A First-Generation American Became NYC’s Deputy Mayor. Can His Pre-K Push Offer Kids The Same Success?

Richard Buery’s childhood weaved between two very different versions of New York City. The son of Panamanian immigrants — a public school teacher and a lab manager — he was raised in East New York, a section of Brooklyn notorious for its violence and poverty, The local schools have a 13.5 percent dropout rate, and one-third of families live in poverty. “East New York is a community that has not always felt that we had City Hall by our side,” Buery says. Abandoned lots and failing schools were all he knew of Gotham until he was accepted at Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s nine elite magnet schools.

“It was my first experience meeting people and having friends who weren’t black and Hispanic,” he tells The New York Times. “For the most part, it was my first time meeting folks from wealthier communities and wealthier families. And it really made very real to me the truth about educational equality and the difference between what it means to be a child from a place like East New York and a child in a neighborhood like Park Slope or the Upper East Side.”

Buery (rhymes with “jury”) recognized the opportunities within his reach: Stuyvesant led to Harvard and, later, Yale Law School. In his mid-forties, he’s now the deputy mayor managing strategic initiatives for Bill De Blasio, the progressive Democrat elected mayor in 2013. Buery’s largely focused on implementing the mayor’s push for early childhood education in The Big Apple. The second year of free, full-day pre-kindergarten class is right around the corner, and his office is aiming to have it be “universal,” an accomplishment that would mean there’s a spot for all 70,000 New York City children who want one. That’s a “small city” of bouncing four-year-olds who’d otherwise be with babysitters or private classes, the Times’ editorial board notes. In essence, Buery is responsible for adding an entire grade level to what’s already the nation’s largest school system, New York Magazine adds.

“Our job is to make these two New York Cities one,” Buery said on his arrival in office last year. “It’s been my mission in life to help families work their way up the economic ladder. No agency, no community group can do that alone. It takes sustained and far-reaching coordination to drive that kind of change. This administration won’t let bureaucracy or business-as-usual stand in the way of the progress we’re going to make for children and families.”

After racking up two Ivy League degrees, a clerkship for a federal judge and a post as staff attorney for the Brennan Center for Justice, Buery had a revelation. “I knew that I did not want to be a lawyer,” he admits, “but I did not have a career plan after college other than wanting to continue a commitment to social justice.” During an assignment challenging the construction of petrochemical facilities in low-income minority neighborhoods in Louisiana, Buery realized that he identified more with the community organizers’ struggle than any courtroom proceeding. “It occurred to me that I would rather have their jobs than my own,” he says.

“Anxious to build organizations of my own,” Buery returned home to East New York. He established two nonprofits: iMentor, a program that’s guided 13,000 students through the college application process with in-person and online mentoring, and Groundwork, Inc., an organization that worked with families in Brooklyn’s public housing projects. “What he wants for East New York is what every middle class family wants for their children,” one of Buery’s colleagues at Groundworks, Inc., told a blogger. His success in doing so — math and science scores improved 36 and 41 percent, respectively, in the program’s first five years — drew the attention of larger charities, including one of New York City’s oldest and most respected child welfare organizations, the Children’s Aid Society.

In 2009, at age 37, Buery was appointed the first black leader of Children’s Aid Society, and the youngest since its founding in 1853. From his early experience founding nonprofits, the broad-shouldered Buery honed an entrepreneurial impulse. At Children’s Aid Society, he learned how to manage a colossal agency of 1,100 full-time and 700 part-time staff. He brought a data-driven approach to the charity’s programming, tracking young participants to measure their successes.

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Those skills have come in handy in his new post as deputy mayor, where Buery is coordinating a couple dozen agencies, his staff says. Luckily, the city isn’t building a program from the ground up. Two years ago, figures showed 20,000 pre-K spots — about one-third of the total needed. Buery’s expanding on two fronts: half-day programs are being lengthened into full days, and new classrooms are being added wherever they can fit them, often at community-based organizations like Catholic Charities or Union Settlement Association.

There’s plenty of challenges ahead for New York’s universal pre-K expansion. Too many classrooms, reflecting the neighborhood demographics, appear segregated by race and socio-economics — exaggerating the worst patterns in their surroundings, rather than adding diversity. One of the most vocal critics, Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at University of California, Berkeley, has argued the expansion does more to benefit middle-class children than the poorer students it’s aimed at.

