New York
A Black Studies Curriculum Is (Defiantly) Rolling Out in New York City
Late last fall at the Hugo Newman School in Harlem, two social studies teachers handed out pages of hip-hop lyrics to their seventh graders, and then flicked off the lights. The students appeared surprised.
They had been studying ancient matriarchal societies, including Iroquois communities that had women leaders. Now, their teachers were about to play the song “Ladies First” by Queen Latifah and Monie Love. The teachers instructed their students to highlight any lyrics that reminded them of the Iroquois women, who were known as the Haudenosaunee Clan Mothers.
Although they did not know it, the middle schoolers were in the midst of their first lesson of “Black Studies as the Study of the World,” a curriculum that rolled out in September and is now available to every New York City public school.
Tristan Vanderhorst, 12, took notes and bobbed to the music. “I had never seen a woman rap like that,” he said afterward.
The curriculum, which spans from pre-K to 12th grade, covers early African civilizations, Black American history and the achievements and contributions of the African diaspora. The curriculum emphasizes what is known as “culturally relevant” teaching, an approach meant to help students connect their own lives with what they are learning. It has been used by dozens of schools across the city since the last school year, to little fanfare.
But the Trump administration has moved aggressively in its first weeks to ban programs related to diversity and equity across government, including in schools.
Local school districts have traditionally been insulated from interference from the federal government. New York’s curriculum — and similar efforts to bring discussions about race and history into schools — could test those lines, and how far the Trump administration might go to enforce its edicts.
Already, many K-12 educators, including the architects of New York City’s new Black studies curriculum, appear defiant.
“In New York, we are trying our best to be Trump-proof,” Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York City Council, said in a recent interview. “We are doing everything we can to protect the curriculum.”
In his second week in office, President Trump signed an executive order to withhold funding from schools that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.” The order bans what it called “discriminatory equity ideology,” which “treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.”
Whether New York’s curriculum — or other Black history efforts — violate those terms is open to interpretation.
That executive order, and others like it, enter an ongoing debate about how schools should handle race and ethnicity. Some states, like California, have embraced ethnic studies education, a discipline born on the left that connects the experiences of people of color throughout history. Others have sought to limit or ban it. Since 2021, more than 44 states have restricted how race is discussed in public schools.
Last week, the Trump administration issued guidance to schools detailing how it might pursue its orders. Officials might examine elementary school with programs that “shame students of a particular race or ethnicity” or that “accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy.” In its guidance, the administration also suggested it would look at schools that it argued “have sought to veil discriminatory policies with terms like ‘social-emotional learning’ or ‘culturally responsive’ teaching.”
Ms. Adams, who helped allocate $27 million to develop the Black studies lessons, has called New York’s curriculum a “model of fearlessness.” The curriculum offers students an “African-centered perspective that predates slavery” and is optional for schools.
But about 200 have adopted it, and in early February, nearly 2,000 students gathered at the Channel View School for Research in Rockaway, Queens, for a Black studies student fair connected with the curriculum.
Melissa Aviles-Ramos, the city’s schools chancellor, said the curriculum was essential in a diverse school district.
“When students connect with the material, they are more engaged, develop critical thinking skills and build a deeper sense of belonging,” she said in a statement. “I am proud to lead a school system that values inclusion and the powerful truth that our diversity is our strength.”
In the curriculum’s pre-K and elementary school lessons, students contemplate their identity through name study and ancestry exercises. In middle school, they are introduced to the concept of agency while studying local Black communities. They also learn about the Black media and the Black Panthers.
In high school, students explore Black liberation, slavery, disenfranchisement, policing and other hot-button political issues like reparations while reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations.”
Peta-Gaye McLean, one of the seventh grade social studies teachers who began a lesson with a hip-hop music video, said she appreciates the new material, even though she has been teaching about Black history for years.
“Not only does it legitimize it, it gives the teachers a responsibility,” she said.
Some of her students took personally the lesson comparing the roles of women in pre-colonial America and Africa. Tristan said his takeaways were “don’t take women for granted. Respect them highly.”
His classmate, Amelia Sierra, 12, said the class taught “all these good things about women and the ladies — how helpful they were and how important they were,” she said. “So I think that shows me how important I am.”
That is part of the goal. Some education experts say that making connections to students’ own lives and culture helps them master the material. One study found that students who take ethnic studies classes are more likely to graduate and go to college.
