New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels faced a public grilling by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones at a school integration town hall Tuesday night over his lack of a detailed plan to address inequality in city public schools, more than 10 months into the new mayoral administration.
The Brooklyn-based civil rights writer recently published a follow-up essay about her choice of a racially segregated school for her daughter, outlining the prior gaps in her child’s education and renewing calls for a citywide school integration plan.
“The people who keep getting told they have to wait for the ‘right time’ are the people who need public schools the most,” Hannah-Jones said at the Washington Irving Campus near Union Square in Manhattan.
“You have to understand the discontent with this. It’s 10 months in,” she told Samuels. “When a timeline can’t be offered, you can understand why people will feel like that means you are just delaying.”
Throughout the contentious town hall, Hannah-Jones urged Samuels to eliminate selective or “screened” admissions, gifted programs, and priority entry in some of the most white and wealthier parts of the city. The chancellor dodged several questions, as the audience of families, teachers, and advocates heckled and jeered. Organizers estimated nearly 800 people were in attendance.
Samuels, meanwhile, insisted their disagreement was not about the need to address the issue, but the “how” to do so. The chancellor has said truly integrated schools are one of the top three priorities of his tenure, and he has started engaging local superintendents and parents in coming up with district-level plans.
“You need to be able to have conversations with communities, rather than pronounce something from on high, for it to actually work and be sustainable,” Samuels said.
“It’s not as though you’re going to remove screens, and it’s going to suddenly have everybody going everywhere, and it’s going to be great,” he added.
Hannah-Jones’s Sept. 20 article wrestles with the impact of the choice she made with her husband Faraji, who sits on the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, to send their daughter, Najya, to predominantly Black, low-income elementary and middle schools.
A decade after the first essay was published, Najya is now a teenager who disagrees with her parents’ choice. Given the chance to select her own high school, Najya picked the type of selective program her mother has spent her career advocating against.
In that school, the shortcomings of her prior education were laid bare as she was forced to catch up to her classmates, she wrote.
In an interview last month, Mayor Mamdani pledged to release a school integration plan, but there’s been little public progress. So far, the chancellor has launched “working groups” to focus on the issue. For now, the task forces are in only five local school districts, with the mayor intending to expand them citywide by 2028.
Meanwhile, Mamdani has largely been quiet or backed away from the sweeping admissions changes that he championed before and on the campaign trail. As a state assemblyman, he called for changes to specialized high schools such as Stuyvesant High School, where only three Black students received offers this year, but has since pledged to keep using a single entrance exam. More recently, he said he supported phasing out gifted programs in kindergarten, but ten months into his term, he has made no such moves.
At the same time, the mayor has explained his selection of Samuels as chancellor was based in part on his record as a local superintendent in integrating schools within his geographic district.
Throughout the town hall, Samuels kept returning to that experience, leaning on the inroads he made in Brooklyn and Manhattan, particularly by merging under-enrolled schools in ways that diversified their student body. By the chancellor’s estimate, there are roughly 30,000 children in schools with low enrollment — and with it, fewer opportunities for advanced coursework and extracurricular activities.
The chancellor also cited pandemic-era reforms, when the realities of school closures forced the system to pause screened middle school admissions policies. Today, there are 80 public schools that consider the grades and essays of applicants, which can lead to less diverse classrooms. Before the pandemic, there were 196 such schools, including in several districts that opted not to reinstate screens.
“I thank you for … your past work furthering integration. You did that as superintendent, and you had to be limited by what the administration would support. But now you are the head of that system,” Hannah-Jones countered. “There is no buck to be passed now. You head the system.”
Students tell their own stories
Beyond the discussion between Samuels and Hannah-Jones, some of the most poignant stories came from students themselves, who described the stakes of unequal schools with varying degrees of access to opportunity.
“I feel like there’s so much beauty in all the different school communities that exist in New York, and all the differences,” said Camilla Spillman, a Manhattan high school senior. Her school, serving grades 6 through 12, has dropped selective admissions since she first applied to middle school, and its student body has become more diverse.
“But I also feel like what school you go to should not so sharply define, like, what opportunities you’ve access to, what you’re going to do, and where you end up going,” she added.
Katelyn Melville attended her zoned elementary school in Queens, but tested into a selective middle school. She estimated she went from seeing “dozens of students who looked like me every day” to 10 or fewer. When it came time to select a high school, she surmised she had to pick between academic rigor and a feeling that she belongs. She went with a predominantly Black and Hispanic school in Brooklyn.
“To this day, I’ve never even taken basic chemistry, because the turnover at my school was so high, we never had a teacher stay long enough to teach it. When it came time to list my extracurriculars and advanced courses on college applications, it hit me: I was entering a race that had begun far before I realized,” said Melville, now a college sophomore.
“I can’t say I made the wrong decision, but I can’t say I made the right one either,” Melville said. “However, what I can say is I shouldn’t have had to make that decision at all.”