Health care push (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
The pandemic has been raging throughout New York for nearly a year, killing tens of thousands of our neighbors and dramatically altering every New Yorker’s life. None of us have been untouched by this deadly virus.
Throughout this year, the critical need for access to health care has become more clear than ever. So too have the gaping inequities across our state. And, while Governor Cuomo has claimed to make confronting the pandemic his number one priority, he has cut Medicaid and other vital health services. This includes reducing or eliminating certain public health programs, specifically, reducing the reimbursement rate for general public health work to 10% in the fiscal year 2022 budget. In the current year’s budget (fiscal 2021), this matching funding for New York City was cut from 36% to 20%, which resulted in a cut of $65 million to vital public programs and services in the city. These services include family health, communicable disease control, chronic disease prevention, community health assessment, emergency preparedness, and environmental health.
Furthermore, there continues to be a Medicaid global cap that imposes automatic cuts when Medicaid spending hits a predetermined threshold. Last year, Medicaid had across-the-board cuts of 1.5%, and this year New York plans to again implement cuts of 1%.
Under Cuomo’s leadership, the state has not taken the needed measures to make affordable, high-quality health care coverage available to every New Yorker, regardless of immigration status. It’s time the State Legislature takes action to change that.
Lourdes Narvaez is a 24-year-old immigrant from Ecuador. Early in the pandemic, like many other thousands of community members in Jackson Heights, Queens, Lourdes contracted COVID-19. At the time, she did not dare go to a hospital or a clinic to receive medical attention for fear of a more severe contagion. Even if she had wanted to, the hospitals were overcapacity. And, as someone who doesn’t qualify for health insurance because of her immigration status, she didn’t have a doctor to call to discuss her health or how to treat the coronavirus. She was very afraid of the virus, but she was also afraid of seeking care and later being burdened with medical debt.
Lourdes is one of 1.1 million New Yorkers who do not have health insurance, and one of 240,000 low-income people with income below 200% of the federal poverty level who specifically lack insurance because of their immigration status. New York can and must take action to ensure that every New Yorker, regardless of immigration status or anything else, has access to health insurance and the coverage we need.
Members of both the New York State Assembly and Senate have gathered for a health-focused hearing and the solutions are clear.
First, the New York Health Act (NYHA) would ensure comprehensive coverage for every New Yorker. All New Yorkers, regardless of immigration status, would be covered for primary, preventive, and specialty care; hospitalizations; mental health; reproductive health; dental, vision; and more. They would also be able to choose their medical providers, instead of being restricted by insurance companies. The NYHA would pay for all covered services, ensuring individuals can access care without unaffordable copays, deductibles, or premiums.
As we proceed toward passing the New York Health Act, New York should also take immediate action to ensure that immigrants like Lourdes have access to health care. We must in the upcoming budget due by April 1 allocate $13 million to create a temporary state-funded Essential Plan for all New Yorkers with income up to 200% of the federal poverty level, who have had COVID-19, and who are excluded from coverage because of their immigration status. New York should also dedicate a portion of new revenue to make all low-income undocumented New Yorkers eligible for a state-funded Essential Plan.
Unfortunately, instead of exploring the big, bold solutions that we need to meet the scale of this crisis, Governor Cuomo has time and again resorted to budget cuts that tear at the safety net — by cutting Medicaid, withholding payments from municipalities and community-based providers, and more. At this point, the administration has also confirmed that it knowingly withheld information on nursing home deaths, while several health department officials have left.
And in the face of loud calls across the state to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers to prevent cuts to care and instead of focusing on meeting the scale of communities’ needs, the governor has spread lies: low-balling the amount that could be raised through progressive taxation, and fear-mongering that billionaires will leave.
It’s time to stop trying to protect the rich and powerful, and instead orient New York to meet the needs of low-income and working-class New Yorkers, particularly those of color. Passing the New York Health Act — and, in the interim, creating a state-funded Essential Plan for all New Yorkers earning up to 200% of the federal poverty level — is the best way to demonstrate that commitment.
