Mayoral control of schools emerges as flashpoint in NYC mayoral election

Should the next mayor cede control of New York City public schools? It’s a controversial idea that favorite Zohran Mamdani supports – and which his opponents took up in the home stretch of the race.

“The reason I remain opposed to mayoral control is because of a criticism of how it keeps many parents, students and teachers out…of decision-making about their lives,” Mamdani told PIX11 ahead of early voting. “They come to forums, they testify for hours, and the decision was made weeks or even months ago.”

Andrew Cuomo, the former governor and independent candidate, and Curtis Sliwa, the GOP candidate, support a renewal of mayoral control.

Mamdani’s seemingly contradictory position — his interest in giving up power over the city’s largest budget agency that he hopes to lead — isn’t just theoretical. Whoever is elected, the next mayor must travel to Albany next year to make the case for or against mayoral control, with profound implications for more than 900,000 schoolchildren.

Municipal control, promise and peril

The city’s education system, the largest in the country, is an exception in terms of school governance.

The vast majority of school districts nationwide are governed by elected school boards, which hire and evaluate the superintendent, adopt policies, and oversee the budget.

But in New York, the mayor controls the schools, with the power to choose the chancellor and form the Panel for Education Policy or “PEP” – the municipal version of a school board – with its appointees.

“When you have a system where everyone is in control, then no one is in control. Someone has to be held accountable for the system, and that’s the main reason why I’m a big believer in mayoral control,” said David Banks, Mayor Adams’ former schools chancellor and the last to get a renewal, in 2024.

The model was first implemented in 2002 under former Mayor Bloomberg and, in the more than two decades since, has been met with a mixed response.

Supporters of mayoral control say it gives New Yorkers a single person responsible for the quality of public schools who can eliminate bureaucracy and implement citywide changes.

“The argument for this is efficiency,” said Jonathan Collins, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University Teachers College. He pointed to recent curricular mandates that, in just a few years, have changed the way all students in the city learn to read.

“If you are an education reformer and want to implement a truly major seismic overhaul of how some or more aspects of your school system operate, then mayoral oversight is the golden tool for you. »

But critics of the model, including Mamdani, say it excludes students, parents and teachers from education decision-making and also leads to accountability issues. They point to a number of difficult choices — like closing or merging schools and budget cuts — where people turned out in droves to public hearings and protests but felt their concerns weren’t being addressed.

“While it is possible to pass very important reforms very quickly, it will not be until the next mayoral election that we can hold this agenda accountable,” Collins said. “The problem with relying on the mayoral election as a source of accountability or a referendum on education (is) that the mayor is responsible for a plethora of other issues.”

The candidates speak out

While education issues have been largely sidelined for much of this mayoral race, the topic has gained momentum ahead of Tuesday’s Election Day around the future of gifted and talented programs and, more recently, mayoral control.

The three leading candidates disagree sharply on both issues, but they share one thing in common: The old method of school governance — consisting of a citywide school board and 32 local school boards, often rife with corruption and cronyism — wasn’t working.

“What I have said time and time again is that we cannot go back to what existed before municipal control,” Mamdani said during the interview with PIX11.

Longtime observers of the school system described a degree of cronyism and nepotism that, while not everywhere, was pervasive in corners of the city. Allegations abound: some people obtained management positions by paying them, others were appointed superintendents by relatives who sat on the board of directors.

“I would always seek accountability,” Mamdani said. “New Yorkers need to know that whatever happens in this city, if it’s city government that’s involved, the mayor has to be held accountable on some level. But it’s possible to build a system that also involves more of the people it seeks to serve.”

What would this system look like? It’s not very clear.

“This is exactly what we are building after these elections, before January,” said the favorite.

This process appears to have begun.

Betty Rosa, commissioner of the New York State Department of Education, said the Mamdani campaign requested a copy of a 2024 report on municipal control, which neither explicitly endorsed nor rejected municipal control but provided a history of school governance in the city and other models across the country.

The nearly 300-page document, however, summarizes the public’s recommendations, including reducing the number of mayors appointed within the PEP and the creation of a commission responsible for proposing more comprehensive reforms. And in an analysis of available research, the study found no conclusive evidence about whether mayoral control leads to better student outcomes.

“I hope we can take the document and make it actionable,” Rosa said. “It will be up to the mayor, but I would offer to be helpful in the redesign or however they want to partner and think about it.”

Earlier this month, Mamdani’s campaign convened dozens of education advocates for a virtual meeting, which included a breakout session on school governance, according to sources in attendance. The discussion focused on ways to share power with parents, including those who serve on boards like the Panel for Educational Policy.

Among the ideas put forward by supporters are changing the composition of the committee so that the majority of members are not appointed by the mayor, while a commission would consider more substantial changes over a period of years, sources said. One proposal is to make the chancellor search a collaborative process involving families, teachers and city officials.

Cuomo’s platform argues that mayoral oversight is an “imperative” to ensure accountability for students’ academic performance. In the last debate, he called mayoral control the “most instrumental reform” in education in decades, attacking Mamdani for seeking to overturn it.

“It’s completely inconsistent to say, ‘I think this is a top priority, but I want to give up control of the mayor. But I want to be a mayor who runs grocery stores,'” Cuomo said, contrasting the frontrunner’s stance on school governance with his campaign promise to open city-run supermarkets. “Forget the grocery stores, run the Department of Education.”

Sliwa, on his campaign website, says he would “retain mayoral control over New York City’s public schools, but would overhaul how the system works.” He called for the creation of a more “transparent” school governance model, with “clear objectives and measurable results”.

Even with his full support of the model, Banks, the former chancellor, said he would like to see some changes in the mayor’s control, such as high school representation on the Education Policy Panel and changes to the law that would allow parents to speak virtually.

“It’s not a perfect system, but there is no such thing as a perfect system,” he said. “But overall, it’s much better than the system we had before.”