Zohran Mamdani, the odds-on favorite to be the next mayor of New York City, has said precious little about education. But as someone who ran our school system for almost a decade, I can tell you what little he has said is alarming.
He is opposed to charter schools and said he wouldn’t allow any more of them. He is opposed to gifted and talented (G&T) elementary and middle schools. He is troubled by the admissions criteria for the city’s specialized high schools. He is opposed to mayoral control of the schools.
And he was even rumored earlier this summer to consider Jamaal Bowman, the highly polarizing, extremely left-wing former congressman, as a potential candidate to lead the school system as chancellor. I held that position from 2002 to 2010 while Michael Bloomberg was the city’s mayor.
Mamdani’s platform is almost certain to hurt the mostly black and Latino kids who live in the city’s poorer communities while driving middle-class and affluent families out of the public school system.
Let’s start with charter schools, an issue on which the evidence is overwhelmingly compelling. Charter schools are a public-school option—free to students and available to all, by lottery if oversubscribed. But in contrast to traditional public schools (called “district schools”), charter schools are operated by private, generally nonprofit organizations rather than by government bureaucrats.