ignored by the media focused instead on the allegations and investigations surrounding the Mayor. I have since reported these alleged crimes to the Inspector General’s office of the US Department of Education, and the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

There have been many more multi-million dollar DOE corruption scandals under Mayoral control over the last 20 years, a selection of which I summarized in my testimony to the State Education Department and my presentation last year to the NYC Bar Association, both posted here.

And yet despite all these allegations of cronyism and worse, the first thing that the newly reconstituted Panel for Education Policy did in its first meeting of the new school year on September 25 is to eliminate its Contracts Committee by amending its Bylaws as depicted below.

This committee, whose meetings have been livestreamed and recorded, has provided the only public airing of discussion and questioning of DOE officials by PEP members of the rationale behind hundreds of millions of dollars of questionable DOE contracts before the final Panel vote. The approval to ditch the committee was 13-6, with one abstention. As usual, every Mayoral appointee plus the new, supposedly “independent” Chair voted in lockstep to eliminate the Contracts Committee and its monthly public meetings. So much for so-called Mayoral accountability!