It’s the best way to get results.
In 2014, Mayor Bill de Blasio entered office after promising to create Pre-K for All, the nation’s largest free, full-day, high-quality universal prekindergarten program. There were 19,000 students in full-day pre-K when de Blasio took office. Eighteen months later, nearly 70,000 children were enrolled; every 4-year-old whose caregiver applied was offered a seat. The City hired and trained thousands of teachers, built outreach programs that reached every corner of the city, developed curricula and instructional standards, expanded bilingual programs and built systems for safety and quality. Pre-K for All is now hailed as one of the biggest wins for New York families in recent memory. And it was only possible because de Blasio had direct responsibility for the schools.
Mayor-elect Mamdani has also made an ambitious promise to our youngest New Yorkers: to provide universal childcare for all children beginning at 6 weeks old. The proposal shows he understands the power of investing in our youngest New Yorkers and their families. Quality early education programs like childcare and Pre-K offer a powerful one-two punch. First, they help children become more prepared for school and have better long-term outcomes in education, health and employment. And second, in a city where childcare can cost thousands of dollars a month, they relieve financial pressure on working parents.
Beyond universal childcare, Mamdani has not yet advanced a detailed children’s agenda. But there is one exception: His platform calls for “an end to mayoral control.” If he is going to deliver better outcomes for New York’s children, he should reconsider and instead fight to retain this essential tool for educational opportunity.
Life before mayoral control
Before 2002, when then-new Mayor Mike Bloomberg successfully lobbied the State Legislature to grant the City’s chief executive ultimate responsibility for the nation’s largest public school system, a seven-member Board of Education was responsible for education policy, budget-setting and hiring the chancellor. The mayor appointed two members, with the other five appointed by borough presidents. In addition, 32 locally elected Community School Boards hired 32 local district superintendents accountable to the school boards, not the chancellor. These superintendents hired principals and oversaw local budgets and curriculum decisions.
The system was designed to give agency to communities ill-served by the central bureaucracy — a goal consistent with Mamdani’s today — but it did not serve children well. Instead, we saw decades of stagnant student achievement, low graduation rates, racially disparate outcomes and endemic, embarrassing corruption. Chancellors lacked the tools to drive change in failing local districts. And with seven bosses appointed by six different elected officials, it was difficult for chancellors to set clear priorities and a coherent vision. Worst of all, most New Yorkers took this dysfunction for granted.
Mayoral control created a system with a clear chain of command. It rests on the idea that our children deserve the focus of an empowered leader chosen directly by voters in a relatively high-turnout election. The mayor manages the Health, Fire, Police and Sanitation Departments. Surely the same should be true of our schools.
Mayoral control accelerates affordability and achievement
I can speak to the value of this accountability firsthand. In March 2014, Mayor de Blasio appointed me to serve as deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives and charged me with making Pre-K for All a reality. And I can tell you that it could never have happened if Mayor de Blasio had not directly managed the school system.
To share one example of many: We needed to quickly open thousands of new Pre-K classrooms in every corner of the city. We expanded existing programs to serve more kids, converted underutilized rooms in schools, rented storefronts, constructed beautiful new buildings on parking lots and other City-owned spaces, took over closed parochial schools and brought charter and private schools into the fold. This required unprecedented coordination between an alphabet soup of agencies, including the Fire Department, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Department of Design and Construction, Department of Youth and Community Development, the School Construction Authority, Department of Buildings, the Administration for Children’s Services — and, of course, the Department of Education. Our office built systems to facilitate coordination: to set collective goals, break down silos and hold agency commissioners and the chancellor accountable for results.
It was not easy. But it worked, in large part, because all of those commissioners had the same boss. It is hard enough to make substantial and rapid changes in our schools. To do so when a chancellor is accountable to multiple elected stakeholders, and doesn’t even directly supervise the principals of the schools where this work will take place, is just about impossible.
The City’s Community Schools Initiative offers another example. Community Schools boost student achievement and well-being by integrating social supports into schools, so that students can come to school ready to learn. In practice, that means connecting schools to community-based nonprofits that deliver services including school-based health clinics, mental health counseling, after-school and summer programs, English as a second language classes, food pantries and, in some cases, even laundry machines. The strategy is built on a simple notion: Students who come to school hungry, struggling with depression, lacking stable housing or facing similar challenges will struggle to succeed. Community Schools remove those barriers so teaching and learning can happen.
Mayoral control allowed New York City to build the nation’s most comprehensive Community Schools system. As deputy mayor, I helped create the Office of Community Schools in City Hall, a central hub that ensured every district operated under a unified vision. Starting with 45 schools in 2014, the initiative has grown to 419 Community Schools serving 173,000 students across every district. The mayor-elect has committed to supporting these schools, and for good reason. Graduation rates are 7.2% higher than in comparison schools. Chronic absenteeism has dropped significantly, especially for students in temporary housing, whose chronic absenteeism fell 9.3%. Disciplinary incidents dropped. And these gains were concentrated in the highest-need neighborhoods.
