Does the D.S.A. Have a Vision for Public Schools in New York?
Mayor Mamdani’s K-12 platform is increasingly perceived as a “blank space.” Some of his supporters have ideas for filling it.
Last year, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America signed up tens of thousands of volunteers to go door-knocking for the then mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. One of the canvassers was Mary Simpson, an artist and a writer in Williamsburg who co-leads her building’s tenant union. “Mamdani’s focus on affordability was what pulled me into campaigning for him,” she told me, citing his promises of rent freezes, free buses, and free child care. Simpson often canvassed in and around her neighborhood with an N.Y.C.-D.S.A. faction called Gays for Zohran—“just lovely young humans in their early twenties, who had such excitement and abandon,” she said. “I would laugh with my husband about it, because there I was, the middle-aged married mom with a public-school kid.”
Simpson, whose daughter is in second grade, prepared extensively with her fellow-canvassers on how to discuss certain topics, such as Mamdani’s views on Israel and Palestine. “I knocked on more than seven hundred doors, and I was asked about Palestine once,” Simpson recalled. “I was asked about education every single canvassing session, probably five times per session.” The campaign provided volunteers with a “Persuasion FAQ” that listed three talking points on Mamdani’s K-12 agenda: to end top-down mayoral control of New York City public schools, to reduce class sizes, and to “fully fund schools” and related programs. “His education platform was quite weak,” Simpson said. “I realized that I needed to offer my own talking points.”
What made Simpson an outlier among the canvassers, as it turned out, also gave her a potent means of connection with some prospective voters. “To be able to say, ‘I’m a local mom, and I send my child to public school, and Zohran is running on a platform of making New York City more affordable, and anything that is good for us is good for our kids’—I just started speaking from that place,” she told me. “That seemed to resonate with a lot of people.”