“The ability to really dig into problems that kids care about is one of the things that I think sets culturally relevant pedagogy apart,” Gloria Ladson-Billings, an education scholar who coined that term in the mid-1990s, said in an interview.
Not all educators agree with that approach. Ian Rowe, the founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in the Bronx that embraces the classics, urges students to “reject victimhood.” He said his school would never adopt the “Black Studies as the Study of the World” curriculum.
His students, who are predominantly Black and Latino, are still exposed to Black history, Mr. Rowe said. But, he added, “We’re going at it from the human condition, a universality. So we don’t want our kids to only see themselves through the prism of race only or gender only.”
Conservative and liberal educators may have more in common than they realize when it comes to teaching about Black history, said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
In both right- and left-leaning parts of the country, new standards and lessons related to African American history often emphasize teaching about the strengths of the Black community. He said that heated political rhetoric prevents both sides from appreciating some of their shared values.
“Instead of trying to find common ground on antiracism or inclusive history or ways in which we can broaden the canon,” he said, partisans “have instead found it more politically beneficial to plant an extremist flag.”
Alesha Smith, an English Language Arts teacher at Eagle Academy in Harlem, an all-boys school that is using the New York City curriculum, said she loved teaching about empowerment in difficult lessons about slavery, for example.
“The strengths of this curriculum are in identifying the strengths of the individuals and the flaws in the system,” she said.
Nevertheless, conservatives who have taken issue with ethnic studies might make similar criticisms of New York’s curriculum, which was informed by some of the issues the Trump orders condemn, like “equity.” It also does not discuss many Black conservatives.
Still, in some lessons, race never comes up. Professor Sonya Douglass, who oversaw the development of the curriculum as the director of the Black Education Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, said the intention was to have students think more about “concepts like identity and empowerment, self-knowledge, culture.”
In December, Ms. Smith led a lesson on how enslaved people subverted the institution of slavery. An illustration at the front of the room showed a rose climbing out of concrete, a reminder of the class’s previous discussion of Tupac Shakur’s poem that reflects on the same imagery.
Students chose from several writing prompts, including one asking how they had overcome adversity in their own lives and another about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
TriNahum Jones, 18, described how Dr. King used his platform as a minister to inspire legions of supporters. And Muhamed Toure, 17, wrote his essay about being stopped and frisked while walking home from the gym.
“It kind of just showed me racism hasn’t gone away,” he said. “It has just evolved and changed throughout time.”
After they put their pencils down, the class talked about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. They also spoke about quieter acts of rebellion, like learning how to read and write.
“I come out of class more impressed with the resilience of my race,” TriNahum said.
The New York Police Department said on Tuesday that it was launching a three-month review of its narcotics division after two of its detectives were recorded brutally beating a man they had mistakenly arrested during a drug sweep last week.
As part of the review, the Police Department said it had disbanded the team responsible for the drug sweep, a small group within its narcotics unit in Brooklyn. That team was shut down on Friday, and its members have all been reassigned or placed on desk duty, the department said.
The overhaul of the division was announced a week after videos showing two narcotics detectives punching, kicking and dragging a man across the floor of a Brooklyn liquor store spread online.
The videos show the two detectives beating the man, a security guard named Timothy Brown, as they struggle to wrestle him into handcuffs for nearly eight minutes. The department said the arrest had been part of an undercover operation in the area and that the detectives had believed Mr. Brown to be involved in a drug deal. After beating and arresting Mr. Brown, the police determined that they had targeted the wrong man and that Mr. Brown had not been involved in the drug sale.
The police charged Mr. Brown with resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration, but the Brooklyn District attorney’s office said it would decline to prosecute the case.
The footage, and news of the mistaken arrest, prompted immediate backlash from New York lawmakers, civil libertarians and police critics, some of whom described the behavior as extrajudicial punishment. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has been careful not to anger the city’s police force, last week condemned the conduct in his strongest words of criticism since taking office. “The violence used by N.Y.P.D. officers in this video is extremely disturbing and unacceptable,” Mr. Mamdani wrote in a post on social media on Wednesday.
The Police Department moved quickly to discipline the two men in the video, Volkan Maden and Michael P. Algerio, both of whom have served with the N.Y.P.D. for more than a decade. On Wednesday, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch called the videos “deeply disturbing” and said that both detectives had been placed under investigation and stripped of their guns and shields.
