It's Thursday. Today we'll meet David Banks, who has been chosen to be schools chancellor by the next mayor, Eric Adams, according to several people with knowledge of the matter. We'll also look at ethics rulings that the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, fought to keep secret. |
 | | Phil Mansfield for The New York Times |
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Adams is scheduled to make the announcement today at Public School 161, the elementary school that Banks attended as a child, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. |
Banks, who is 59 and has had his eye on the chancellor's job for years, is a former teacher and principal who created a network of all-boys schools, the Eagle Academy for Young Men. It is considered by many to be a bright spot in the city's halting efforts to make the system fairer for Black and Latino students, who have long been relegated to segregated, low-performing schools. |
As chancellor, Banks will inherit a school system laboring to move past the disruptions of the pandemic. He told my colleague Eliza Shapiro that his first priorities would include expanding early childhood education options for the city's youngest children; improving career pathways for older students; and combating students' trauma. He will also have to decide whether to admit students into gifted and talented classes, which Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in October that he was phasing out. |
"I want to help transform the lives of so many of our children, but particularly Black and brown children who have struggled the most in this system," Mr. Banks said in a recent interview with The New York Times. "They need people to be bold on their behalf." He added that without sweeping changes, "you're just going to play around in the margins." |
It is not yet clear how Banks's success in building the Eagle network will translate to a system with 1,600 schools, many of which lack the leadership and fund-raising aptitude that Eagle has demonstrated. But Banks is familiar with the city's labyrinthine educational bureaucracy, which could stifle a newcomer. He has also close ties not only with elected officials but also with business and philanthropic leaders, some of whom he has enlisted to mentor Eagle students. |
And, perhaps most important, he will have room to maneuver. While Mayor Bill de Blasio was known to micromanage his commissioners, Adams has signaled that his top advisers will have more leeway. |
Banks has already begun to fill top jobs in the Education Department. Daniel Weisberg, who was the lead labor strategist for schools when Michael Bloomberg was mayor and now runs an organization focused on teacher training and quality, will serve as Banks's first deputy. Banks has also recruited Kenita Lloyd, the chief operating officer of the Eagle Academy Foundation, to be deputy chancellor for family engagement. |
Temps are in the low 40s as clouds increase throughout the day. The evening is mostly cloudy with temps dropping to the mid-30s. |
In effect until Dec. 24 (Christmas Eve). |
Ethics rulings de Blasio fought to keep secret |
 | | Eric Thayer for The New York Times |
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As Mayor Bill de Blasio nears the end of his years in City Hall and lays the groundwork for a possible campaign for governor, questions about his fund-raising could arise. |
In 2014, he called two real estate developers who had projects underway in the city and asked them to donate to a nonprofit organization he had set up. |
The request to help his nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, seemed to violate the city's ethics law as well as a ban against asking for contributions from people who had business pending with the city. Within months, de Blasio was formally warned by the city's Conflicts of Interest Board, in a previously undisclosed letter, against making such requests. |
But the mayor continued to contact potential donors, according to documents that the city has now released. |
The new details of de Blasio's outreach to donors were contained in a pair of secret letters that the city's Conflicts of Interest Board sent the mayor. The first letter, dated July 2014, said the mayor had violated ethics laws with the two find-raising calls to developers. The second letter, in September 2018, found that de Blasio had continued the practice and reprimanded him. |
"By soliciting these three donations from firms with business pending or about to be pending before executive agencies," the second letter said, referring to de Blasio's 2018 fund-raising efforts, "you not only disregarded the board's repeated written advice, but created the very appearance of coercion and improper access to you and your staff that the board's advice sought to help you avoid." |
The letters were released this week, after the state Court of Appeals denied the latest move by the mayor's office, which had opposed The Times's efforts to obtain them, first by rejecting a Freedom of Information request and then by fighting a lawsuit filed by The Times. The Campaign for One New York was shut down in 2016 after raising more than $4 million. |
Mar-a-Lago's human resources director corroborated testimony about an outspoken Epstein accuser |
 | | Laura Cavanaugh/Getty Images |
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The jury in Ghislaine Maxwell's sex-trafficking trial heard from four prosecution witnesses on Wednesday. They served to bolster the testimony of the government's main witnesses, three women who said they were sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, with Maxwell's help. |
The first witness on Wednesday was Janine Gill, the human resources director at former President Donald J. Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. That is where Virginia Roberts — one of Epstein's most outspoken accusers, now called Virginia Giuffre — has said she first met Maxwell. |
Giuffre has not taken the stand. But a former Epstein employee told the jury last week that he and Maxwell had met her at Mar-a-Lago. Evidence introduced on Wednesday indicated that Giuffre's father had worked at the resort around the time of the encounter. |
I moved to the Upper West Side in January 2007 without knowing anyone in the city. I felt so alone. |
On my first Friday night, it was freezing out and I had nothing to do, so I killed time walking up and down Broadway, looking into the windows of shops and restaurants. |
Passing a pizza place, I stopped to look inside. A man and a woman, maybe in their 40s, were sitting down for one of those $1 slices that soak the paper plate through with grease. |
Once they were sitting, they lifted their slices without saying a word and cheers-ed them as if they were champagne glasses. |
I could tell by the way they did it that I was witnessing a tradition. They weren't alone like me. They had each other and a tradition, a shared experience they returned to again and again. |
At least that is what I imagined as I stared in from the cold, tears welling in my eyes. I was so sure then that I would never find someone to toast pizza with me. New York can be the most bustling and yet still lonely place. |
But it is also full of people to find. On a frigid night almost 15 years later, I grabbed some pizza with my husband. And when we sat down inside the tiny pizzeria, I made him cheers his slice with mine. |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
Melissa Guerrero, Rick Martinez and Olivia Parker contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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