Among Mamdani’s Many Upcoming Challenges: Fixing New York City’s Schools

Zohran Mamdani won over many voters in New York with an ambitious pledge of free child care for all babies and toddlers. When the mayor-elect takes office, his administration will have another huge group of children to worry about: the nearly 900,000 students in the city’s public schools.

It will not be easy.

New York is home to the largest and most challenging education system in the United States, with more than 1,500 schools and a $41 billion annual operating budget that could power a small nation.

Mr. Mamdani has not shared his full vision for schools. He has announced plans to recruit more teachers, expand support for homeless students and trim wasteful education spending. But he has been candid: He is still learning about this unwieldy system.

His selection of a schools chancellor will be closely watched, and he has said he will rely on guidance from advisers and the teachers’ union, which endorsed him.

Michael Mulgrew, president of that union, the United Federation of Teachers, has encouraged Mr. Mamdani to consider retaining Melissa Aviles-Ramos, who has run the system since last fall. The union also has a strong relationship with Meisha Ross Porter, a former schools chancellor who is under consideration for a return engagement and remains popular among education leaders.

Mr. Mamdani’s administration will take over the school system in January at a pivotal moment. Here are some of the complex challenges that he could face:

A Huge Loss of Students

New York City was once home to more than 1.1 million public school students. Not anymore.

This fall, roughly 880,000 children were enrolled, according to new city data.

The dwindling numbers are largely explained by an exodus of families who have often moved to cities where it is far more affordable to raise children and by falling birth rates.

The decline has far-reaching consequences for New York’s school system and could prompt tough questions. Will Mr. Mamdani reduce funding for principals when their enrollment drops? And should his administration merge or close large numbers of schools? Such moves often ignite an enormous backlash among parents and teachers.

The arrival of tens of thousands of migrant children helped stabilize enrollment. But it was a brief reprieve. Projections suggest that the system could lose tens of thousands of additional students in the coming years.

A Federal Education Department Spoiling for a Fight

In New York, schools allow students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. The system launched a Black studies curriculum and social studies lessons on race, culture and sexuality. Its teachers have banded together to shield migrant children from federal immigration officials.

In other words: It is exactly the type of school system that the Trump administration would target.

To some extent, it already has. New York’s schools have faced minor cuts to federal funding. But the outgoing mayor, Eric Adams, curried favor with President Trump and often declined to criticize his policies.

The U.S. Education Department could take a more confrontational approach under Mr. Mamdani, as it has in other cities and states with less conciliatory Democratic leaders. It clashed with Maine’s governor because of the participation of transgender athletes on girls’ sports teams, briefly freezing all federal funding from the state’s public schools in the spring.

A Reading Crisis Among Children

A school system may have no more important responsibility than teaching students how to read.

For decades, New York, like many cities, has failed to consistently do that well.

More than half of Black and Latino children are not proficient on state tests. And the city has moved in the wrong direction: The percentage of students who struggle the most — testing at the lowest performance level on a gold-standard federal exam — rose during the past 15 years.

That may be changing. Mr. Adams’s administration overhauled how children learn to read. And the early results are promising.

The next four years will indicate whether progress can be sustained. “Now is the moment to double down on this work,” Evan Stone, the co-founder of Educators for Excellence, a teachers’ group, said.

The stakes are substantial for the economy and well-being of New Yorkers: Millions of adults across the state are functionally illiterate, meaning they cannot read well enough to navigate common tasks such as understanding medical prescriptions.

A Fraught Local Political Landscape

Education rarely polls as a top issue in elections. But it can ignite a political firestorm.

Mr. Mamdani’s team learned that lesson after a three-sentence answer about the city’s gifted and talented programs, which he provided to a New York Times questionnaire about challenges the city is facing. It fueled a multiday news cycle last month.

Education controversies have proved to be a land mine for past mayors.

Within his first year in office, Mayor Adams made crucial missteps in his management of New York’s popular free prekindergarten programs. That permanently frayed his relationship with many voters who have young children and at times overshadowed his other education accomplishments.

A Stubbornly Unequal School System

In many urban school districts, the opportunities granted to children can look radically different depending on their race, family income or ZIP code.

That inequality is evident across New York.

At some schools in wealthier neighborhoods, parents raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for their PTAs; at those in low-income areas, many families might live in shelters or in other temporary housing.

For children with disabilities, the line between receiving speech therapy and support services — or languishing in classrooms that cannot meet their needs — may come down to whether a parent has the time and means to navigate the city’s byzantine special education system.

Arlen Benjamin-Gomez, the executive director of the Education Trust-New York, an influential policy group, said that the next mayor should take a close look at the disparities across the system.

“Mamdani has an opportunity and a responsibility to make New York City the national model for educational equity,” she said.