NYC NOW - Midday News: Bank Closed Mayor Adams’ Campaign Account After Indictment, MTA Pushes Back on Tunnel Repair Plan, and City Schools Shift to New Math Curriculum

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

TD Bank shut down Mayor Eric Adams’ campaign account within a week of his federal indictment, according to new documents filed with the city’s Campaign Finance Board. Meanwhile, the MTA is urging Amtrak to rethink its plan for a three-year tunnel closure, warning it could disrupt Long Island Rail Road service for years. Plus, WNYC’s Jessica Gould breaks down the city’s new approach to math education and why even parents may need a refresher.

Welcome to NYC now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Thursday, May 1st. Here's the midday news from Veronica Del Valle. Newly released documents show the bank holding Mayor Adams' campaign account closed it down within a week of his federal indictment. The campaign finance board filing shows TD Bank closed the mayor's account shortly after the corruption charges were filed against him last September. The charges have since been dropped, but the documents show the board naming more reasons to withhold public funds from the mayor, including fundraising

records accidentally submitted by his campaign for assembly member Jennifer Rajkumar. She's running for public advocate. The Adams campaign, the campaign finance board, and TD Bank did not respond to requests for comment. The MTA is warning that Long Island Railroad riders could face years of delays if Amtrak moves forward with its plan to close one of its East River tunnels for three years of repairs. The agency's urging Amtrak to reconsider its plan, which aims to fix damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. They're suggesting the work should be done on nights and weekends. MTA chair, Jano Lieber, says the closure of one tunnel could cause problems for its riders whenever something goes wrong. Amtrak's track record for us is a little terrifying. MTAA official.

say Amtrak hasn't proven the other tunnels are ready to handle the traffic, or that Amtrak is ready if there are any problems. Amtrak says it's prepared. The tunnel outage will begin a week from Friday. Another beautiful day outside, 67 and sunny right now. Today, mostly sunny with a high of 69, with some calm winds. Stay close. There's more after the break. Have you ever felt stumped by your middle schoolers' math homework? Well, it's not just you.

Math instruction has undergone a transformation since many adults learned to crunch those numbers. WNMIC Education reporter Jessica Gould joins us now to talk about the new math curricular being rolled out in New York City's public schools and there will be a test. Jessica, please, walk us through recent developments with math instruction. Sure. So this week, Chancellor Melissa Avelis Ramos and, Mayor Eric Adams made a big curriculum announcement. And as part of it, they said they are overhauling math curricula at middle schools next year, part of this broader effort to streamline how they teach math and align it with best practices. So in the fall, they made a similar move where they called on all high schools to move to a single curriculum for algebra one.

And now they are offering three options for middle schools going forward. So what do one of these math problems look like? Well, I wanted to show you. So I brought an example for you that I believe you have in front of you. Read to me what you see there. I see a fraction here. It says how many three-fifths are in nine-tenths? And it has a diagram next to it where it has ten squares in a row.

And then above that it has a bracket showing that it's more or less highlighted for lack of a better word, highlighted nine of those 10 squares showing that it's nine-tenths right there. Right. So nine-tenths divided by three-fifths, the answer, spoiler alert, is one and a half. And as you can see, they're trying to make this more visual, more hands-on by using that number line there. And this is all part of the effort to get kids to kind of grapple with these problems at the start. So why does the education department think these types, of math problems are more effective at teaching kids? They say that they want to emphasize critical thinking.

So the idea is that the learning will be stickier for these kids if they work on the problems first, along with getting support from their teacher, and that it will make them more engaged in the learning. So you can compare that to, you know, the old image that I have of a math teacher at the chalkboard, sort of working it out, and the kids are at their desks, copying it down. This is how school's chancellor Avelas Ramos explained it to me. It's not tied to regurgitation of content. It's really thinking through the math and figuring out how to arrive at the answer.

So it's focusing on explaining the reasoning behind mathematical operations rather than simply teaching steps to solve the problem. This is the hands-on experience that she wants more students to be having. So you've been talking to teachers. What do they think about this? Some teachers are fans of this new approach. One teacher who was at the press conference announcing it this week said that it's better than that old I do, we do, you do for students and that her students have been flourishing as a result. I talked to a math teacher named Gary Rubinstein, who has a blog where he looks at different curricula. And he said that it all comes down to this idea of productive struggle. You give students a situation that they haven't exactly seen before, and you try to give them, you know, five, ten minutes to, like, think about it. And if they can figure it out for themselves, then they're going to understand it better. But he says some kids might give up during that so-called productive struggle.

And I've talked to teachers. He said their kids seem overwhelmed as they try to grapple with these problems that they aren't quite prepared for. The teachers union also critical. criticized the algebra one curriculum that rolled out earlier this year because they said it assumed kids had more prior knowledge to figure things out than they actually had. And it also didn't prepare them enough for the regents exam. The chancellor said she's gotten that message and they've made adjustments to that curriculum and they're going to continue making adjustments to make sure that this works. Productive struggle. That's education reporter Jessica Gould making me do math this morning. Jessica, thank you for that.

It's productive. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. Also subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We'll be back this evening.