Chancellor Banks must tell Congress that antisemitism is a huge problem in NYC public schools
City schools Chancellor David Banks will testify Wednesday at a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing on antisemitism; expect the back-and-forth to get pretty brutal.
In a column for The Post, Banks lays out what he wants to say, but he’ll surely also face questions on a host of public-school controversies in the months since Hamas’ horrific Oct. 7 attack on Israel:
- An apparent double standard, where the city Department of Education tolerates teachers who post antisemitic or anti-Israel hate on social media while a teacher whose posts included “let Gaza burn” got booted from his school.
- The Jewish global history teacher at Origins HS in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, who was serially victimized by vicious antisemitic teens — and then punished for speaking out. The school saw Jewish faculty and students taunted with “death to Israel” chants, swastikas drawn on classroom chalkboards and emails threatening: “All Jews need to be exterminated.”
- The Hillcrest HS riot involving hundreds of kids, targeting a Queens Jewish teacher after she posted a photo of herself holding an “I Stand With Israel” sign.
- A Qatar-funded Arab studies program whose classroom map of the “Arab World” renamed Israel as “Palestine” — in symbolic fulfillment of the Israel-haters odious “From the river to the sea.”
- A Brooklyn parent advisory board that promoted and organized a student walkout for Palestinians.
He’ll need to admit that antisemitism — not Islamophobia— is huge a problem in the city’s public schools, a system now under federal investigation over the issue.
Indeed, this mess is only one more sign that Banks exercises at best limited control of the vast bureaucracy he officially oversees. (The fact that he took office vowing to shrink that beast, but instead has seen it grow, is another hint.)
We fear his testimony is unlikely to come off looking much better than the disastrous performances from university presidents like Harvard’s now-ex-prez Claudine Gay.