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Jessica González-Rojas is the State Assembly Member representing New York’s 34th District in Queens. Theo Oshiro is the Deputy Director, and incoming Co-Executive Director, of Make the Road New York. On Twitter: @votejgr & @TheoOshiro.
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Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
In July 2018, a few months after New York City welcomed a new schools chancellor, The Atlantic asked, “Can Richard Carranza Integrate the Most Segregated School System in the Country?”
Now we have our answer. On Friday, Carranza announced his resignation, attributing it to the emotional toll the pandemic had taken on him. But many observers believe — and The New York Times reported — that Carranza decided to leave at least partly because it had become clear that Mayor de Blasio did not share his commitment to ending segregation in the nation’s largest school system.
So with 10 months left in office, de Blasio, who ran for mayor decrying New York’s “tale of two cities,” leaves New York public schools with two systems, divided by race, class, and resources. The question is whether the battles of the last seven years — and Carranza’s tenure — will lay the groundwork for the next mayor to end that split.
Integration advocates say Carranza’s three years have not been devoid of accomplishment. They cite his overseeing integration plans in Manhattan’’s District 3 and Brooklyn’s District 15, laying the groundwork for similar efforts in other districts, instituting an at least temporary end to screened admission to middle schools, and launching an ambitious program of anti-bias training for teachers.
Above all they commend the outgoing chancellor’s unabashed advocacy for integration.
Zakiyah Ansari, advocacy director of the Alliance for Quality Education, praised Carranza as a strong leader “who’s very clear on what his agenda is and…who didn’t have any problem speaking out when white parents came after him” and when the New York Post went after him. “He has never backed down,” she said.
“Carranza used the bully pulpit to elevate the issue in a way no previous chancellor had,” Richard Kahlenberg, director of K–12 equity at the Century Foundation and a member of the executive committee for the mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group, said by email.
But the last three years brought resistance from a supposedly progressive mayor who lacked either the conviction or the backbone to fight for true equity. “No chancellor has ever highlighted racial justice the way that Chancellor Carranza did. The big disappointment was he was dealing with an obstructionist mayor,” said Matt Gonzales, director of the Integration and Innovation Initiative at NYU Metro Center.
The angry town hall meetings and the attacks on Carranza in The Post and elsewhere also highlighted once again how strong the resistance to equity can be and made clear that many white and Asian parents believe the system, unfair though it may be, is good for their children and should remain.
“Those citizens with the most political power in the city are often defenders of the status quo, because they perceive the status quo to directly benefit their children. For many people, the practical considerations outweigh the philosophical agreement with school diversity,” Stefan Lallinger, a fellow at the Century Foundation, wrote by email last year.
School integration never appeared at the top of de Blasio’s agenda. He boasts of being a public-school parent but both his children went to academically selective elite public schools for middle school and high school (as did mine). In an early stint on a local school board in Brooklyn, de Blasio helped devise a choice system for middle schools that hardened racial and economic divisions in the area’s middle schools — a program that, owing to community action, has since been dismantled.
Tellingly his campaign rhetoric on divides in the city did not focus on K-12 education. But school integration became a kind of elephant in the room when, a few months after de Blasio’s inauguration, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA released a report finding that New York State had the most segregated schools in the country, owing largely to educational segregation in New York City, and that the system was becoming increasingly divided.
Students began speaking out loudly and eloquently about the effect segregated schools had on their education and organizing around the issue. Some politicians echoed their calls, and the City Council passed a few measures aimed at the problem while a few members made the issue a priority.
There was “a hope, if not an expectation” that de Blasio and his first schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, would take on segregation, recalls David Bloomfield, a professor of education law at City University. But he says, “The best Carmen could come up with” was a suggestion that students have pen pals of different backgrounds and de Blasio would not even say “segregation.” Instead the mayor focused on universal pre-K and 3K, along with expanding access to advanced placement and computer sciences courses — all of which, de Blasio said, would expand opportunity for all children.
