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New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones grilled schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels at a town hall Tuesday evening, pressing him for more than 40 minutes to articulate his plans for integrating New York City’s public schools.
The highly anticipated event represented a rare public cross-examination of the leader of the nation’s largest school system. Hannah-Jones recently published a widely-debated essay about the decision to send her daughter to segregated schools, which turned out to inadequately educate her child.
“While they said it’s a conversation, it’s really about to be an interrogation,” Hannah-Jones said during the event at the Washington Irving campus in Manhattan hosted by the pro-integration advocacy group New York Appleseed and The Bell, a student journalism incubator.
After Hannah-Jones repeatedly asked the chancellor about a systemwide plan, Samuels did not commit to any specific integration policies, nor did he offer a timeline for offering a more detailed plan, repeatedly drawing jeers from an auditorium packed with several hundred attendees.
Here are five takeaways from the event:
Don’t expect top-down integration plans.
Samuels repeatedly identified one obstacle to developing more aggressive integration efforts: community opposition. It was a striking acknowledgement that anticipated pushback is influencing the administration’s thinking.
“If you don’t have the conversation well, you will see a level of pushback that will essentially start to end the conversation,” Samuels said. Any efforts to integrate schools would have to first win support from local communities, he said. (Prior chancellors have made similar arguments.)
Samuels noted that the Education Department has convened working groups in five of the city’s 32 local districts to address a wide range of issues, including school integration. City officials have not said who is serving on them or even if they will produce formal recommendations.
It’s unclear whether the administration is actually working on integration.
Samuels’ comments that integration efforts must first win support of local communities is in tension with recent remarks from Mayor Zohran Mamdani who recently said that developing a desegregation plan is “one of our urgent priorities.”
Yet the schools chief repeatedly deferred to the working groups. “I am not saying that we will not address segregation in our schools,” Samuels said. “We are disagreeing in some ways on how that will be addressed.”
Hannah-Jones shot back that the lack of specifics and deference to working groups are a stalling tactic.
“Ten months in, when a timeline can’t be offered, you can understand why people feel like that means you are just delaying,” she said.
Samuels praised the reduction of middle school screens. But he wavered on going further.
New York City is unusual in the number of schools that admit students based on their prior academic performance, a process known as screening. Many integration advocates, including Hannah-Jones, have blamed the admissions method for exacerbating segregation.
Hannah-Jones repeatedly asked Samuels whether he would consider reducing screens, a policy measure proposed by an earlier School Diversity Advisory Group. She pointed out that the city has more screened schools than elsewhere.
The chancellor noted that fewer middle schools screen students than before the pandemic — a move he supported as a local superintendent — but he also seemed to be skeptical that ending selective admissions across the board would make a big dent.
“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 said.
New York City is planning to first tackle small schools and integrate students with disabilities.
When asked about his integration plans, Samuels pointed to the need to first tackle the growing problem of schools with shrinking enrollment — which tend to disproportionately serve Black and Latino students and the most vulnerable students.
He said he wanted to “make sure that we are really looking directly at how we can make structural shifts to those schools.” About 30,000 students attend these “highly segregated” underenrolled schools with fewer than 200 students, he said.
They offer “fewer advanced courses, fewer extracurriculars, fewer opportunities,” Samuels said. “These are also often the same schools that have students in temporary housing, students living in poverty, students learning English for the first time, and students with disabilities.”
As a Chalkbeat analysis found, 33 high schools now have fewer than 150 students, and 113 have fewer than 250, an eightfold increase from 25 years ago.
Samuels said that the city also needed to expand efforts to integrate students with disabilities, citing the city’s recent expansion of high-demand programs serving students with autism and other disabilities into prekindergarten classrooms for the first time.
The reviews of Samuels from some quarters were harsh.
Some observers expressed disappointment that Samuels failed to outline a clearer vision for the city’s schools — which neither he nor Mamdani has yet articulated.
“Despite the truly heartbreaking reality that the kids themselves know exactly how they are being shortchanged, there doesn’t seem to be any plan for them,” said Johanna Bjorken, the parent of a senior at Urban Assembly Maker Academy.
Another observer was more blunt on X: “Nikole Hannah-Jones absolutely kicking Kamar Samuels’ ass right now.”
Chalkbeat New York reporter Michael Elsen-Rooney contributed.
Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.
Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.