In the following days, the department removed the sergeant who oversaw Detectives Maden and Algerio from his post and placed him on modified duty. By Friday, six more detectives on the team, as well as the lieutenant and captain who oversaw the entire North Brooklyn narcotics operation, had all been reassigned.
In interviews last week, several lawmakers praised Ms. Tisch and Mr. Mamdani for taking swift disciplinary action against what they called a shocking display of police brutality.
“This video looked like something from the 1990s,” Oswald Feliz, the chair of the City Council’s Public Safety committee, said. “This had nothing to do with public safety, it had everything to do with violence and that is violence that we will not and cannot accept.”
But for some, the behavior of the two veteran detectives raised concerns about how the unit and department was functioning.
Some critics have pointed out that Detectives Maden and Algerio appear to use cellphones, rather than police radios, to call for backup. Others noted that neither appeared to be wearing, or using, body cameras during the arrest.
Lincoln Restler, a city councilman who used to represent the Brooklyn district where the mistaken arrest happened, said the episode had concerned him enough to refer it to the city’s Department of Investigation. In his referral, Mr. Restler requested that the agency examine the Police Department’s communication practices for instances of unauthorized text and phone communication, according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times.
In the city’s policing community, reactions to the video have been more mixed. Union leaders and several former officers have chafed at the mayor’s response, defending the behavior of the two detectives and saying that Mr. Brown had no right to resist arrest. (It is not clear from the video whether Mr. Brown was in fact resisting arrest or if he was unable to comply while being beaten.)
“This is what happens when City Hall rushes to judge based on a viral clip instead of facts,” the detective union’s president, Scott Munro, said in a statement last week. “It’s reckless. It’s dangerous. And it’s a failure of leadership.”
The Police Department said on Tuesday that the 90-day review will aim to address and reform the kind of policy violations raised by Mr. Restler and others. It added that both detectives were being investigated by the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, which looks into reports of police misconduct.
The review will be led by the chief of department, Michael J. LiPetri, and will examine the policies of the entire narcotics division to make sure that its officers are enforcing their duties “safely and effectively,” the department said.
As part of the process, the department will review the current training that narcotics detectives receive and will ensure that all officers in the unit use “appropriate equipment.” The department also said it would clarify its current policy to require detectives to use body cameras during drug operations.
The department also said it will require commanding officers to regularly check in on the narcotics unit to ensure that it is meeting departmental standards for professional conduct during its operations.
She testified last year that she first met the former producer when she was about 27, after moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. He pressured her into giving him a massage shortly after, she said.
In 2013, she was visiting New York and had planned a morning meal with friends and the producer. He arrived early and got a hotel room over her objections, Ms. Mann testified. Still, she went with him to the room, where he injected his penis with medication that produced an erection and then raped her, she said.
She tried to fight, she said, but eventually “I just gave up, I wanted to get out.”
In the years that followed, Ms. Mann said, she fell into a complex relationship with Mr. Weinstein, which included friendly email exchanges, phone calls and several consensual sexual encounters. In her testimony last year, she called it a “dance” in which she tried to keep him both happy and at a distance. At one point, Ms. Mann said, she decided to enter a romantic relationship with him.
During cross-examination, a lawyer for Mr. Weinstein questioned Ms. Mann about money — close to $500,000 — that she had received as settlement payments through a fund established as part of the bankruptcy of Mr. Weinstein’s company.
“This is not about money for me,” Ms. Mann testified.
For this trial, Mr. Weinstein has hired a new trial team of Jacob Kaplan, Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos.
The lawyers have already signaled that their defense will differ, at least slightly. They have indicated that they will not argue that Ms. Mann made the accusations against their client for financial gain.
The grandson of an infamous mob boss was sentenced to prison on Monday after pleading guilty to defrauding the federal government out of more than $1 million in Covid relief funds, some of which he invested in cryptocurrency.
Carmine G. Agnello Jr., the grandson of John J. Gotti, the former leader of the Gambino crime family, was sentenced to 15 months in prison by Judge Nusrat J. Choudhury in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y. She also ordered Mr. Agnello to pay $1.3 million in restitution to the Small Business Administration.
Mr. Agnello, 39, fidgeted in court on Monday. Some of his family members were in attendance, including mob figures previously convicted of federal crimes: his father Carmine (the Bull) Agnello and his uncle John A. Gotti.
