Mayoral control of schools emerges as flashpoint in NYC mayoral election

Should the next mayor cede control of New York City’s public schools? It’s a contentious idea that front-runner Zohran Mamdani supports — and his opponents have seized on in the final stretch of the race.

“The reason that I remain opposed to mayoral control is because of a critique of how it keeps many parents, students and teachers out of … decision-making about their lives,” Mamdani told PIX11 ahead of early voting. “They’ll come to forums, they’ll testify for hours on end, and the decision was actually made weeks, if not months ago.”

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

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

Mayoral control, promise and peril

The city’s educational system, the largest in the nation, is an outlier in terms of school governance.

The vast majority of school districts across the country are governed by elected school boards, who hire and evaluate the superintendent, adopt policy and oversee the budget.

But in New York City, the mayor controls the schools, with the power to pick the chancellor and pack the Panel for Educational Policy or “PEP” — the city’s version of a school board — with his appointees.

“When you have a system where everybody’s in control, then nobody’s in control. Somebody has to be held accountable for the system, and that’s the main reason why I believe very much in mayoral control,” said David Banks, Mayor Adams’ former schools chancellor and the most recent to secure 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.

Proponents of mayoral control say it gives New Yorkers one individual to hold accountable for the quality of the public schools, who’s able to cut through bureaucracy and implement citywide changes.

“The argument for it 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 couple of years, changed how all city students learn to read.

“If you are an education reformer and you want to implement some really major seismic overhaul of the way some or multiple aspects of your school system operates, then mayoral control is the golden tool for you.”

But critics of the model, including Mamdani, say it shuts students, parents and teachers out of educational decision-making and comes with accountability concerns of its own. They point to a number of difficult choices — such as school closures or mergers and budget cuts — where people turned out in droves to public hearings and protests, but felt their concerns weren’t taken into account.

“While you can push reforms through really big reforms very quickly, it’s only at the next mayoral election where we get to hold that agenda accountable,” Collins said. “The issue with relying on the mayor’s election as the source of accountability or as the referendum on education (is) the mayor is responsible for a plethora of other issues.”

The candidates weigh in

While education issues were largely on the sideline for much of this mayoral race, the subject picked up steam ahead of Election Day on Tuesday around the future of Gifted and Talented programs and more recently, mayoral control.

The three leading candidates vehemently disagree on both topics, but they share one point in common: The old way of school governance — consisting of a citywide Board of Education and 32 local school boards often plagued by corruption and cronyism — wasn’t working.

“What I’ve said time and time again is we cannot go back to what existed before mayoral control,” Mamdani said during the PIX11 interview.

Long-time observers of the school system described a degree of patronage and nepotism that, while not everywhere, was pervasive in corners of the city. The allegations abound: some people who got principal positions by paying for them, others who were appointed superintendents by relatives who sat on the board.

“I would still look to be accountable,” Mamdani said. “New Yorkers should know that whatever happens in this city, if it’s city government that’s involved, the mayor has to answer for it at some level. It’s possible, however, to build a system that has more involvement of the people it’s looking to serve as well.”

What would that system look like? That’s not quite clear.

“That’s exactly what we’re in the process of building out past this election, before January,” the front-runner said.

That process appears to have begun.

New York State Education Department Commissioner Betty Rosa said the Mamdani campaign requested a copy of a 2024 report on mayoral control, which did not explicitly endorse or reject mayoral control, but presented a history of school governance in the city and other models across the country.

The nearly 300-page document did, however, summarize recommendations from the public, including fewer mayoral appointees on the PEP and a commission to propose more comprehensive reforms. And in an analysis of the available research, it found no conclusive evidence as to whether mayoral control leads to better student performance.

“My hope is that we can take the document and make it actionable,” Rosa said. “It’s going to 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 centered around ways to share power with parents, including those serving on councils like the Panel for Educational Policy.

Among the ideas pushed by advocates are to change the composition of the panel so that the majority of members are not appointed by the mayor, while a commission considers more substantive changes over a multiyear period, sources said. One proposal is to make the chancellor search a collaborative process that involves families, teachers and city officials.

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

“It is wholly inconsistent to say, ‘I think it’s a top priority, but I want to give up mayoral control. But I want to be a mayor who runs grocery stores,’” Cuomo said, contrasting the front-runner’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 “keep mayoral control of NYC public schools, but overhaul how the system operates.” He called for the creation of a school governance model that is more “transparent,” with “clear goals and measurable outcomes.”

Even with his full-throttle endorsement of the model, Banks, the former chancellor, said he’d like to see some changes to mayoral control, such as representation for high schools on the Panel for Educational Policy and changes to the law that would allow parents to speak virtually.

“It is not a perfect system, but there is no perfect system that exists,” he said. “But on balance, this is much better than the system that we had before.”