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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 students and 1,600 schools.
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 would like to study racial and gender bias in the specialized high school exam.
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.
While more of New York City’s budget goes to the Education Department than any other city agency, education wasn’t a focal point during this year’s primary race. But city schools could take on a larger role in the general election – and observers will be watching the United Federation of Teachers, which is the city’s second largest union and declined to endorse a candidate in the Democratic primary because of deep division within its members.
Here’s what we have learned about Mamdani’s views on city schools during his campaign:
Focus on child poverty, homelessness
The city’s affordability took center stage throughout Mamdani’s campaign and shaped his language around education. During the first primary debate, when Mamdani was asked about education, he talked about how 500,000 children go to bed hungry each night and how 100,000 of the city’s students are homeless. According to his platform, Mamdani would expand the city’s Bronx pilot “Every Child and Family Is Known,” which pairs children living in shelters with a “caring” adult who provides daily check-ins with them and weekly check-ins with their families.
During the second debate, when asked about supporting students with significant disabilities whose needs can’t be met in their neighborhood schools, Mamdani mentioned leaning on “high quality” tutoring. He also discussed ways to meet the state’s mandate to limit the city’s class sizes, including passing a City Council bill pushed by the teachers union to increase the wages for paraprofessionals, or teachers aides. The city is currently facing a shortage of these staffers, who often help students with disabilities. Mamdani also mentioned a push to cut down on Education Department contracts to consultants.
On his website, Mamdani’s K-12 platform discusses “strong” after-school programs, mental health services, and integrated student bodies. His platform focuses heavily on free child care from birth to five years old, and Mamdani called for raising the salary of child care workers to be on par with public school teachers.
He also supports a bigger city and state investment into the CUNY system and has long championed a “new deal” for CUNY to make the system tuition-free, increase funding for infrastructure and staff salaries, and provide free OMNY cards for students to reduce their public transit costs to and from class and work.
Mamdani said he would also create car-free streets in front of every school in the city as a way to prevent traffic deaths, foster outdoor play, and reduce pollution around schools. His vision is to make car-free school streets universal, he said, instead of the current opt-in system.
Mamdani’s views on thorny issues facing schools
Mamdani is one of the few candidates who opposes mayoral control (at least in its current form) and proposes instead to try to create “a more participatory educational system.”
That could include co-governance through the Panel for Educational Policy (the board that approves contracts and school closures) and school leadership teams (school-based teams consisting of school administrators, teachers, and parents), for instance. The city school governance system is up for renewal from the state in 2026.
Overhauling the city’s reading and math instruction with curriculum mandates has been Adams’ major school initiative. A new mayor will need to grapple with whether to continue, tweak, or scrap these changes. Mamdani called the city’s literacy program “a step in the right direction.” But he said the Education Department should increase teacher development and also provide more support to adapt materials for students struggling to access the curriculum as well ensuring it’s culturally responsive.
“I would work with our school communities to find the right balance of maintaining focus on literacy and the initiative, while adjusting the program to ensure we enable more teacher discretion,” he said in a statement in response to questions on several issues that Chalkbeat asked the mayoral hopefuls.
Ensuring the city’s compliance with the class size mandate will be another massive task for the next mayor. Meeting the targets will require a hiring spree projected to cost as much as $1.9 billion annually and potentially many billions more to create new classroom space.
Mamdani told Chalkbeat he would work with the School Construction Authority on a capital plan and would ensure the Education Department has enough funding to hire thousands of teachers. He provided few details on how he’d pay for that, though he said he would undertake a major audit to find inefficiencies to help the Education Department save money to invest in class size compliance.
Mamdani said he’d consider capping enrollment at overcrowded schools as well as consider mergers “where appropriate.”
As a graduate of Bronx Science and a former standardized test tutor, Mamdani told Chalkbeat he’s seen “firsthand the promise and the failure of our specialized high schools and their admissions process.” He said he supported an independent analysis of the Specialized High School Admissions Test for gender and racial bias, and he would address the city’s highly segregated school system by implementing recommendations from a 2019 school diversity advisory group. (The specialized high school admissions test, which is the sole basis for entry to eight schools, is enshrined in state law.)
When it comes to addressing New York City’s shrinking school safety force, Mamdani told Chalkbeat he would want to invest instead in guidance counselors, social workers, and mental health support, as well as expand free after-school and summer programs. He also would establish a youth advisory committee on hate violence prevention.
“As Mayor, I will focus on these investments along with restorative justice models, which allow our students to remain in schools, learn from mistakes, grow conflict resolution skills, and improve academic outcomes,” Mamdani said.
And Mamdani pledged to stand up to the Trump administration’s threats to cut education funding over diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
“I am running to protect New Yorkers from Trump,” he said in a statement to Chalkbeat. “My policies will deliver protections from his rising prices, safety from his attacks on immigrants and LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers, and protections from his attacks on funding for vital services.”
Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.
