New York

A Black Studies Curriculum Is (Defiantly) Rolling Out in New York City

Published

1 year ago

March 3, 2025

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.

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New York

Inside the NYC Power Stations That Keep Trains Moving — or Bring Them to a Halt

Published

11 hours ago

April 20, 2026

Press Room

Inside the NYC Power Stations That Keep Trains Moving — or Bring Them to a Halt

It was one of the worst commutes in years. A power outage stranded more than 3,500 New York City subway riders in stuffy, crowded train cars for more than two hours on Dec. 11, 2024, during the evening rush.

Firefighters evacuated riders from the disabled trains, but not before some passengers were forced to relieve themselves between cars, according to people who were present. The ensuing delays, which affected the A, C, F and G lines in Brooklyn, stretched well into the morning, snarling the commute for thousands more riders.

But the foul-up didn’t start on the tracks — it began about 40 feet beneath the sidewalk, in a concrete bunker called a substation, like this one.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the New York City subway, operates 225 of these substations. They provide the electricity that keeps trains moving.

Some are deep underground, while others are in fortresslike buildings close to train tracks. Dozens of the facilities are nearing 100 years old, and some components have gone decades without substantial upgrades.

The electrical outage in 2024 started after a critical failure in a Downtown Brooklyn substation that dates to the 1930s. Heavy rainfall most likely seeped into equipment and caused an explosion so forceful that it knocked a door off its hinges, according to the M.T.A.

Without adequate electricity, trains that were closest to the damaged substation could not move, and their ventilation systems shut down.

Such major failures are rare, but are responsible for some of the subway’s worst logjams, said Jamie Torres-Springer, the head of the authority’s construction and development division.

“That’s what causes the most difficult, painful disruptions in the system that drive people out of their minds,” he said.

In hopes of preventing the next nightmare commute, the M.T.A. is making the biggest investment in power in its history. Transit officials plan to spend $4 billion on new power systems by 2029, including upgrades to 75 subway substations. That’s three times as many as were renovated during the last major round of repairs, which ended in 2024.

They have their work cut out for them.

Hidden beneath a steel-trap door on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, 36 steps below the surface, is one of the system’s oldest remaining substations.

“This is a blast from the past,” said David Jacobs, the M.T.A.’s acting general superintendent for power stations, who donned a hard hat and safety glasses on a recent weekday before disappearing into the underground space.

The substation, near 73rd Street and Central Park West, was built in the 1930s, and is expected to be renovated during the current blitz.

A dirty tarp hung in one corner of the cavernous room, to catch water that seeped through worn concrete. Rows of machines hummed with the constant surge of power feeding the electrified third rail on nearby tracks.

It takes about 2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to run the subway system annually. That’s enough power to light 128,000 homes for a year.

The substations’ main function is to convert raw, high-voltage electricity from the electrical grid into lower-voltage power that can be delivered to the third rail.

But the aging equipment has become progressively less efficient and reliable, and harder to maintain.

The substations are spaced out across the city, to help keep electricity flowing to trains even if one of them malfunctions. But the equipment has sometimes failed when asked to carry an extra load, leading to cascading problems.

Last year, there were 758 “major incidents” on the subway, ones in which 50 or more trains were delayed. Substations cause a small but disruptive share of the problems, according to M.T.A. data.

Every time a nearby train passes, it pulls electricity from the substation. A series of gauges, each corresponding to a train track, tick up as power is transmitted. The heavier the train, the more power is pulled.

“Power is everything,” said John Ross, a recently retired transit worker who was dispatched to help after several service disruptions in the subway, including the outage in 2024. “When it breaks, it breaks good.”

M.T.A. officials assessed the condition of every substation in recent years, and found that 36 percent of the equipment was in poor condition or in need of replacement.

While the main purpose of the upgrades is to reduce train delays, the changes have other benefits. The M.T.A. is installing a new signal system that relies on wireless technology to automatically control train movement.

The system, known as Communications-Based Train Control, or C.B.T.C., will allow trains to operate more reliably. It will also enable transit workers to monitor train traffic more closely from a dedicated room in Midtown Manhattan, known as the operations control center.

But switching to that signal system requires upgrading the rest of the subway’s archaic equipment. “In order to run more trains, we need more power,” Mr. Torres-Springer said.

For Mr. Jacobs, 36, who joined the M.T.A. nearly two decades ago as an electrical apprentice, working with machines younger than him would be a welcome change.

Today he runs a department of almost 400 people, and much of the work remains hands-on: diagnosing problems in the machinery by reading small flags with numbered codes, searching for replacement parts that are no longer manufactured, and generally eking out more life from obsolete machines.

“I do love this equipment,” he said with a smile.

But he’s ready for an upgrade to something built in this century.

“It’s like a B.M.W. versus a 1940 Cadillac.”

New York

Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein

Published

2 days ago

April 18, 2026

Press Room

Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein

Film

Leo McCarey’s “Make Way for Tomorrow” (1937). The Criterion Collection

‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey

The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.

The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”

Tippy Walker (left) and Merrie Spaeth in George Roy Hill’s “The World of Henry Orient” (1964). United Artists/Photofest

‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill

The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.

The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.

Rip Torn (left) in Milton Moses Ginsberg’s “Coming Apart” (1969). Courtesy of the Everett Collection

‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg

The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.

The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.

Don Murray and Diahn Williams in Ivan Nagy’s “Deadly Hero” (1975). Courtesy of the Everett Collection

‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy

The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.

The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.

Chantal Akerman’s “News From Home” (1976). Collections Cinematek © Fondation Chantal Akerman

‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman

The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.

The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”

Michael Wadleigh’s “Wolfen” (1981). Orion/Courtesy of the Everett Collection

‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh

The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.

The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.

Seret Scott in Kathleen Collins’s “Losing Ground” (1982).

‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins

The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.

The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”

Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” (1985). Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection

‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese

The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.

The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.

A scene from Edo Bertoglio’s “Downtown 81” (1980-81/2000). Courtesy of Metrograph Pictures

‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio

The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.

The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

13 Actors You Should Never Miss on the New York Stage

Published

3 days ago

April 17, 2026

Press Room