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To help New York City hire thousands of extra teachers to lower class sizes, mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani wants to offer prospective educators tuition assistance in exchange for a commitment to teach three years in city schools, he said Wednesday.
The plan, one of only a handful of K-12 education proposals Mamdani has put forward in the runup to November’s mayoral election, would bring in roughly 1,000 extra teachers a year at an annual cost of $12 million, he said at a press conference outside an elementary school in Astoria, Queens, the area he represents in the state assembly. Mamdani said savings from cutting contracts and bloat within the Education Department’s bureaucracy would cover the cost.
Under the state’s 2022 class size law, all city classrooms must meet the designated caps of between 20 and 25 students by 2028 — an effort that will require both carving out new space and hiring thousands more educators.
All told, the city will have to hire nearly 18,000 additional teachers to meet the law’s demands, according to estimates from the Independent Budget Office.
“This city faces an urgent question of where and how will we find them,” Mamdani said.
The Democratic socialist was flanked by Queens State Sen. John Liu, one of his early endorsers and a chief architect of the state’s class size law, along with officials from the city teachers union, which backed Mamdani after the Democratic primary and was a major force in lobbying for the state class size law.
“The teachers we have are doing incredible work, but we need to ensure that we ask them to do a job that is in fact possible, and one key part of that is ensuring that they have a limited number of students in their classroom,” he said.
City officials embarked on an unprecedented hiring spree starting last spring to meet the legal requirement of bringing at least 60% of classrooms citywide under the caps by this fall.
The Education Department doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in extra funding to over 700 schools to hire roughly 3,700 new teachers needed to lower class sizes. That’s on top of the 4,000 to 5,000 teachers schools hire each summer to fill vacant positions.
By the end of September, city schools had hired around 6,300 teachers for this school year. That’s up from roughly 4,800 hired over the same period last year, but city officials didn’t respond to a question about whether it was enough to meet the mandated caps.
Mamdani plan builds on existing programs
Mamdani’s proposal is similar to some existing programs like NYC Men Teach and New York City Teaching Fellows that subsidize tuition or offer an expedited path into the teaching profession.
K-12 education has largely taken the back burner in the mayoral election, but attracted some attention in recent weeks after Mamdani made a controversial proposal to eliminate kindergarten admissions for gifted and talented programs.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who’s running as an independent and has sought to contrast his education plans with Mamdani’s, has also proposed similar teacher recruitment plans, including growing NYC Teaching Fellows, investing more in “Grow Your Own” programs, and offering tuition assistance for future teachers and career changers.
Mamdani’s plan, which he calls “Community to Classroom,” would offer two tracks: one for high school students who can get college credits, mentorship, and up to $12,000 a year in tuition assistance if they commit to teaching in city schools. The other is for career changers, who would also receive $12,000 in tuition assistance to take adult education courses through CUNY or SUNY.
In addition to tuition assistance, program participants would get free OMNY cards, support on certification exams, and mentorship from current city teachers.
Mamdani didn’t immediately offer details about which contracts or central costs he would cut to achieve the savings needed to fund the program.
He acknowledged the program would not meet the city’s full teacher need for the class size law, but said he hopes to expand the program in the future and improve retention of existing teachers.
City officials have already leaned on programs like Teaching Fellows to boost hiring numbers, doubling the size of that program’s cohort from 500 last summer to 1,000 this summer.
Former First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg, who led teacher recruitment efforts in New York City before stepping down this summer, said that while he hasn’t reviewed Mamdani’s plan, effective efforts to boost hiring should combine “targeted recruiting, tuition subsidies, and support.”
Pointing to programs like the Teaching Follows program, he said “there’s no telling how much we could scale them up effectively” but is “confident we could do it significantly.”
Teacher hiring won’t be enough at overcrowded schools
Even if the city reaches its elevated hiring goals in the coming years, hundreds of schools are too crowded to meet the class size caps. Those schools will need to either find additional space or cut their student numbers by capping enrollment — a strategy the city so far has not embraced.
Mamdani criticized Mayor Eric Adams for doing too little to plan ahead for those schools — and vowed to fill vacant positions in the School Construction Authority to speed new school projects.
“My first order of business will be to exhaust every single option we have in front of us,” he said.
Mamdani, who has said little about who is eyeing as his schools chief, praised current Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos for her “creativity” and “ingenuity” in seeking to meet the class size law’s demands so far.
“I think she has been doing a good job,” Mamdani said when asked if he might keep Aviles-Ramos in the position. “I will consider anyone on the basis of the work that they have done, not hold it against them as to who appointed them as to who appointed them to that job.”
Alex Zimmerman contributed.
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.
