During his campaign, Zohran Mamdani pledged to end mayoral control of New York City’s schools. One day before taking office, he changed his mind. His decision reflects the legal and operational realities of governing the nation’s largest school system.
Mamdani’s about-face came at a New Year’s Eve press conference to announce Kamar Samuels as his schools chancellor. “I will be asking the legislature for a continuation of mayoral control,” he said, adding that he would ensure that “the mayoral control we preside over is not the same one that New Yorkers see today.”
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Mamdani once argued for a co-governance model that would have redistributed authority over the school system away from the mayor’s office and toward the Panel for Educational Policy, Community of Educational Councils, and school leadership teams. His shift means that the question is now not whether mayoral control will continue but what form it takes under his administration.
New York City’s mayoral control model concentrates responsibility between the mayor and the school chancellor, making it less likely that major reforms will be abandoned as soon as leadership changes. Board-governed districts, by contrast, tend to produce leadership turnover and short reform cycles, making accountability almost impossible to sustain.
That helps explain the change of heart: Mamdani may have come to terms with what ending mayoral control would mean in practice. Running New York's school system requires the capacity to move the entire organization in the same direction and to answer for results. Mamdani’s reversal suggests not a shift in beliefs but the lack of a credible alternative that would have allowed him to govern the city’s schools.
Still, his decision is a good one. Mayoral control has been a boon to student performance. Since adopting the policy in 2002, New York City has seen rising graduation rates, academic gains, and the successful implementation of large-scale reforms, such as NYC Reads. The city’s graduation rate rose by 30 percentage points overall, with larger gains among black (32.5 percent increase) and Hispanic (35.3 percent increase) students. Eighth-graders’ scores on state English Language Arts assessments moved from ten points below the statewide average in 2011 to outperforming it by 2019; the city has sustained those gains through 2024.
Of course, those numbers don’t mean the system has solved all its problems. New York City has longstanding challenges that must be fixed, such as chronic absenteeism, special education service delivery, and declining enrollment. And the Mamdani administration needs to set new priorities on education policy. Still, the numbers demonstrate the system’s capacity to improve when accountability is clear.
Mayoral control is set to expire on June 30, which is when the state legislature will determine whether to renew or modify the current system. Mamdani’s recent reversal removes the most serious obstacle to renewal, making an extension more likely—though not necessarily without additional conditions.
In the past, lawmakers have renewed mayoral control, most recently in the 2024 state budget, which extended the system for two years and included conditions on how state funds get used and adjustments to the Panel for Educational Policy’s makeup.
While the mayor’s change of heart is welcome, big questions remain about the Mamdani education policy. At the same press conference, he outlined procedural reforms that would boost parent and educator engagement, such as expanding the role of parent coordinators—school-based staff who handle family outreach and communication—and changing how community meetings are conducted. He didn’t specify whether or how these changes would affect decision-making authority or accountability.
It remains to be seen what those changes will look like and whether they will improve student performance. Expanding committees can bring more perspectives to the table. But without a data-driven focus on student performance, such efforts won’t translate into sustained academic gains.
It is politically easier to adjust the school-governance process than to focus on outcomes. If education debates fixate on process—such as who sits on a council, how meetings are run, or which voices are consulted—policymakers’ attention will shift away from the harder work of improving academic outcomes and holding schools accountable for student learning. When process is treated as progress, confronting ineffective instruction or enforcing standards becomes politically harder.
Centralized educational authority works only when those in power must answer for results. If reforms are not measured and debated publicly, such structures become insular. That’s why, for all its flaws, mayoral control has proved successful in improving student outcomes and enabling results to be tracked over time.
Photo by Jason Alpert-Wisnia / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images