Education makes up a third of New York City’s annual budget. That’s over 40 billion dollars in 2026, funding the public education of over 945,000 students. And this year, the system has a new Committee Chair: Eric Dinowitz, who represents the 11th district of New York City.
How can we curate a public school system that provides equal education access for every single student?
This is the question that New York City Council Member Eric Dinowitz has grappled with for decades. Through his time teaching special education classes in the Bronx, working as the Council Member for District 11, and now serving as the new Chair of the New York Education Committee, this issue has remained central to his focus. The experiences that he gained, from witnessing disproportionately strong academics in certain high schools, to hearing negotiations on how to manage the city-wide budget distribution, helped Dinowitz to develop a unique perspective of the New York City public school system. Now, Dinowitz steps into his new position as Chair of the Committee on Education with a few key focus areas: special education, school assessment reform, and merging small schools.
Dinowitz was invited to speak with journalism students at The Bronx High School of Science as part of the Journalism for All Initiative launched by the NYC Youth Journalism Coalition, a group working to promote equitable access to journalism in public schools. Although their work often focuses on creating and bolstering journalism programs in schools that lack the resources to do so alone, they also reach out to well-funded journalism programs by offering community events and special panels such as this one.
Bronx Science journalism students were able to have a conversation with Dinowitz, and see themselves reflected in parts of his story. Dinowitz grew up going to elementary and middle school in the Bronx, and attended The Bronx High School of Science himself as a high schooler, graduating from Bronx Science in 2003. He attended Binghamton University before returning to his borough of the Bronx to become a teacher through the New York City Teaching Fellows program. Becoming a City Council Member was a logical next step in his career, as Dinowitz began to feel constrained within the classroom by the legal and policy barriers that hinder meaningful system reform.
Dinowitz’s ideas, which grew from the connections that he made in various parts of the city, are now fully fledged pillars of his Committee Chair platform. The foremost issue he wants to address is how schools are assessed. “Assessments or evaluations are how a system looks at itself, and if you’re not measuring [students’ success], you’re not incentivized to invest in it,” Dinowitz said.
Recently, he explained, these yearly reports have been too focused on only a few core subjects, evaluating students’ raw academic performance in Math, Science, and English, without enough space for other creative subjects. Dinowitz recounted, “I have seen schools cut art programs. Maybe they have to cut journalism programs. Maybe they cut the debate team, or just don’t invest in them, because they know they’re judged on a handful of assessments like ELA Regents and Math Regents. If I’m looking to change one thing, it would be how we measure the success of students.” In these unfortunate cases, administrations force teachers who once instilled a unique passion for learning into students to divert their energy towards raising scores through narrow curriculums, inspiring less student engagement.
Dinowitz argues for a more holistic approach to measuring success, both for students and for schools. This comes with phasing out Regents exams, the New York State standardized tests, which have been a graduation requirement for public high schools since 1878. Dinowitz has also highlighted programs such as art, music, and journalism to be included as factors in assessing schools’ overall efficacy.
Another key pillar of the new Education Committee platform is prioritizing the experience of students with disabilities, IEPs, and learning barriers of all kinds. Dinowitz used an anecdote to explain his goal: “There’s a ramp and a staircase, and it’s a snowy day, and someone is shoveling the staircase, and a kid in a wheelchair says, ‘Just shovel off the ramp!’ Everyone can use a ramp, and then you can shovel off the staircase afterwards. This idea of ramps is this universal construct that everyone can utilize. That’s how our education needs to approach kids with disabilities.”
What does this “universal ramp” look like in practice? Dinowitz indicated a few ways in which teachers and school administration could create it, one of which is a ground-up curriculum designed with visual, audio, and literary aspects, in order to address a variety of students’ learning styles. Another is attempting to integrate students with special needs into general education classrooms and programs, instead of stigmatizing or underestimating the abilities of those students.
On a larger, policy-making scale, prioritizing special education has become more difficult in recent years, due to a decades-old Supreme Court ruling. The case validated a process through which parents of students who have disabilities can seek private school education funded by the city, if the city cannot provide proper accommodation to their children. In 2022, Carter Cases cost New York City $918 million, and that number has grown each year. Unfortunately, balancing this budget is like balancing on a tightrope: improving public schools’ special needs programs is the goal, but doing so requires diverting money from this private school fund for the very same population of students.
The final focus point of Dinowitz’s platform is a shift away from compartmentalized small schools towards larger, merged campuses. Under former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, schools with upwards of a thousand students were broken into smaller schools in the interest of more individualized education. Instead of achieving that goal, however, the past decade has proven this measure to have done the opposite, limiting opportunities for specialization on many campuses.
Dinowitz used the logic of scale economies to explain why the initiative failed. “If you have 3,000 kids, and even if a small percentage of those kids want an Advanced Placement class or need a special education class or anything in between, you could fill it. But if that same percentage in a school of 300 kids wants an elective, they can’t fill the course.” This, along with a drop in enrollment in recent years, is why he proposes to re-unify schools which, not long ago, existed as one school with populations in the thousands.
Today, educational reform issues are rarely centered in high-profile political debates. At the forefront of city politics, instead, are questions of housing, transportation, and immigration. Still, federal politics and the hot-button issues of the day have bled into every aspect of public service work. Dinowitz explained how the Trump administration’s rhetoric has undone some of his own hard work towards equal education. “The language that our president has allowed to flourish says ‘it is okay to demean other people from a position of authority.’ That is what he said is okay. And it is felt by people who now think it’s okay to use the r-word, which we recently removed from the city charter’s description of the services for people with intellectual disabilities.”
This kind of normalization of violence extends beyond rhetorical norm-setting to physical fearmongering. ICE agents in New York City have arrested and detained multiple high-school students as part of the administration’s crusade against undocumented immigrants. It is now the unfortunate job of teachers to educate students not only in math and English but in their constitutional rights and toolkit in the event of an arrest. Dinowitz described going door-to-door in high-foreign-born population neighborhoods during the early months of Trump’s second term handing out “Know Your Rights” cards, and being turned away or shunned by immigrant families with deeply-rooted distrust of government institutions.
At the end of his visit with the journalism students at Bronx Science, Dinowitz addressed the room of aspiring future journalists, asking, “What are your suggestions regarding education reform, and what works or doesn’t work at Bronx Science?” Although the answers varied from shy, small-scale ideas to wild, unimplementable fantasies, our Council Member heard and gave space to each of them. This is the spirit behind the new Education Committee’s agenda: to center the real experiences of New York City students in policy decisions, building the best possible system for all of us.
The experiences that Eric Dinowitz gained, from witnessing disproportionately strong academics in certain high schools, to hearing negotiations on how to manage the city-wide budget distribution, helped him to develop a unique perspective of the New York City public school system. Now, Dinowitz steps into his new position as Chair of the Committee on Education with a few key focus areas: special education, school assessment reform, and merging small schools.