As he rolls back diversity programs, David Banks says families just want a good neighborhood school

When David C. Banks, future chancellor of the New York City school system, was growing up in a working-class Black family in southeast Queens, his father pulled strings to get him into a better junior high school across town. Banks and his brother left the house in darkness and took two buses to get to Flushing. In high school, his parents again believed the campus around the corner was unacceptable and sent the siblings out of the neighborhood. The school they chose, Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens, had been the site of integration protests from White parents when it opened in 1971, though when David arrived in 1977, he encountered little racial strife. He was elected vice president of his senior class, took advanced classes and ran track. “We got along,” he said. “We liked each other.” It was the sort of positive multiracial experience that civil rights leaders had spent decades fighting for.

For years, advocates have decried racial and economic segregation in New York City schools, partly because it has been so rare for students in high-poverty schools to succeed. Advocates prodded Mayor Bill de Blasio to take on the issue, and near the end of his tenure, pushed by the pandemic, he adopted changes. Those changes reduced the role of merit in admissions and made some of the most sought-after schools modestly more diverse.

Now de Blasio is out, and Mayor Eric Adams is in, with his friend and adviser David Banks at his side as schools chancellor. For the first time ever, New York has a Black mayor and a Black schools chief. But racial integration is not on their to-do list, and they have rolled back many of de Blasio’s policies.

Banks replies that Black and Hispanic kids can successfully compete for these spots. And, despite his own experience, the chancellor does not think most Black families care all that much about integration or gaining access to schools viewed as elite, which may require traveling across town like he did. They simply want better schools in their own neighborhoods, he says, even if those schools remain segregated.

In 1974, Philip and Janice Banks moved their three sons from Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood to Queens, escaping gangs, drugs and violence. Philip, then a New York City patrolman, kept close watch over his boys as they grew. “If there was no homework, I’d get on the phone to the teacher and ask why,” he later recalled.

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