Then, in 2018, after his first choice for next schools chancellor suddenly bailed out, de Blasio appointed Carranza, the Houston school superintendent and a grandchild of Mexican immigrants. Carranza was quick to call out city schools for being deeply divided and zeroed in on schools that use grades, test scores, and other measures to admit some children — and not others — as a key driver of that segregation. “Why are we screening kids in a public-school system? That is, to me, antithetical to what I think we all want for our kids,” he said.
The move to get rid of screens was a constant of the next three years but repeatedly fell far short of Carranza’s goal.
The first round involved the test that serves as the sole basis for admission to the city’s eight academically elite Specialized High Schools. By the time Carranza arrived, de Blasio was already planning to call for junking the test in favor of a system where top students from every city middle school would be chosen. Because of a state law passed in 1971, the change required state approval — at least for the three largest and most prestigious of the schools.
It immediately ran into a buzz saw, particularly in the Asian community where many families see a high score on the admissions test as a ticket to success. De Blasio had not consulted with Asian leaders and parents beforehand, fueling sentiment that his policy was targeting Asians. Carranza reinforced that when he said, “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.”
Few if any prominent politicians backed the mayor’s specialized high school admissions plan. By September 2019, de Blasio was acknowledging he had failed and that he might be open to keeping the test after all.
Lallinger of the Century Foundation said the problem with the proposal was not its substance. “The failure to enact it was entirely a political failure. There was no meaningful stakeholder engagement before it was announced, and no opportunities to tweak it to address the concerns of some constituencies before it was presented as an alternative to the status quo,” he wrote in an email last summer. The retreat on specialized schools was the first of many.
In 2019, the School Diversity Advisory Group, which the mayor named in 2017 in response to significant pressure to desegregate the city’s schools, released two sets of integration proposals. The first report, issued in February, had 67 recommendations, such as setting goals for diversity and devising a more culturally responsive curriculum. The administration embraced 62 of them.
The group’s far more sweeping report landed that summer. It looked at the system of choosing students for coveted schools and essentially called for blowing it up. Middle schools, it said, should no longer use admissions criteria such as grades, attendance, and standardized test scores. High schools should abandon lateness, attendance, and geography as criteria for admitting students and instead adopt admissions policies that would create diversity.
Perhaps most controversially the report called for a complete rethinking of the elementary school gifted and talented program, including elimination of the test that determines which children will gain the coveted seats.
The reaction was harsh and immediate. Critics charged that the proposals, if accepted, would spark middle class flight from the city. National figures weighed in with Fox television host Tucker Carlson accusing Carranza of “leading the charge” to sow “racial division in America’s largest city.”
Few New Yorkers who have seen de Blasio’s handling of tough issues, such as police reform, were surprised at what happened next. The mayor — who was running for president at the time — barely acknowledged the recommendations, didn’t meet with the group that he had appointed, and downplayed the importance of integrating schools. “All the theory about how we create a utopian world, you know how we get everything to be perfectly balanced at all, that’s not what parents are talking to me about,” he said at a press conference that September. He pledged a review of the group’s recommendations, but there’s no evidence that happened. De Blasio’s February 2020 State of the City speech did not mention school integration.
The genie, though, would not go back in the bottle.
Angry over calls to eliminate tests as an admissions criteria, a proposed integration plan in Queens, and a community school board member in Brooklyn who referred to Asians as “yellow,” activists, many of them Asian, vented their ire at Carranza. They demonstrated at his town halls, holding signs demanding he be fired, and charged that they had been barred from a March meeting at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School. De Blasio defended Carranza against charges of racism but remained largely silent on the issues.
“De Blasio allowed the equity agenda to be demonized” and be tied to Carranza, said Gonzales, who served on the School Diversity Advisory Group. “He was a brown man who spoke about racial justice and that’s what happens.”