And then there’s the bruising fight with Gov. Andrew Cuomo that practically came to blows over mayoral control of city schools. (De Blasio, who fought for permanent control, was prepared to settle for three years; instead, Senate Republicans in Albany gave him just one.)

But with September approaching, Buery can tick off a number of successes. State funding — about $340 million a year — is locked in for the program’s first five years, totaling $1.5 billion. Enrollments have also increased for the second year, close to projected totals. In June, De Blasio announced that 57,000 children had been guaranteed a spot in their top three choices, though another 10,000 youngsters were placed in schools that didn’t even appear on the parent’s list of a dozen choices.

Soon, the visions from Buery’s childhood, of separate and unequal cities, may become a detail of the past. If universal pre-K lives up to its “historic and transformative” promise, it will level the playing field in the New York City’s schools and check inequality in the long run. Fifteen years from now, a kid like Buery from East New York, from South Bronx or Central Harlem might look back on this moment as the first step of his own journey to Harvard.

“To those who think that this mayor is too ambitious or moving forward too quickly, I just want to emphasize that if you say that, you really don’t know this city,” Buery says. “There is nothing that we cannot do when we come together.”

When Mayors MEET: 5 Brilliant Education Ideas Coming to a City Near You

Even the casual observer of current events knows that education reform is a major concern for Americans. Turn on Fox News, MSNBC or any nightly news program, and you’re likely to hear debate on a number of issues, from teacher unions and Common Core to pre-K opportunities and the overall cost of education. But by watching the national debate, which can be as combative as it is complex, it’s easy to forget that we live in a country with nearly 20,000 municipal governments — each of which is working on unique, location-specific efforts to improve their respective public school systems.
Last fall, mayors from four of those municipalities — Michael Hancock (Denver), Kevin Johnson (Sacramento, Calif.), Julian Castro (San Antonio, Texas) and Angel Taveras (Providence, R.I.) — rallied to rise above the national chatter and actually collaborate to improve public schools. And to do that, they hit the road on the inaugural Mayors for Educational Excellence Tour (MEET), an initiative with a simple premise: The four mayors visit one another’s cities to learn successful methods being used in pre-K through 12th-grade public schools, which can then be implemented in their own hometowns — and cities across America. The tour kicked off last October in Denver with Mayor Hancock, before stopping in Sacramento and San Antonio. It’s slated to end April 24 in Providence with Mayor Taveras.
At each stop, the host city’s mayor showcases his community’s most innovative education initiatives. The host city also holds a town hall meeting where all the mayors can engage with parents, students and other education leaders in a wide-ranging conversation about public-school reform. “MEET was designed to be an echo chamber where the mayors could have unfiltered conversations over a day or two in a particular city, as opposed to a rushed 15-minute meeting,” says Peter Groff, a principal at MCG2 Consulting in Woodbridge, Va., and a former Colorado legislator with a longtime interest in education reform. Groff conceived and developed the tour with Hancock; this included choosing the three other mayors based on their education-focused administrations. “They’ve heard about what the other mayors have done, but they haven’t seen it firsthand.”
That Hancock, Johnson, Castro and Taveras are all progressive mayors who favor more liberal reform policies no doubt makes this kind of teamwork easier. All four mayors are also governing the very cities they grew up in — and are graduates of the public-school systems they’re trying to fix. But the biggest factor contributing to their success may be the very fact that they serve as mayors.
Last October, a Pew Research Center report found that just 19 percent of Americans trusted Washington to do what’s right most of the time or all of the time. But living outside the Beltway, MEET’s four mayors say they can buck that stereotype to actually make measurable progress.
“Mayors mostly govern in a nonpartisan environment, so we don’t have to tow the party line from one side to the other,” Mayor Castro says. “Being in local communities, the residents are more likely to know their mayors — people actually approach mayors, so they’re not cardboard cutouts, or just the bad guy or the good guy. Cities are where things can still get done. And that’s not something they can say in Washington, D.C., and most state capitals.”
MORE: Ask the Experts: 7 Ways to Improve K-12 Public Education
With the final stop on the tour approaching, MEET’s organizers are already thinking about next year and how to scale their mission. Mayor Hancock says he’s received inquiries and requests from other mayors to join. And the Educational Excellence Task Force of the United States Conference of Mayors, an organization for leaders of cities with more than 30,000 people, is working to document digitally the lessons from MEET’s first run so all its members can access the takeaways. “If a mayor on another side of the country wants to see what Denver’s doing, they just need to go online and read the case study,” Hancock says. “We’re moving forward with what we’ve learned. We’re moving nationally. And all that is because of this tour.”
Here’s a look at 5 big ideas from MEET that may be coming to a school near you:
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Why the U.S. Should Adopt the “Finnish Way” of Education

