From Charters to Yeshivas: A Practical Education Agenda for Mayor Mamdani
Mamdani should listen to families with school-age children. Here’s why.
Zohran Mamdani arrived at City Hall as the new face of Democratic Socialism, but his future will depend less on ideology than on whether New York stays a place where parents want to raise their kids.
His biggest test is schools: if he embraces abundance rather than “leveling down,” protects the lifeline charter schools provide, and shows real support for the city’s diverse private and religious school families, he can keep the middle class from fleeing and start rebuilding trust. Ray Domanico, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, explains. Opinions are those of the author.
Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor has made him a national symbol of Democratic Socialism, a headache for moderates, and a prime target for conservatives, but the real test of his tenure will be whether he can manage core city services effectively, honestly, and efficiently, beyond ideology. History suggests how hard that is: no modern New York City mayor has gone on to win higher office after leaving City Hall.
That job is made even harder by the structural limits of what a city government can actually control. Like all localities, New York City has open borders, which limit the implementation of policies grounded in the redistribution of wealth or publicly provided services. Those whose wealth or quality of public services are targeted for redistribution can simply leave for more welcoming environs. This does not apply only to the billionaires who are often referenced; it also applies to the much larger class of professional families of more modest means.
Building on Lessons from the de Blasio Years
All this is doubly true when it comes to public education. Here, the middle and professional classes have a personal stake in the quality of the schools for their own children. This does not mean that they are indifferent to the well-being of less fortunate students; they will support the advancement of educational opportunity for all children, but not if it is seen as leveling down, taking opportunities away from their children to attain equality of outcomes.
Former Mayor de Blasio was seen by many as taking this approach with his attempts to water down admissions to the city’s elite high schools and selective middle schools. The memory of that time will place Madani’s approach under great scrutiny from those committed to raising their children in the city. He would be wise to follow an abundance approach here, maintaining popular programs while finishing what Mayor Adams said he would do: create new opportunities for the highest-performing students in each of the city’s districts to participate in an advanced or gifted academic program.
Similarly, he and his team need to move beyond his uninformed view of the city’s charter schools. These schools enroll almost 150,000 students, of whom 82.9% are economically disadvantaged, and 89% are Black or Hispanic, and they have provided a lifeline for the communities they serve. They demonstrate superior academic results in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and they deserve the new Mayor’s support as part of his commitment to make the city a safe and affordable place to raise and educate one’s children.
Regarding the Department of Education itself, Mamdani should back off his notion of further diminishing mayoral control of the system, which would be the ultimate cop-out. The city’s schools improved demonstrably in the Bloomberg years, when support for charter schools was accompanied by a strong and effective investment in programs and policies to improve the city’s district-run schools. Mayor Adams’ promising initiative to properly teach reading skills in the early grades, and a newer, similar effort in mathematics, benefits from the clear lines of responsibility and accountability afforded by Mayoral Control, as opposed to government by committee, which Mamdani at times seems drawn to.
Private School Families Are Constituents Too
The city’s 238,000 private school students and their families are also the mayor’s constituents. Half of them attend Jewish schools. In the non-Jewish schools, almost 36% of private school students are Black or Hispanic, and an additional 21% are Asian or multi racial. While the Mayor has no control over these schools, he can still do a lot to demonstrate his commitment to their students’ well-being. Maintaining safe streets around all schools, public, charter, and private, must be a priority.
The mayor-elect could also send a strong message of support to all private school families by urging Governor Hochul to allow non-profit scholarship-granting organizations in the state to participate in the new federal income tax credit. There will be no cost to the state or the city; it is simply a diversion of federal funds to families through scholarship organizations.
These scholarships could help alleviate the state’s longstanding conflict with a group of Jewish schools serving Hassidic families over compliance with the state law requiring private schools to provide a curriculum substantially equivalent to that offered in local public schools.
The issue is complex, but the state courts have ruled that the state may not close schools deemed out of compliance. Rather, enforcement must be directed at parents who choose to send their children to these schools. The court also noted that parents can comply with the law by purchasing tutoring or other educational services. That is exactly what the new federal program supports. Supporting the approval of it in New York State could be a small step towards building trust within Jewish communities, which he has damaged with his equivocation on hateful riots outside of a synagogue, as well as his embrace of noted anti-Semites.
Lessons from Decades of School Integration Attempts
Mamdani’s transition team for Youth and Education Policy has a good representation of advocates for renewed efforts to racially integrate the city’s public schools, with an emphasis on scaling back the number of middle- and high schools that use academic performance to screen students for admission. His transition team notably lacks advocates for charter schools.
A book that I recently reviewed, Radical Dreamers, reminds us that New York has a long history of half-hearted attempts to better integrate its schools, beginning with the dawn of the desegregation efforts in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. By the mid-1960s, community leaders in the city’s Black neighborhoods shifted their advocacy from integration to community control of local schools. The system that emerged by 1970 split the city into 32 local school districts, with limited control by locally elected community school boards.
This arrangement eventually proved a disaster, with political corruption outweighing any real improvement in outcomes for students of color. This story played out in other cities as well, with quite leftist Black leaders embracing school choice in North Carolina, Cleveland, and Milwaukee. The book notes that these leaders took their cues from the school system’s clients, the families of color who used the schools rather than from the system’s constituents, the professional organizations promoting continued efforts for integration through bussing and other means.
Listen to Families, Not Ideologues
Mamdani can be a successful leader of education in the city and advance his goals of greater affordability and improved quality of public services if he and his team listen to the system’s clients, the city’s child-rearing families, rather than to ideologically motivated advocates who would sacrifice those families in pursuit of a larger agenda.
The families have made clear what they want, with over 130,000 Black and Hispanic students now enrolled in charter schools. Taking away things that are cherished by families, such as effective charter schools, accelerated programs in the city’s district-run schools, or private and religious schools that provide education aligned with family values, is a recipe for disaster.
Expanding new opportunities, such as pre-kindergarten programs, quality childcare, and access to proven methods of teaching reading, mathematics, and other subjects in underserved communities, is doable and a much more desirable approach.