For his part, Carranza, in announcing his resignation, seemed to acknowledge he could have done better at reaching out to various groups in the city.
On the other side, frustrated that sweeping change seemed stalled, students staged walkouts at individual schools during the first half of the school year and planned to up the ante with a citywide school walkout.
Then the pandemic hit. The shift to remote learning threw the screening metrics into disarray, as state standardized tests used for high school and middle school admissions were canceled, and the city scrapped traditional grades for grades K-8. The specialized high school test and elementary school gifted test seemed in jeopardy as some educators and politicians questioned the validity of tests when so many students’ lives were disrupted. They expressed concern about the safety of in-person testing and grumbled about spending money on them at a time when the city faced massive budget cuts.
Carranza clearly hoped to seize the moment. In April, he told the Association of Latino Superintendents and Supervisors he was “not allowing” people to talk about returning to normal because that normal was rife with inequities. “We see this as an opportunity to finally push and move and be very strategic in a very aggressive way what we know is the equity agenda for our kids,” Carranza said. “Never waste a crisis.”
Soon after came another crisis: George Floyd’s killing by police in Minneapolis. The ensuing focus on racial injustice in America reinforced arguments that screened schools were inherently unfair and even racist. Teens Take Charge stepped up its assault on screens and released city data showing that some selective high schools with large numbers of Black and Latino applicants tended to admit more of their White and Asian applicants than their Black and Latino ones.
To the frustration of many parents, the administration repeatedly delayed deciding how it would handle admissions for next school year. But when it finally began announcing its admission policies in December, some screens, including controversial ones, remained.
At least for this year, middle schools cannot use criteria such as grades and attendance to select students but will choose them by lottery. High schools can no longer give preference to students from their Community School District, ending the policy that made schools in Manhattan’s affluent District 2 disproportionately white and privileged. High schools can, however, continue to choose students using test scores, interviews, and portfolios, and many of them are doing that.
Some critics worry the confusion about new criteria and some of the changes could make the system even more unfair.
“We are frustrated that the DOE has missed an opportunity for truly transformative change by failing to remove all academic screening for high schools, even as a temporary measure. The lack of valid metrics during the pandemic, when already-existing inequities were magnified, highlights the baselessness of screening policies in general,” Parents for Responsible, Equitable, Safe Schools said in a statement.
The city also decided to keep the Specialized High School test, citing the state law.
The biggest furor came over the gifted and talented test, which had been given one-on-one by proctors to children who would enter kindergarten through third grade the following September. Many consider this the most egregious of New York’s screens, a belief bolstered by the fact that no other school system selects children for gifted programs this way. Experts argue that testing children as young as four — before most have had many influences beyond their family — tells you more about the child’s home than the child. In New York, it tells you about race: three quarters of kindergarteners in the city’s gifted programs in 2017-18 were white or Asian, even though white and Asian students accounted for only about a third of city kindergarten students.
Success on the test puts students on track for future academic success. Children in the gifted program are likely to land in a selective middle school, which is then a path to passing the Specialized High School test.
The normally toothless Panel for Educational Policy barred the city from issuing a contract for the gifted and talented test this year, but de Blasio remained adamant about finding a way to screen children. The administration decreed that, to qualify for the program, little children would have to get recommendations from their preschool programs or be interviewed.
Even supporters of screened programs balked, the absurdity of the plan seemingly evident to everyone but the mayor, who also said he would be offering a longer-term reform plan for gifted and talented later this calendar year.
“They’ve chosen the system that has been proven to be the least effective for identifying gifted students who are of color, or low-income, or English learners…Subjective evaluations have always benefited the wealthy and middle class,” Alina Adams, an education writer and school choice advocate, told the Post.
M. Rene Islas, former executive director of the National Association for Gifted Children, which advocates for gifted programs, said he was unaware of any evidence that young children could be identified as gifted in a remote interview and that allowing evaluators to Zoom into children’s homes could introduce a whole new set of biases. “I’m really worried about that,” he said, according to Chalkbeat. “I don’t think that’s going to help with equity.”
