It’s no question that New York City schools are in urgent need of reform. This year, the city is spending $89 billion on education: $36,293 per student, the highest figure in the nation and nearly double the national average. Despite this — or because of it — only a third of fourth-graders are proficient in math, and only a third of them read at grade level.

Chronic absenteeism is also widespread, with more than a third of students having missed at least 10 percent of the 2023-24 school year, exceeding the national average. “The big elephant in the room,” the president of the Empire Center for Public Policy, Zilvinas Silenas, tells the Sun, “is that New York’s K-12 system is producing very mediocre results.” 

The question is: What, if anything, will the next mayor of New York do about it? If frontrunner Zohran Mamdani wins City Hall in November, his answer could prove deeply divisive. The democratic socialist has yet to present a formal education agenda. The ideas he has so far proposed, though, point to a sweeping overhaul of school governance — one that critics warn could lend more power to unions without addressing the underlying dysfunction of America’s largest school system.

Mr. Mamdani supports an end to mayoral control, a system of governance for public schools in which the city’s mayor, rather than an independently elected school board, has direct authority over the school district. The state law granting its authority is up for renewal in the middle of 2026. In its place, Mr. Mamdani advocates for a decentralized “co-governance” model, which would shift power toward elected school boards and likely inflate the influence of teachers unions.

“We need a system that understands teachers, students, parents — as being part of the way in which we deliver the educational policy of this city,” Mr. Mamdani said during a press conference at the United Federation of Teachers headquarters in Lower Manhattan last week. The union applauded this pledge and finally endorsed him, after remaining neutral in the mayoral primary last month. 

Mayor Bloomberg established mayoral control in 2002 to streamline bureaucratic decision-making and limit the direct power of unions, since a single executive and his or her appointed officials are ultimately responsible for the city’s 1,600 public schools. Every mayor has since lobbied state lawmakers in Albany to extend this system.

Mr. Mamdani has yet to explain how his vision for school governance would produce better results for students. Some critics are concerned that rolling back mayoral authority would weaken accountability and lower academic standards in public schools. Although delegating policy decisions to the local level may carry popular appeal, in practice it could fail to deliver the kind of democratization voters expect amid chronically low turnout.

In the May elections for community and citywide education councils — parent-led advisory bodies that influence local school policies and zoning — only 2 percent of eligible voters participated. Some 89 percent of school board candidates endorsed by New York State United Teachers were elected. “These victories aren’t just about numbers,” the union president, Melinda Person, said in a statement, “they’re about values.”

Mr. Mamdani has also suggested he would spike the Specialized High School Admissions Test, which is needed to get into eight of the city’s most prestigious public high schools that consistently produce exceptional academic results — including the Bronx High School of Science, from which Mr. Mamdani graduated.

In June, Mr. Mamdani said he supports “an independent analysis of the Specialized HS exam for gender and racial bias.” The recommendations he mentioned include phasing out gifted and talented programs in elementary schools and blocking the creation of new test-in high schools. 

While campaigning for state assembly in February 2022, Mr. Mamdani suggested abolishing the specialized exam entirely. That was in response to a question from the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club about possible legislation and policy changes to address “the ongoing effect of slavery, racism, colonialism and discrimination.”

The SHSAT has long faced criticism for alleged racial bias. Asian students consistently score the highest on the exam and, as of 2023, made up two-thirds of the student body at Stuyvesant High School. Yet it’s critical to consider socioeconomics: Asian New Yorkers have the lowest median income of any racial group in the city. While selective schools are often portrayed as enclaves for the privileged, the reality is that at Bronx Science and Stuyvesant, roughly half of the student body is considered economically disadvantaged.

In response to the lack of Black and Hispanic students at these schools, Mayor Adams and his administration have pushed to open more “academically accelerated” schools in historically underserved neighborhoods. Mr. Mamdani’s pitch is to get rid of the merit-based metric that makes a specialized education accessible to some 5,000 students each year.

Yet ditching an exam that exposes deep-rooted disparities does little to resolve the conditions that produce them. Such an effort, Libertarian magazine Reason argues, “will deprive talented students — low-income students whose parents can’t afford private school in particular — of the ability to attend a school with similarly talented peers, while making it harder to identify how and why other students are struggling.”

According to Mr. Silenas, scrapping any sort of standardized measurement of achievement would lead to “absolutely no accountability of schools toward parents, taxpayers, and politicians.” Instead, the school system needs to identify, nurture, and challenge smart young scholars, Mr. Silenas says. “If you stick a gifted kid in a regular classroom, he’ll not realize his full potential. In fact, he might lose a love of learning, and we might lose an Einstein or another genius.” (In fact, Einstein began at an ordinary Catholic school in Munich, and his exceptional math scores gained him entrance into a special polytechnical high school in Zurich, the equivalent of a Stuyvesent.)

Besides, Mr. Mamdani might not be able to carry out this idea. Any city-level initiative to eliminate or phase out the SHSAT requires a repeal or amendment of a 1971 New York State law, and the legislature has proved unwilling to act. When Mayor de Blasio proposed replacing the SHSAT with a composite system of grades and state test scores, he was stalled in Albany.

The Mamdani campaign is also pledging to “ensure our public schools are fully funded with equally distributed resources, strong after-school programs, mental health counselors and nurses, compliant and effective class sizes, and integrated student bodies,” according to the campaign website. 

The Department of Education’s budget for New York City schools, however, is already bloated. It’s grown by 20 percent in the last five years, even though enrollment in pre-K through eighth grade in DOE schools is down by almost a quarter in the last 20 years, a lagging indicator of greater declines in high school enrollment in the coming years. Even as the DOE is educating fewer students, it has added thousands of new teachers, principals, assistant principals, guidance counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers since 2020.

“There is a really high number of students who are in temporary housing and who are recent immigrants learning English and need additional support,” an affiliate of NYU Steinhardt’s Research Alliance for New York City Schools, Sean Corcoran, tells the Sun. “So it’s hard to imagine even a basic level of proficiency for these students that the district is serving without that kind of support.” Whether those resources are being deployed efficiently, Mr. Corcoran says, is a different question. 

Many voices in the education realm point to the prolonged school closures during the Covid pandemic to explain the suppressed achievement of New York City students in recent years. Yet private, religious, and charter schools have since bounced back, while public schools lag behind. A recent report by the Manhattan Institute argues that legislative blunders in City Hall, in the state capital, and at DOE headquarters in the Tweed Courthouse are to blame.

Under the de Blasio and Adams administrations, education officials halted the expansion of school choice — an approach that had involved closing underperforming schools and replacing them with higher-performing charter and district schools. Instead, the Manhattan Institute asserts, “education leaders returned to a strategy that never works: throwing more money into the system without fundamental changes that would make the money useful for improving student outcomes.”

Now they might take a cue from the city’s charter schools, where funding is tied directly to student enrollment rather than allocated independently of how many students a school actually serves, as it is in district schools. The charter system consistently outperforms traditional public schools: 2024 state data show New York City charter students score more than 9 percentage points higher in English Language Arts and 13 points higher in math compared to their district counterparts, with Black and Hispanic students often seeing even larger gains.

“Charter schools are definitely providing value for money,” Mr. Silenas says. “And they’re often cheaper than district schools.” Regardless of who becomes the next mayor or even the next governor, he says, fixing the city’s school system isn’t just a local concern. It’s a national imperative.

 “Given the amount of resources that we spend and the high population concentration in New York City, there’s absolutely no reason why New York City shouldn’t be topping all sorts of educational achievement rankings in the U.S. and in the world,” he says.