Wearing a gray, checkered suit, Mr. Agnello read a brief statement in court calling his crime “wrong, selfish and criminal.” He added that he never wanted to “find myself in prison” like so many of his relatives.
“I regret not only what I did, but the disappointment I caused my family,” he said.
Starting in April 2020, Mr. Agnello applied for at least three loans for his Queens-based company, Crown Auto Parts & Recycling L.L.C., through a program meant to support small businesses hurt by the pandemic.
He applied for the loans under false pretenses, claiming he did not have a criminal record when he in fact did have one, prosecutors said. He then used more than $400,000 of the borrowed money to invest in a crypto business.
Mr. Agnello pleaded guilty in September 2024 to a single count of wire fraud. Federal prosecutors with the Eastern District of New York had sought a sentence of around three years, as well as $1.3 million in restitution.
He “shamefully lined his own pockets with government and taxpayers’ dollars,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
As a child, Mr. Agnello starred on the reality television show “Growing Up Gotti” alongside his mother, Victoria Gotti, and two brothers, Frank and John. The show, which ran on A&E for three seasons and was canceled in 2005, depicted a Long Island household in the milieu of “The Sopranos.”
At the time, Mr. Agnello’s father was in prison and had been divorced from Ms. Gotti, a former columnist for The New York Post, leaving her to raise three rowdy sons. The intense media focus on the Gottis gave the grandson “a distorted sense of reality,” wrote John A. Gotti, Mr. Agnello’s uncle and the leader of the crime family in the 1990s, in a letter to Judge Choudhury before the sentencing.
“Being part of the Gotti family meant growing up with too much attention, expectations and society’s judgment that most kids never have to deal with,” Mr. Gotti wrote. He added that his nephew faced pressure “to live up to the Gotti name.”
Mr. Agnello found his way into the family business, in a way. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to running an unregistered scrap business. That case echoed his father’s racketeering conviction after he firebombed a rival scrap company in Queens that was run by undercover police officers.
Mr. Agnello’s grandfather exercised power with unrelenting brutality and delighted in the spotlight. He seized control of the family by organizing the 1985 assassination of his predecessor, Paul Castellano, before running enterprises that investigators estimated earned about $500 million a year from ventures that included extorting unions, illegal gambling, loan-sharking and stock fraud.
After numerous acquittals in state and federal trials, aided by juries that had been tampered with, Mr. Gotti earned the nickname “Teflon Don” from New York City’s tabloids. He was ultimately convicted in 1992 on 13 criminal counts and died of cancer in 2002 at age 61 in a federal prison hospital.
Jeffrey Lichtman, a lawyer for Mr. Agnello, told Judge Choudhury that Mr. Agnello had grown up with no male role models in his life, as 15 of his family members had gone to prison, including his grandfather when he was 5 and his father when he was 14.
Mr. Lichtman, who also represented Mr. Agnello’s uncle, called his client’s crime “horrific behavior” but added that his conduct was inevitable.
Charles P. Kelly, a federal prosecutor, said in court on Monday that Mr. Agnello’s family history was no excuse for his fraud.
“This case is not about John Gotti; it’s about Carmine Agnello,” Mr. Kelly said.
This year, Steven Metcalf, another lawyer for Mr. Agnello, asked Judge Choudhury for a sentence with no prison time so that Mr. Agnello could donate a kidney to his mother, who has renal disease and also appeared in court on Monday. Without the transplant, Ms. Gotti could die during her son’s prison term, Mr. Metcalf said.
But in April, Mr. Agnello hired Mr. Lichtman, who apologized to the judge for Mr. Metcalf’s “voluminous argument” in support of Mr. Agnello, which stretched hundreds of pages.
As Judge Choudhury announced the sentence, Mr. Agnello kept his gaze forward and nodded. Judge Choudhury pushed back on the notion that his upbringing drove him to commit wire fraud.
“You were raised with access to opportunities. These are opportunities that many people in our society do not have,” she said.
After the sentence on Monday, Mr. Agnello embraced his family members in a hallway of the courthouse, one by one, kissing his uncle and his father on the cheek. He must surrender to the authorities to begin serving his prison term by July 20.
Outside the courthouse, his uncle John A. Gotti addressed a group of reporters.
“We had 15 members of our family who went to prison,” he said. “I think that’s enough. I think we did our time.”
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