Cross-agency choreography was essential to make these schools work, and that depended on mayoral control. For instance, the Department of Youth and Community Development ran the process to select the community-based organizations that coordinate services within each school. The Office of School Health ensured school-based health care. The Department of Homeless Services partnered with schools serving high concentrations of students in shelters. When COVID hit, Community Schools acted as neighborhood hubs for food, internet devices and health care, and as enrichment centers for the children of first responders. Companies stepped up as well. For example, Warby Parker provided free glasses to 65,000 students across all Community Schools, removing one of the most basic barriers to learning.
The benefits of mayoral control continued under Mayor Eric Adams, who launched NYC Reads under the leadership of Chancellor David Banks. Previously, schools selected their own reading curricula, and quality varied widely. Too few schools embraced the essential role phonics plays in teaching early readers. NYC Reads requires all districts to choose from among a handful of centrally vetted, phonics-aligned curricula — an approach that extensive research has proved to help kids learn to read in the early grades — and works with unions to coach principals and teachers. NYC Reads represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the central administration and its districts — change that requires empowered mayoral leadership and concentrated execution. And we are seeing results. After decades of stagnant test scores followed by declines during the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City students posted a 7-point increase in reading scores last year, with the largest gains occurring in the earliest schools to adopt NYC Reads.
Pre-K for All, Community Schools and NYC Reads represent significant steps forward. But make no mistake, we have a long way to go. Literacy rates remain alarmingly low, with persistent achievement gaps between white and Asian students and Black and Latino students, and between students from high- and low-income families. Chronic absenteeism is rising, and the long-term effects of the pandemic are still playing out in our classrooms. The City faces substantial federal funding threats to its schools, as well as systems like health care, food and housing that students depend on. The mayoral-control era should give us confidence that we can manage these challenges: Since 2002, the graduation gap between Black and white students has decreased by 13.3 points, and the difference between Hispanic and white students dropped from 26.7 points to 12.6 points. Overall, the dropout rate has gone from 18.5% to 4.8%.
Without mayoral authority, the urgent work of improving achievement and reducing gaps would be subject to the whims of local political interests and hampered by the complexity of working across bureaucracies led by multiple leaders with various priorities.
It is about accountability
Mayoral control’s critics assert it locks out the voice of parents, a serious concern. After all, we cannot force change on communities. Durable reform requires deep engagement with the students, parents, teachers and administrators who are closest to the work. The mayor-elect’s platform asserts that he would replace mayoral control with “a system instead in which parents, students, educators and administrators work together to create the school environments in which students and families will best thrive.”
But while community engagement must be strengthened, it is not incompatible with mayoral control. Today, the city has thousands of avenues for parents to engage directly with their children’s education — from Parent-Teacher Associations to School Leadership Teams to Community Education Councils to the Panel for Educational Policy. These bodies have driven increased funding for special education, support for immigrant students and critical facilities upgrades. A smart mayor will listen to these voices not only because it is good politics, but because it makes for better policy. The mayor’s authority to execute, combined with the power of parent voice, makes change possible.
Ending mayoral control would diminish the mayor’s authority and distribute it among other officials. To his credit, the mayor-elect has made clear that he does not intend to return to the system of 32 elected local school boards, though he has been less clear about what comes next. His platform speaks to “co-governance,” but we have seen across the country that diffusing responsibility makes progress less likely.
Indeed, elected school boards are in a very real sense less representative of community voice than the system we have today. Across the nation, school board elections are plagued with low turnout, hovering around 5%-10%, and are increasingly attracting massive amounts of special interest campaign spending. A few activists can take hold of these bodies and use them to force inequitable financing, patchwork policies and subpar achievement.
And perhaps most importantly, weakening mayoral control weakens public accountability. Elections are, after all, the ultimate form of community engagement. If you are not satisfied, you can vote the mayor out. Under the prior system, few people knew their school board members. But everyone knows who the mayor is. In the old system, school board members would point their fingers at the mayor, who would point his fingers at the borough presidents and so on. And at the end of the day, everyone threw their hands up, lamenting that nothing could be done. Making authority more diffuse makes accountability more diffuse.
There’s time to reconsider, Mr. Mayor-elect
The public’s trust in government is historically low, with devastating results for our politics. One reason for that distrust is that, so often, our elected leaders make promises without delivering. De Blasio faced broad opposition to Pre-K for All. Why? Most critics weren’t really opposed to Pre-K for All. They thought it would be a waste of money; they thought the mayor couldn’t deliver. Critics exploited this cynicism, with Reason Magazine intoning “Mayor de Blasio looks out at this vast blighted terrain of waste and broken promises and thinks to himself: ‘Time to expand.’”
Instead, mayoral control gave Mayor de Blasio a powerful lever to do what many thought impossible, and by doing so, gave hope to many who discount the ability of communities to come together through their government to make positive change.
Our new mayor-elect will face profound challenges; foremost among these is building systems worthy of our children. This is not the time to weaken his ability to do so. Mayoral control has proved an essential tool for change, not only for pre-K, community schools and reading instruction, but also for equitable school funding, recruiting diverse teachers and many other innovations. As Mamdani continues to develop his priorities, I am confident he will come to appreciate the benefits of the current system.
Mayoral control is not a panacea. But meaningful change can’t happen unless the mayor has the authority to drive it, and voters have the authority to hold him accountable for doing so.