New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has two priorities: raising taxes—preferably on the rich, but on anyone if he must—and freezing rents. Other issues, including any reform of the city’s overfunded and underperforming public school system, must take a back seat.
The divide between Mamdani’s ideological goals and the job of the mayor—delivering needed public services efficiently—helps explain his decision not to challenge New York’s class-size law. The 2022 law, which requires the city to reduce class sizes in its public schools, has raised city education costs by more than $1.5 billion annually. Not only does that make little sense, given steadily declining enrollment; it also provides cover for Mamdani’s plan to raise taxes in support of unnecessary increases in city spending.
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Save for the teachers’ union and its legislative allies, the class-size law is widely despised. Many parents—especially those in affluent school districts—are happy with their children’s schools as they are. These schools are at or above capacity enrollment because parents like them; their crowded classes are not considered a problem. But parents fear that accommodating the required class-size reductions would necessitate cutting enrollment because of lack of space for extra classrooms and teachers, sending children to less effective schools.
Poor children also stand to lose. The city’s Independent Budget Office (IBO) found that “schools with higher poverty levels consistently had lower rates of over-enrollment.” That means that complying with the state’s mandate will shift money and staffing away from underenrolled lower-income schools to more affluent, already-over-enrolled ones.
The IBO report also cites research on class-size reduction. It notes that “[w]hile some studies have shown positive impacts of reduced class size on student achievement, including on long-term outcomes like college enrollment,” other research suggests that downsizing is a worse use of education dollars than interventions like “tutoring or additional instructional time.”
Finally, the IBO cites research on California’s own attempted class-size mandate, finding that the change “resulted in the loss of experienced teachers in schools with higher needs.” In other words, if better schools need to hire more teachers, they may take the best from poorer schools. Students in lower-income schools end up with newer, less effective teachers as well as reduced budgets.
Governor Kathy Hochul is not going to endanger her reelection campaign by opposing the class-size mandate and angering the teachers’ unions. But she can take other actions to offset the harms to students in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
She could provide more funds to the charter schools offering those areas educational opportunities not available in traditional public schools. Many of these charters are housed, for free, in New York City Department of Education buildings; others receive city and state funding to pay for private leases. But 73 charter schools established before the 2014 passage of the rental assistance law—requiring the city to provide space for charter schools inside public school buildings—must pay for their leases out of their per-pupil allowance. The New York City Charter School Center has estimated that it would cost the city and state just $60 million annually to undo this injustice to schools serving black and Hispanic families from poorer areas.
Hochul could also help families who choose to send their children to religious or private schools—by, say, allowing Scholarship Granting Organizations to use recently created federal tax credits. This would cost the state nothing and prevent New Yorkers’ taxes from leaving the state.
New York City and State face steep challenges. Governor Hochul should do all she can to stop the bleeding. As for Mayor Mamdani, we can hope that he will look beyond his ideological fixations and truly serve his constituents. And when it comes to schools in the city and state, both leaders should prioritize helping the children most in need.
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