“Ten months in, education experts and reformers are not impressed”
Last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was pressed to respond to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s recent essay chronicling her daughter’s challenges in the city’s segregated public-school system and asked how he planned to address it. His response, simply put, was that his administration has a plan to come up with a plan. Education-reform advocates and experts have been waiting all year for a better answer, not just regarding desegregation, but about almost everything to do with the city’s schools.
It’s now more than a month into a new school year, and ten months into Mamdani’s first term, but aside from a welcomed focus on early child care and a recently implemented policy on artificial intelligence in public schools, even the city’s most plugged in aren’t sure how the mayor will tackle a wide array of problems New York’s educators, students, and parents face.
“I think he is strikingly devoid of an agenda,” said David Bloomfield, a former general counsel at the city Board of Education and professor emeritus at Brooklyn College. “There have been words, but very few deeds.”
And these advocates and experts stress that there are a lot of to-dos, including addressing school budgets, declining enrollment, chronic absenteeism, class sizesand overcrowding, falling reading scores, uber-expensive special-education private-school placements, school mergers, standardized-test screen time, what to do with all the Gifted and Talented programs, SHSAT reform, school-bus system overhaul, and the implementation of new graduation requirements, among other concerns.
Matt Gonzales, a longstanding advocate for school integration who was on Mamdani’s education transition committee, is also nonplussed. “I was kind of like, ‘I’m gonna give you guys grace to wrap up the end of the Adams school year,’ the Adams administration’s term, and then I wanted to see a clear vision, more clear plans, and more clear commitments to a progressive education policy,” he explained.
“And, frankly, that’s not been clear yet. I haven’t seen any of that,” he said.
On the campaign trail, Mamdani staked out strong positions on two key issues, promising an end to mayoral control of the schools and to institute the state legislature’s law decreasing class sizes in school, a measure he supported during his time in the state assembly. But following his election, Mamdani switched course, announcing his intention to seek an extension of mayoral control from Albany as well as a two-year delay in implementation of the class-size mandate.
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The Special Commissioner of Investigation for NYC schools must explain why her agency failed to report Kamar Samuels’ role in contract violations that she found would justify firing his deputy.
