{"id":378541,"date":"2026-10-21T02:16:48","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T02:16:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/378541\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T02:16:48","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T02:16:48","slug":"nyc-schools-chancellor-kamar-samuels-grilled-by-nyts-nikole-hannah-jones-over-integration-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/378541\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels grilled by NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones over integration plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The Brooklyn-based civil rights writer recently published a follow-up essay<\/a> about her decision to put her daughter in a racially segregated school, outlining how her daughter was having a hard time keeping up in the high school of her choice as a result, and renewed calls for a citywide school integration plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe people who keep getting told they have to wait for the \u2018right time\u2019 are the people who need public schools the most,\u201d Hannah-Jones said at the Washington Irving Campus near Union Square in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to understand the discontent with this. It\u2019s 10 months in,\u201d she told Samuels. \u201cWhen a timeline can\u2019t be offered, you can understand why people will feel like that means you are just delaying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the contentious town hall, Hannah-Jones urged Samuels to eliminate selective or \u201cscreened\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Samuels, meanwhile, insisted their disagreement was not about the need to address the issue, but the \u201chow\u201d to do so. The chancellor has said truly integrated schools are one of the top three priorities of his tenure<\/a>, and he has started engaging local superintendents and parents in coming up with district-level plans.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to be able to have conversations with communities, rather than pronounce something from on high, for it to actually work and be sustainable,\u201d Samuels said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not as though you\u2019re going to remove screens, and it\u2019s going to suddenly have everybody going everywhere, and it\u2019s going to be great,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Hannah-Jones\u2019s Sept. 20 article wrestles with the consequences of the decision with her husband Faraji, who sits on the city\u2019s Panel for Educational Policy, to send their daughter, Najya, to predominantly Black, low-income elementary and middle schools.<\/p>\n

A decade after the first essay was published, Najya is now a teenager who disagrees with her parents\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

In an interview last month, Mayor Mamdani pledged to release a school integration plan, but there\u2019s been little public progress. So far, the chancellor has launched \u201cworking groups\u201d<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\"SchoolsSchools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, right, speaks at the Charles A. Dana Discovery Center in Manhattan on Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2025, after Mayor Zohran Mamdani, left, appointed him to the position. (Barry Williams\/ New York Daily News)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Mamdani has largely been quiet or backed away from the sweeping admissions changes<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Throughout the town hall, Samuels kept returning to that experience, leaning on the inroads he made in Brooklyn and Manhattan<\/a>, particularly by merging under-enrolled schools in ways that diversified their student body. By the chancellor\u2019s estimate, there are roughly 30,000 children in schools with low enrollment \u2014 and with it, fewer opportunities for advanced coursework and extracurricular activities.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thank you for \u2026 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,\u201d Hannah-Jones countered. \u201cThere is no buck to be passed now. You head the system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Students tell their own stories<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like there\u2019s so much beauty in all the different school communities that exist in New York, and all the differences,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I also feel like what school you go to should not so sharply define, like, what opportunities you\u2019ve access to, what you\u2019re going to do, and where you end up going,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

Katelyn Melville attended her zoned elementary school in Queens, but tested into a selective middle school. She estimated she went from seeing \u201cdozens of students who looked like me every day\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo this day, I\u2019ve 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,\u201d said Melville, now a college sophomore.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t say I made the wrong decision, but I can\u2019t say I made the right one either,\u201d Melville said. \u201cHowever, what I can say is I shouldn\u2019t have had to make that decision at all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York City Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels faced a public grilling by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378542,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[67,85,267,9,24,55,54,264,12,56],"class_list":["post-378541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-education","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-new-york-county","tag-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}