Serve every child: How the city’s Department of Education should respond to falling enrollment

The sprawling New York City Department of Education is sometimes treated as a single large bureaucracy. Sometimes it’s thought of as a network of schools. Most of all, it’s thousands of educators serving the children of millions of New Yorkers — which is why the enrollment and attendance statistics revealed in the Daily News this week are startling.

As our education reporter Cayla Bamberger explained, there are now 121,000 fewer kids enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade than before the COVID-19 earthquake and its aftershocks hit. And so far this school year, more than 30% of the roughly 900,000 students who remain have been chronically absent, a number that’s down from during the worst of the pandemic but up from before COVID hit.

When families vote with their feet to live elsewhere or learn elsewhere — or, in the worst-case scenario, not learn anywhere at all — they’re sending a signal that the schools aren’t properly serving their kids. That requires a robust response from the central DOE leadership headed by Schools Chancellor David Banks, one that recognizes that there’s no single, simple way to meet the needs of a diverse population across the five boroughs.

Fortunately, Banks has been working hard to build a more parent-friendly system with a panoply of options and high standards across the board.

Some students need special education services, which is why, especially after the pandemic disrupted so much face-to-face learning, schools need to swiftly approve Individualized Education Plans and then deliver the promised enhancements. Others need accelerated learning, which is why the expanded rollout of gifted-and-talented programs must continue. Others crave more stable art and music and extracurriculars.

Still others want alternatives other than the traditional public schools, which is why Albany must finally lift its arbitrary cap on the number of charter schools, which often offer more academic rigor, structure and discipline than district-run counterparts. Such a shift won’t help with the macro enrollment problem, but it will satisfy families. And that’s what this is ultimately all about, isn’t it?