New York City had lots of VHF channels, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 so no real need for UHF, and as the few UHFs were in Spanish, English only speakers never missed UHF. Orginally 13 was a commercial station, but they folded and someone bought it out and made it an educational channel in the early 60s. So forget about trying to set up an English language UHF channel, if a VHF channel couldn't cut it. Market saturation. Until the mid 70s when New Jersey set up its own educational network of stations on UHF.
Speaking of educational TV, someone provided my grammar school TV sets in every classroom. Which the teachers never used, as educational TV never taught anything that would show on the annual achievement tests we had. Testing ala "No Child Left Behind" is nothing new...