In life, quality almost always trumps quantity. (Just think: You’d probably rather have one bite of Green and Black’s chocolate instead of an entire Hershey’s bar.) And interestingly, the same appears to hold true in education.
Some of the smartest students in the world don’t start school until they’re 7 years old — a full year later (or more) than we do here in the United States. This is the “Finnish Way” of education, and the American school system could learn a lot from it.
Recently Krista Kiuru, Finland’s minister of education and science, visited Washington, D.C. to talk to U.S. education officials about how to bring some of this coveted “Finnish Way” here to America. Despite the country’s small size — it’s roughly the size of Minnesota — and the fact that students start school later, Finnish students greatly outperform Americans in math, reading and science. In fact, Finland’s students are some of the smartest in the world, outperforming all but a few countries. Kiuru owes most of this to a high-quality, universal and free preschool system — something that U.S. President Barack Obama has pushed for but seems unlikely to catch on, due to resistance from legislators and lobbyists.
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In Finland, every child has a legal right to childcare and preschool, regardless of income. Because of this, more than 97 percent of 3- to 6-year-olds attend some variety of preschool program, which makes them better prepared to start school when they’re 7 years old. “First of all, it’s about having high-quality teachers,” Kiuru told NPR about the preschool program. “Day care teachers are having Bachelor degrees. So we trust our teachers, and that’s very, very important. And the third factor: we have strong values in the political level.” That’s something we’re not finding here in America.
Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, visited Finland and other countries with top-performing students — Singapore, South Korea and Japan, to name a few — to determine what these countries do right in terms of education. Finland’s preschool and childcare programs, both of which meet the country’s stringent National Curriculum Guidelines, stood out to her in terms of their approach and effectiveness. “Kids are almost all in some kind of day care, all of whom are working in the same curriculum that’s aligned with what they’re going to learn in school,” Ripley told NPR. “That’s a level of coherence that most U.S. kids will never experience because we don’t have a coherent system with highly trained people in almost every classroom.”
ALSO: 40 Years Ago, Researchers Sent Half These Kids to Preschool. And What a Difference It Made
Why don’t we have a coherent system? First, we can’t seem to agree on one. There’s no national consensus about what such a program would look like here in the U.S. Second, we don’t invest in early childhood education. (In Finland, the taxes are much higher to provide free preschool and day care.) And lastly, our child poverty rate — which is five times higher than Finland’s — is holding us back. “It’s very clear from the research in the U.S. that our problems with inequality [and] school failure are set when children walk in the school door,” Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, told NPR, noting that in the U.S., 60 percent of 4-year-olds from low-income families don’t attend preschool.
“If you invest in early childhood education, in preschool and day care, that will lead [to] better results,” Kiuru says. Sounds like common sense. So why can’t the U.S. adopt at least some of the “Finnish Way” and make it “American Way”?
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Oklahoma’s Pilot Pre-Kindergarten Program Provides National Model

“Since 1998, Oklahoma has offered universal access to pre-kindergarten and has one of the highest participation rates in the country, with 74 percent of all 4-year-olds enrolled in a pre-K program,” according to the Washington Post. Recently, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof visited a few families participating in the state’s universal pre-K program and was impressed by depth of support it offered low-income families. He noted how the issue of early childhood education isn’t political in Oklahoma, and attributes this as part of the program’s success. In addition to pre-kindergarten, the state also offers younger children free access to full-day, year-round nursery school. “Oklahoma also supports home visits so that social workers can coach stressed-out single moms (or occasionally dads) on the importance of reading to children and chatting with them constantly,” Kristof wrote. “The social workers also drop off books; otherwise, there may not be a single children’s book in the house.” So far, studies have shown that children enrolled in this program outperform those not enrolled. President Obama recently proposed nationwide adoption of this pre-k program modeled after the success in Oklahoma. Read Obama’s plan here. More on the program here.