On the campaign trail last year, Zohran Mamdani backed a city council bill to pay school paraprofessionals (non-teacher school aides) a $10,000 supplement for the 2026– 2027 school year. The bill’s purpose was to fill a shortage in those roles. Now, the mayor finds himself suing to stop a law he supported as a candidate.
In July, the city council unanimously approved the RESPECT Check Act; in August, it became law without the mayor’s signature. Mamdani’s administration is now arguing (correctly, as my colleague Ken Girardin has explained) that allowing the city council to set employee compensation would amount to an end-run around the city’s collective-bargaining process—and, therefore, a handout to the powerful teachers’ union.
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“This law is not only the right thing to do, it is also the fiscally responsible thing to do, helping address the staffing shortages that contribute to the City’s $1.5 billion in Carter case costs,” Council Speaker Julie Menin said last month in response to Mamdani’s lawsuit. But a one-time $10,000 check for paraprofessionals won’t solve the city’s budget-busting Carter case costs. These costs shouldn’t be invoked to justify a union handout.
Under federal law, students with disabilities are entitled to the services laid out in their Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). For some students, that means support from a public school paraprofessional. If the New York City Department of Education can’t provide that support, parents can file a due-process complaint. Not all due-process complaints are so-called Carter cases, which arise when parents who believe the public schools cannot appropriately serve their children place them in a private school and then ask the city to reimburse the tuition. The resultant settlements generally compel the city government to pay that tuition—with the average annual Carter settlement per student now exceeding $100,000 per.
The city spends about $1.5 billion annually on Carter cases today, up from a mere $47 million in 2005. But these ballooning costs are not driven by a lack of paraprofessionals, as Menin claimed. The major source of bloat is an unwillingness to reevaluate prior placements, along with complaints over services that paraprofessionals cannot provide—not understaffed classrooms.
The costs of paraprofessionals are only a fraction of what Carter cases cover. A large share of costs come from the city reimbursing private school tuition for students who can’t be served in traditional public schools. Last school year, the city made such payments on behalf of nearly 7,600 students.
Even among non-tuition cases, paraprofessionals are not the dominant driver of costs. In 2023, the comptroller’s office analyzed thousands of special-education complaints. The most common issues were special-education instruction, speech and occupational therapy, make-up sessions for services that children had missed, or required services by certified teachers or other licensed providers. In fact, paraprofessional services are not among the 19 issue categories the Department of Education tracks in these complaints.
Carter case costs have risen as the city has become less willing to dispute parents’ claims. As I’ve explained previously, the city changed how it handled these cases under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Under de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, the Department of Education hired additional lawyers to contest private school placements and reevaluate them annually. The de Blasio administration made these cases easier to settle, and payments faster to process. In 2015, the first full year under the new policy, the Department of Education settled 60 percent more tuition-reimbursement cases without a hearing.
In addition, federal “pendency” rules require the city to continue paying for an existing placement while a dispute is being resolved. That allows some students to remain in publicly funded private placements for years. Those existing placements make up a substantial part of the city’s spending.
Attributing the growth in Carter spending to staffing failures doesn’t add up for another reason: the city is measurably getting better at providing services. Between 2014 and 2016, only about 60 percent of students with disabilities received all the services required by their IEPs. By 2023–24, that figure had improved to about 92 percent. Yet Carter case spending keeps growing. If staffing failures were driving those costs, then, as the Department of Education delivered more mandated services, fewer families would have grounds to leave the school system, and spending would decline. Instead, Carter spending tripled while the share of students with unmet services shrunk by nearly 80 percent.
Even if the council were right about the source of the problem, making $10,000 bonus payments to the city’s roughly 26,000 existing paraprofessionals will not fill the 1,600 paraprofessional vacancies. These are the result of a broken hiring system, which determines who can become a paraprofessional, where he or she can be hired, and how quickly vacant positions can actually be filled. Paying off the beneficiaries of this cartel won’t do anything to dismantle it.
The RESPECT Check Act will neither help fill paraprofessional shortages nor address the city’s underinvestment in public special-education needs. And it does nothing to change the policies that helped push Carter case spending to $1.5 billion. Instead, it mostly lines the coffers of the city’s unions.