The People Who Wrecked N.Y. Schools Love Zohran Mamdani
Democrats are politicking as if their COVID-era derangements don't matter.
Set aside for a moment the real estate price controls, the government groceries, even the growing stack of missed opportunities to forthrightly condemn antisemitic violence—New York mayoral Democratic Party nominee Zohran Mamdani this week reminded us anew about the awfulness of his candidacy by receiving the enthusiastic endorsement of (shudder) the local teachers union.
"[Mamdani] has clearly broken through to the people of this city," United Federation of Teachers (UFT) President Michael Mulgrew said at a celebratory press conference on Wednesday. "The politics of old are no longer working…. It is time for the city to say to everyone across this country, that [it] is the workers, it's the poor, it's the middle class, who have been getting the shaft throughout, and we're going to lead the way in this city."
The "politics of old" is actually an apt descriptor of the UFT, New York City's second-largest union, whose 200,000 members include around 60,000 pension-drawing retirees. As in so many other Democratic-run big cities, NYC politics and policies have for the past decade-plus been disproportionately misshapen by the parochial professional concerns of a monopoly-seeking guild.
In practice, this means not just the 3.5 percent annual raises locked in by the five-year contract signed in 2023 with Mayor Eric Adams (raising the starting salary for teachers with bachelor's degrees from $61,070 to $72,349), but also a 2022 statewide classroom-size mandate, state and city caps on the number of allowable charter schools (whose teachers are generally nonunion), plus a proposal to roll back modest 2012 public-sector pension reforms enacted (and now opportunistically opposed) by Andrew Cuomo.
Such blatant featherbedding comes with obvious costs and dubious benefits. New York leads the nation in per-pupil K-12 spending at both the state ($36,300) and city ($39,300) levels, contributing to the Empire State's dead-last ranking in overall tax burden. Has there been a measurable student-performance bang for all those bucks? No, there has not.
Zohran Mamdani favors the UFT's already aggressive wish list but wants to go even further than his vote-grubbing competitors and endorsement-wielding predecessors by advocating the end of mayoral control over the Department of Education, replaced by an alphabet soup of "co-governance" entities that would inevitably be controlled or heavily influenced by—you guessed it!—the teachers union. Not even Bill de Blasio, the only UFT endorsee to win the city's top slot during the past 35 years, went that far.
Befitting someone who is not just a Democrat, but a democratic socialist, sometimes Mamdani's education policy positions land to the left of the Democratic Party–supporting union. The UFT, for example, wants to de-emphasize but still retain the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), which historically has determined which students are admitted to eight of the city's nine elite public high schools. As my colleague Emma Camp noted last month, Mamdani, a graduate from one of those schools and a former SHSAT tutor, said in 2022 that he wants to abolish the test altogether, in the name of desegregation. (During the 2025 campaign, he softened that to supporting "an independent analysis of the Specialized HS exam for gender and racial bias.")
In New York politics, SHSAT-abolitionist progressives who throw around words like "segregation" to describe 21st century schooling are almost always in favor of abolishing Gifted and Talented programs. The UFT, however, is not. "It's a terribly misguided approach," Mulgrew co-wrote with Kirsten Jon Foy in 2019, after a Diversity Advisory Group appointed by de Blasio suggested euthanizing G&T. "Access to these programs should be expanded, not eliminated, particularly in large parts of Brooklyn and of the Bronx—the parts where black and Hispanic residents mostly live, where gifted programs are now few and far between."
I have not found Mamdani on the record discussing Gifted and Talented programs. But he did, as recently as six weeks ago, say, "My administration will focus on addressing the root educational causes of this segregation by implementing recommendations from the 2019 School Diversity Advisory Group's at elementary and middle schools across our city."
The radical implications of such a move would go far, far beyond eliminating admissions tests for smart kids in government-run K-12s. As I wrote back in 2019, the proposals included "push[ing] every school in a given district to have the exact same demographics as the district as a whole within three years, as the borough within five years, and as the whole city within 10. The sheer logistics of such an enterprise would make '70s-style busing seem modest, which is one reason that both the New York Post and the largest local teacher's union were in rare agreement that the plan was a non-starter."
This, nevertheless, is Zohran Mamdani's stated policy position.
Think of Mamdani's educational approach as containing two sharp prongs of a large pitchfork: On the left is his progressive/millennial antiracism/desegregation, which goes further than the union feels comfortable in attempting to dismantle any perceived bastion of exclusionary privilege. On the right is his big-government commitment to giving teachers even more of what they want than traditional Democrats will.
Basically, it's a rerun of NYC educational policy circa 2019–21, albeit with a tad more social media pizazz. But here's the problem with that particular one-two punch of wokeness and union deference: We tried that during and after the challenge of COVID, and the failure was so profound that it wrecked New York schools.
In the five years between the 2019–20 school year and the 2023–24 school year, New York City public schools lost a staggering 98,000 students, or 11.6 percent of the population. Only Houston (12.4 percent) and Los Angeles (13.1 percent) among big cities had a larger percentage drop. Some of that familial flight pre-dated COVID, as increasing numbers of kids and parents found themselves dissatisfied with the city's 2018–19 adoption of "controlled choice" admissions standards, by which bureaucrats balance consumer desire against the progressive directive of balancing socioeconomic and racial demographics.
Then came COVID. New York, like virtually all Democratic-run cities in blue states, kept schools largely closed and in "remote learning" limbo well into June 2021, based on a series of numbers-outta-their-arse testing formulae negotiated between the UFT and the mayor it endorsed. Brooklyn teachers in August 2020 protested with coffins and skeletons at the mere thought of going into (safe) school buildings, at a time when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, like political leaders all over the non-American industrialized world, had simply and correctly reopened schools.
Similar scenes across the country created a backlash against government-run education that is likely to prove permanent, at least numbers-wise. But it also sparked a political backlash, including right here in New York City. Eric Adams in 2021 successfully ran against COVID-era school closures and public disorder. New York Republicans in the 2022 midterms, campaigning largely against 2020–21 Democratic derangements in NYC, flipped four seats in the House of Representatives from blue to red, thus helping tip control of the lower chamber back to the GOP. We've seen this movie before, and it stunk.
Mamdani, and the N.Y. Democratic establishment mostly coalescing around him, are betting that voters have short memories and will be willing to excuse some in-the-moment excesses, like the democratic socialist tweeting in November 2020 that "Queer liberation means defund the police" or talking in February 2021 about "seizing the means of production."
And they may well be right, at least about the 2025 politics. But some of us who did not succumb to madness in 2020, and made the perhaps foolhardy decision to stay in the five boroughs, will not soon check the box for any candidate who, like so many Democrats, responded to the challenge of a lifetime with bad ideas and batshit craziness. Seize this, Zohran.
