Mayor-elect Eric Adams introduced David Banks, his first cabinet-level appointment, with stern warnings about the state of the nation’s largest school system.

By Eliza Shapiro @ NYTimes.com, Dec. 9

David C. Banks began his first morning as New York City’s schools chancellor-in-waiting with a warning to the city’s educational bureaucracy: The nation’s largest school system had betrayed too many of its students by paying the salaries of administrators who did not improve the lives of children, funded by a bloated budget that produced abysmal results for too many Black and Latino students.

Speaking at a packed, celebratory outdoor news conference at Public School

Saying that “65 percent of Black and brown children never achieve proficiency” on state standardized exams, Mr. Banks said that statistic reflected “a betrayal,” adding: “Think about if everybody in the Department of Education went home and all the kids went to school, you could get those same results,” he said.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio’s three schools chancellors all made similar promises. While test scores and graduation rates have risen citywide during the current mayor’s tenure, profound problems remain, from entrenched racial segregation to lack of support services for the city’s roughly 100,000 homeless students. Bringing sweeping change to a system that commands a $38 billion annual budget and employs 150,000 adults inside schools alone has always been more aspiration than reality for chancellors.

Mr. Adams said there was no alternative to bold action. “Let me tell you something, if 65 percent of white children were not reaching proficiency in this city, they would burn the city down,” he said. The mayor-elect said there has been “no urgency” about improving schools, in what appeared to be a veiled swipe at the de Blasio administration.

161, the elementary school he attended as a child in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Mr. Banks thundered: “I have a message for a lot of folks who are down at Tweed who think they know me,” referring to the Department of Education’s downtown headquarters.

To laughter and cheers, he issued a rhetorical question to administrators: “If you left, and your job disappeared tomorrow, would that change anything that’s going on in any of our schools?”

Mr. Banks, a longtime friend and adviser to Eric Adams, is the mayor-elect’s first commissioner-level appointment, and his remarks, along with Mr. Adams’s, were feisty opening salvos that signal their plans for major changes in the sprawling system. [....]