Can Zohran Mamdani Fix New York S Public Education Jacobin

Leo Migdal

-Dec 3, 2025, 8:00 AM

can zohran mamdani fix new york s public education jacobin

Zohran Mamdani’s potential election as New York City mayor could be transformational for the city’s underfunded public K–12 schools and higher education system. Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani answers questions from the media during an event in Queens, New York, on June 19, 2025. (Adam Gray / Bloomberg via Getty Images) Jacobin‘s winter issue, “Municipal Socialism,” is out soon. Follow this link to get a discounted subscription to our beautiful print quarterly and get it right when it’s released. As New York City gets ready for a historic mayoral election, Zohran Kwame Mamdani has exploded onto the scene as a candidate proposing transformative changes to the city’s educational framework.

Central to his vision is ending unilateral mayoral control and redistributing wealth to support equity, development, and research. In this exclusive interview, organizer, union activist, and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY), Nivedita Majumdar, discusses the potential challenges to realizing Mamdani’s platform. These include barriers to funding, connections between education and climate, and the roles of civil society and union advocacy. Drawing lessons from historical city governance, she explains how New York’s public education landscape might evolve under a potential Mamdani administration. For more than 20 years, New York City schools have operated under a simple idea: If one person is in charge, one person is accountable. Now mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani wants to break that link.

Mayoral control works the same way any strong organization works, with clear leadership. When one person is ultimately responsible for a sprawling entity like the city Department of Education, with its 815,000 students and 1,600 schools, decisions move faster, reforms can be evaluated and voters know who... In 2002, when Mayor Mike Bloomberg first convinced the state Legislature to move city schools under mayoral control, the goal was simple: end the chaos of 32 local school boards and give one leader... November 5, 2025 / 7:25 PM EST / CBS New York Of all the New York City agencies Zohran Mamdani will soon be in charge of, the largest, by a wide margin, is the public school system. Yet, the mayor-elect did not signal comprehensive plans for it during the campaign.

Many are wondering if the status quo will remain or if major shake-ups are coming. The public school system is in the midst of an ongoing bus contract dispute and has an enrollment that shrunk by 20,000 students this year, according to the Department of Education's preliminary data. On Thursday, just hours after he won the election, Mamdani held a press conference detailing his transition. Education barely registered in this year’s mayoral race, but the nation’s largest school system will now be the crucible for Zohran Mamdani’s progressive ideals. He inherits a vast bureaucracy, but his true challenge is not managing the status quo. It is to reimagine a system that fails too many of its children.

The public debate will try to drag him into political minefields such as mayoral control and gifted and talented programs. These are distractions compared to what most matters: Can he improve the quality of what happens every day in the 78,000 classrooms across the city? To do so, the incoming mayor must focus on a single, powerful strategy: hands-on apprenticeship. This principle must be applied not just to students, but to our teachers first. The new mayor arrives just as a state mandate for smaller class sizes forces the city to hire thousands of new teachers. This is either a crippling expense or a generational opportunity.

The city’s current scramble leans toward crisis, risking a surge of under-prepared teachers from fast-track certification programs. There is a better way: paid, year-long co-teaching residencies. Zohran Mamdani is calling for a new approach to how New York City’s public schools are governed, challenging the decades-old system of mayoral control that concentrates power in City Hall. Zakiyah Shaakir-Ansari, co-executive director of AQE, said the current structure was built to consolidate authority and that now is the moment to build something more democratic. She emphasized that communities, parents, and educators must have a real voice in shaping the schools their children depend on, insisting, “[w]e have to make it work and figure it out, just as they... Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to get essential news about NYC’s public schools delivered to your inbox.

If presumptive Democratic candidate for mayor Zohran Mamdani wins in November, he would oversee the nation’s largest school system – but he doesn’t want to do it alone. The 33-year-old democratic socialist told Chalkbeat he is “opposed to mayoral control in its current iteration” and would advocate for a system that would lean on partnerships to govern the system of roughly 911,000... The Queens assemblyman doesn’t have a long track record when it comes to city schools, but he is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and a former standardized testing tutor who... Despite a stunning apparent victory Tuesday, Mamdani has a long road ahead of him to get to City Hall. If he formally clinches the nomination after ranked-choice ballots are counted, Mamdani will still face in November Mayor Eric Adams, who is running a third-party campaign, and potentially former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is mulling the same.

Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder, is running on the Republican ticket, and Jim Walden, a former assistant U.S. attorney, will be on the ballot as an independent. With Zohran Mamdani projected to win the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, his slate of socialist-influenced policies, from city-owned grocery stores to a rent freeze, are one step closer to reality. Mamdani's socialist agenda won't stop with housing policy or the minimum wage. It will also hit America's largest public school system and aim to kill the best thing about it. While New York City schools are routinely criticized for overspending, underaccountable teachers' unions, and general dysfunction, the city's group of selective high schools is a consistent bright spot.

Eight schools, including Mamdani's alma mater, Bronx High School of Science, admit students through an exam. The schools give talented students from all over the city the ability to escape chaotic local schools and receive an education at some of the top public high schools in the country. However, the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), which is the test used to admit students, has long come under fire for what critics say is a racial bias. That's because Asian students overwhelmingly perform best on these tests. In 2023, for example, over two-thirds of the students at Stuyvesant High School (widely regarded as the best of the eight high schools) were Asian. However, this framing is reductive.

It's worth noting that Asians have the lowest median income of any racial group in New York City. And, contrary to the popular vision of magnet schools being comprised of upper-middle-class white and Asian students, New York's selective high schools are economically diverse; 50 percent of Stuyvesant students are economically disadvantaged. At Bronx Science, it's 52 percent. But that hasn't kept politicians from attacking the schools as segregated, and the SHSAT as racist. In 2018, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) called the high schools a "monumental injustice." He attempted to survert a state law protecting the SHSAT, but the admissions change has so far been tied up... Over the years, Mamdani has stated that he would also attempt to ditch the admissions test.

"As a graduate of Bronx Science, I have personally witnessed just how segregated New York City public schools are, especially our specialized high schools," he said in a 2022 interview. "I support measures to integrate our public schools and fully fund our education system, including the abolition of the SHSAT."

Can Zohran Mamdani Fix New York S Public Education Jacobin

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