Zohran Mamdani And Education He Needs To Fill In The Blanks

A dozen concrete steps the mayor-elect should take Although education wasn’t one of the hot topics in the mayoral race, it will soon become a topic of great interest to the thousands of parents, students, teachers and staff who depend on the... If Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani seeks to retain control of the city’s public schools (and I hope he revisits his ill-considered proposal to undo the accountability reform established in 2002), he can use his office... I have been involved with New York’s public schools for several decades as a researcher, an advisor to district leaders, and as a parent of two students who graduated. Although I now live in Los Angeles, I continue to follow what happens in the city and the district closely. I therefore offer these comments in the constructive spirit of one who hopes to be helpful.

Like many others, I am excited by the prospect of Mamdani’s mayoralty and the possibility that he will succeed in making New York a city that works better for all of its residents. His campaign was brilliant, but as many of us know, running the City will be harder than running a successful campaign. The challenges facing the school system are especially formidable. More than 100,000 students — more than a tenth of those enrolled — face chronic housing instability. Additionally, for a variety of reasons, enrollment is declining, and as it does, the system will lose funding that is tied to per-pupil attendance. Several schools are severely under-enrolled, and because so few children attend them, the Department of Education can no longer provide adequate educational opportunities and services to the children who remain.

Several schools in the city’s poorest communities face high teacher turnover, chronic absenteeism and poor academic performance. Several others are in high demand and unable to accommodate those who desperately want access. Finally, while test scores in reading and math have shown significant improvement in recent years (though they remain lower than pre-pandemic levels in 2019), the question remains: How will recent growth be sustained? Furthermore, how will New York’s schools prepare students to have the skills needed in a labor market that is likely to be upended by the advent of artificial intelligence? While the other major candidates for mayor are on record favoring the current system of mayoral control of schools, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani is in opposition. He needs to clarify what this means.

Mamdani has a thin record on public education. He attended private school through eighth grade, then the elite Bronx High School of Science before graduating from a private college. He doesn’t sit on the Assembly’s Education Committee, a favored post among elected officials because of its importance and high visibility. Direct involvement with schools in his Queens district appears scant. He didn’t take part in the brief teachers union initiative for Democratic primary candidates to work a day in a city public school. Most importantly, pre-K through 12 education hardly figures in his list of campaign priorities: a rent freeze, free buses, government-owned grocery stores, and community safety.

The closest he comes to addressing education on his Zohran for NYC homepage is an on-brand promise of free child care. Only by drilling down three levels is there a generic schools position, hardly distinguishable from other candidates’, that “Zohran will ensure our public schools are fully funded with equally distributed resources, strong after-school programs,... So what are we to make of Mamdani’s stance on public education which accounts for one third of the city’s budget and its largest single expenditure, responsible for educating almost a million students? Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to get essential news about NYC’s public schools delivered to your inbox. Zohran Mamdani campaigned on ending mayoral control of New York City’s public school system — by far his most significant education promise. As debate intensifies over whether the mayor-elect should follow through on that pledge, a significant shift has flown under the radar: Under Mayor Eric Adams, the chief executive’s power over the school system has...

On paper, the city’s mayor still exerts near-complete authority over the city’s schools. The mayor hires and fires the head of the school system and appoints a majority of the school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP. But from his first months in office, Adams struggled to manage the board, which voted against several administration proposals. During his term, state lawmakers diluted the mayor’s power, adding new parent representatives to the panel while preventing the mayor from removing appointees who vote against the administration’s proposals. 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... 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. This story about gifted education was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. When I was a kindergartner in the 1980s, the “gifted” programming for my class could be found inside of a chest. I don’t know what toys and learning materials lived there, since I wasn’t one of the handful of presumably more academically advanced kiddos that my kindergarten teacher invited to open the chest. My distinct impression at the time was that my teacher didn’t think I was worthy of the enrichment because I frequently spilled my chocolate milk at lunch and I had also once forgotten to...

The withering look on my teacher’s face after seeing the easel assured me that gifted I was not. The memory, and the enduring mystery of that chest, resurfaced recently when New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani announced that if elected on Tuesday, he would support ending kindergarten entry to the city’s... Although many pundits and parents debated the political fallout of the proposal—the city’s segregated gifted program has for decades been credited with keeping many white and wealthier families in the public school system—I wondered... In New York City, the determination is made several months before kindergarten starts, but how good is a screening mechanism for 4-year-olds at predicting academic prowess years down the road? New York is not unique in opting to send kids as young as preschool down an accelerated path, no repeat display of giftedness required. It’s common practice at many private schools to try to measure young children’s academic abilities for admissions purposes.

Other communities, including Houston and Miami, start gifted or accelerated programs in public schools as early as kindergarten, according to the National Center for Research on Gifted Education. When I reported on schools in New Orleans 15 years ago, they even had a few gifted prekindergarten programs at highly sought-after public schools that enrolled 4-year-olds whose seemingly stunning intellectual abilities were determined... It’s more common, however, for gifted programs in public schools to start between grades 2 and 4, according to the center’s surveys.

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