Although Carranza and de Blasio have downplayed policy differences, the mayor’s stubborn endorsement of the gifted and talented admissions was probably too much for the chancellor. The Times reported that Carranza had drafted a resignation letter after a heated conversation with de Blasio over the future of gifted and talented classes.
There are many possible reasons as to why Carranza resigned. “Maybe we should just take him at his word that he was simply exhausted and vulnerable,” Bloomfield said. With the de Blasio administration going into its final months many officials are leaving — in fact a number at the education department already have. Others look to the atmosphere in the mayor’s office and what many see as his propensity for micro-managing.
With Carranza out the door, de Blasio’s legacy on school integration will remain one of weakness, at best, and opposition at worst. He will be seen as someone who either did not believe in equity or was too timid to take on the powerful forces supporting the status quo.
When de Blasio was elected, advocates had “thought we had someone who would be a champion,” Ansari said. Instead the mayor did not back Carranza up when he was under attack and flouted the wishes of the Panel for Educational Policy when it blocked the gifted and talented test. “The mayor’s not all in on democracy, let alone equity,” she said.
Nyah Berg of New York Appleseed, which advocates for school integration, also blames de Blasio for stalling the drive for a more equitable school system. “So much could have been done and done sooner if it were not for the lame duck de Blasio administration obstructing progress for integration at every turn. It will be hard to judge Carranza’s leadership as he was never allowed to truly lead and was micromanaged by a mayor who has shown no moral courage, leadership or intent to uphold his promise in addressing his ‘Tale of Two Cities,’” she said by email.
In resigning Carranza said that, while “it’s never been my style to look at the coulda shoulda woulda,” he would have done more to engage with communities. Gonzales hopes that incoming chancellor Meisha Ross Porter’s long experience in New York City schools and status as a lifelong New Yorker will help her do that and “move things forward” during the next ten months — or beyond if the next mayor lets her stay on.
As Porter works to fully reopen the city’s schools, integration advocates will be looking to shape the debate about education in the mayoral campaign and elect someone who will take on what de Blasio didn’t.
They will also be examining the structure of mayoral control of city schools. Ansari said that issue has been “simmering” for a while but that the chancellor's resignation was “an aha moment for me”: “We could have had big change,” she said, but the mayor blocked it.
While mayoral candidates have been asked to give a thumbs up or thumbs down on mayoral control, Gonzales said the discussion must go beyond that to creating “a vision for actual democratic governance of schools in New York City.”
Whoever becomes mayor in January, the debate about how — and maybe even whether — to achieve equity in city schools will continue. Along with coming back from the pandemic, “the number one education issue” for whoever takes office in January 2022 will be “to fulfil the promise that de Blasio broke and that’s mainly increasing diversity and desegregating schools,” Bloomfield said.
Kahlenberg agrees: “The next mayor will not be able to ignore segregation, as so many had in the past. Richard Carranza is a big reason for that.”
The question though is what, if anything, will the next mayor want to do about it? And will he or she — and their schools chancellor — succeed?
As the last years have shown, it will not be easy.
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Gail Robinson is a former editor of Gotham Gazette who writes on education and other policy issues and teaches at Baruch College. On Twitter @GailNRobinson.
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Housing underway (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
We as a city spend $3 billion annually on shelters -- including renting hotel rooms -- that fail to provide the services New Yorkers experiencing homelessness need.
These band-aid solutions don’t work. They’ve never worked. Before COVID-19, more than half of New Yorkers were paying more than 30% of their income on rent, and more than 140 New York City schools had a homeless student population of over 20%. Almost 1 in every 100 New Yorkers experienced homelessness in 2019. Despite big promises, Mayor Bill de Blasio has overseen a 23% increase in homelessness during his tenure, even as homelessness declined nationally. While the mayor’s approach expanded access to dormitory-style shelters, it didn’t come close to adequately addressing the root causes of homelessness: a citywide lack of stable, affordable housing and access to “wraparound” social services and healthcare.
