{"id":14517,"date":"2026-01-31T08:00:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-31T13:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14517"},"modified":"2026-02-04T02:50:30","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T07:50:30","slug":"mamdanis-mayoral-control-mishap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2026\/01\/mamdanis-mayoral-control-mishap\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani\u2019s mayoral control mishap\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

O<\/span>n New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani took office as New York\u2019s 112th mayor, promising a \u201cnew era.\u201d But while working-class New Yorkers celebrated Mamdani\u2019s enthusiastic promise to use his power to implement a pro-worker agenda, Mamdani backtracked on a key promise on his education platform.<\/p>\n

In a major reversal of his own long held views, Mamdani announced that he would support mayoral control of the city\u2019s schools. While most school districts are governed by elected school boards, in New York City school policy is determined almost exclusively by the mayor. This undemocratic system was implemented and used by previous mayor Michael Bloomberg to enact neoliberal anti-student education reforms including closing schools, increasing the number of charter schools in the city, and ratcheting up high-stakes testing<\/a>. Eric Adams used his power over city schools to create curriculum mandates that limit teacher creativity and autonomy in the classroom.<\/p>\n

Ending mayoral control and giving parents and teachers more of a voice in NYC education has been a longstanding goal of progressive education activists. Mamdani\u2019s turnabout marks a breach of trust with his own base, including the thousands of NYC educators whose doorknocking, phonebanking, and flyering helped get him elected, especially considering that ending mayoral control was the clearest plank of his limited education platform.\u00a0 His only other major promise was to retain the racist Specialized High School Admissions test, which has blocked Black and Latinx admission to prized high schools like Stuyevsant and Bronx Science.\u00a0 Even more troubling, the flip-flop indicates that voices of neoliberal education reform, like Gates-funded and anti-union Educators for Excellence<\/a>, have the mayor\u2019s ear in the transition process.<\/p>\n

When it comes to education, the signals Mamdani is sending are contradictory, but they\u2019re not all negative. Mamdani\u2019s promotion of Kamar Samuel, a local superintendent who implemented diversity efforts in his Upper West Side district, to the position of chancellor suggests that desegregation will be a priority for the new administration. This is a welcome and crucial development, as previous Mayors have ignored the issue, at best leaving it to blue-ribbon commissions. However, it seems that the mayor may have been convinced that retaining mayoral control is a necessary tradeoff, required to maintain executive authority to help de-segregate the most segregated school district in the country. While a return to the previous system of decentralized neighborhood school boards would allow local pro-segregation parents to block policy proposals, a post-mayoral control school system (like the proposed People\u2019s Board of Education<\/a>) could both maintain centralized policy while allowing democratic input.<\/p>\n