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New York City’s mayoral race has huge implications for the nation’s largest school system: Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate who is currently leading the polls, has offered a dramatically different view of governing schools from former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the independent trailing him.
The winner of Tuesday’s election will take charge at a time when city schools are losing students, and graduation rates have risen but college readiness is low. And many students are still failing to show up to class regularly.
If Mamdani becomes the city’s next chief executive, one of the most pressing questions ahead is whether he will end two decades of mayoral control, a governance model that gives the chief executive enormous power over the city’s schools, including the selection of its chancellor.
Mamdani hasn’t displayed a deep interest in education on the campaign trail, and he doesn’t have much of a record of school-related legislation from his time as a state assemblyman. Until recently, his campaign website devoted just one 168-word paragraph to K-12 education.
As Election Day neared, Cuomo seized the opportunity to elevate education, seeing a lane left open by Mamdani. Cuomo also sought to distinguish himself from the Queens state assemblyman by promoting an expansion of gifted education, specialized high schools, and charter schools.
While Mamdani is a fairly blank slate when it comes to city schools, Cuomo brings some baggage to a system he famously tousled with as governor. When it came to schools, his leadership style shifted over time: Early on, he pushed an aggressive reform agenda only to pull back in the face of backlash. He helped boost the charter school sector, and while he increased spending for New York City schools overall, he never fully funded Foundation Aid, a state funding formula that sends more money to high-needs schools, winning the enmity of many education advocates.
That would leave Cuomo with a tall task: building trust with educators and more fully defining an agenda for a sprawling school system.
Overseeing New York City public schools is no small feat: It has a $41 billion budget, 150,000 staffers, and nearly 900,000 students at more than 1,600 schools.
The school system’s graduation rates have soared 30 percentage points over the past two decades, and state test scores for reading and math have been improved since the pandemic. But a closer look at a range of metrics reveals that student progress may be more stagnant than some of these figures indicate.
Just 52% of high school students in 2024 were considered ready to succeed in freshman-level college coursework, according to a recent audit from the state comptroller’s office. Students’ scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, were essentially the same last year as in 2003. And schools are facing a crisis of chronic absenteeism, with 1 in 3 students missing at least 10% of school last year.
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Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.