The homelessness crisis has only become more potentially dire due to pandemic-related job losses, particularly among lower-income households, causing more families to fall behind on rent and putting nearly 150,000 New York City households at risk of eviction. While the state eviction moratorium and federal stimulus checks have so far prevented the worst, many of the most vulnerable New Yorkers still fall through the cracks.
With so many of our neighbors at risk of losing their homes, we need a mayor who will treat homelessness like the crisis it is. It’s time for bold, transformative solutions on housing and homelessness — it’s time to move from a shelter strategy to a housing strategy. It’s time for housing that heals.
I’m a dedicated public servant who knows how to manage a crisis. But unlike this mayor, I’m not content to just manage homelessness – I pledge to end it.
It starts with smarter leadership. Right now, 19 city agencies are “responsible” for tackling homelessness, which means nobody is in charge. When I’m mayor, for the first time homeless services, housing, and economic development will all report to the same deputy mayor, who will be held accountable for treating housing issues with one comprehensive approach.
We’ll also put more resources towards prevention, focusing on the top risk factors: job loss and health crisis. New York’s CityFHEPS rental assistance program provides temporary vouchers to at-risk households, but the voucher amounts are often too low to rent an apartment. Fully funding CityFHEPS means less homelessness in the first place.
Shift from a shelter strategy to a housing strategy also means instead of paying to rent hotel rooms we purchase suitable empty commercial spaces and convert them into 10,000 permanent supportive housing units. California’s Project Homekey used federal coronavirus relief funds to acquire 6,000 vacant hotel rooms in a matter of months, and New York City should act with similar urgency.
You get what you measure. Rather than fixating on units, we will focus on reducing the number of people who are sleeping on the street, who are rent burdened, and who are in shelters. We’ll open new drop-in centers with bathrooms and critical services, creating more opportunity for social workers to build trust and a pathway to permanent housing, and proactively engage with individuals leaving the correctional system.
Finally, we’ll address homelessness at its roots by fixing our broken housing market. Despite red-hot demand, New York builds less housing per-capita than almost any major city in America. We’ve only added housing in a few neighborhoods where zoning has encouraged it, and we’ve even lost housing stock in areas including the Upper East Side, Sunset Park, and Bayside. It’s no wonder that only 4% of New York’s essential workers can afford an apartment that fits their budget. Our housing market has become a sick game of musical chairs, leaving more and more New Yorkers without a place to call home.
My administration will fund 50,000 new affordable homes for New Yorkers making under 50% of the Area Median Income (AMI), finally targeting the city’s affordable housing plan to the greatest need. We’ll plan for citywide affordable housing growth, especially in high-resource neighborhoods with good access to jobs, transit, schools, and parks. We’ll update the zoning code and streamline the byzantine permitting process, which makes it all too easy for housing opponents to block affordable housing. And we’ll implement common-sense reforms like legalizing basement units, backyard units, and small apartment buildings citywide.
We won’t be the first city to use this approach to deliver results. In 2011, Houston, suffering from record-high homelessness, adopted The Way Home, which identified homeless residents and matched them to housing within 30 days. Houston redirected funding into building permanent supportive housing and improved coordination among service providers, nonprofits, and government. Houston’s housing supply also grew quickly, holding rents flat. Six years later, homelessness had fallen 60%, and military veteran homelessness was effectively ended. This playbook works — we just have to follow it.
It’s one thing to say that housing is a human right. It’s another thing to execute on it. With COVID-19 still putting too many New Yorkers’ housing in jeopardy, our next mayor needs to embrace proven solutions and prioritize ending homelessness. New Yorkers have had enough of excuses — it’s time for experience.
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Kathryn Garcia is a Democratic candidate for mayor of New York. On Twitter @KGforNYC.
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