Mayor de Blasio Outlines Education Policies

Mayor Bill de Blasio is poised to unveil the next phase of his education agenda on Wednesday in a major speech that will tout his massive pre-kindergarten expansion as the foundation for a series of new policy initiatives aimed at improving standards and leveling the playing field for students in the nation’s largest school system.

De Blasio, in an exclusive interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday, said he would outline a series of expansive new proposals meant to achieve three major goals: to have all children reading by third grade, to improve on-time graduation rates and to give all students a shot at attending college.

And while the mayor’s primary audience will be the parents of the city’s 1.1 million students, he’ll also be using the speech to reiterate his case to the governor and lawmakers in Albany for more state education funding and a lengthy renewal of mayoral control of the public school system.

“We’ve known for a long time we didn’t have equity in our school system. We literally said for generations, ‘That’s a good school, that’s a bad school.’ That’s not acceptable,” de Blasio told the AP at the Bronx Latin School, the planned site of his speech. “My goal is that every school and every child have what they need to succeed.”

The mayor plans to hold up his administration’s success in launching universal pre-K — there are now 65,000 4-year-olds in pre-K, more than the number of students in the entire Boston public school system — as evidence it’s able to tackle sweeping changes to the sprawling school system.

One new proposal is aimed at the early formative years of students’ lives to set them on track for later success. De Blasio, a Democrat serving his first term, will declare he wants all students to be reading at their grade level by the end of second grade. Currently, only 30 percent of city public school third-graders are proficient in reading, and experts have found reading level in the third grade is a strong predictor of reading proficiency in the eighth grade.

To bridge that gap, the city plans to hire reading specialists who will  focus on helping students become literate. Hiring for the specialists, which will eventually cost $75 million annually, will begin this spring for the most-needy elementary schools, and all will have one on staff by 2018.

This article appeared in print on page 3 of the September 16th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.