BLOOMBERG'S FORMER EDUCATION CZAR WARNS: I'M ALARMED - MAMDANI COULD KILL NEW YORK'S SCHOOLS

I ran New York City’s school system under Mayor Bloomberg. And I’m alarmed by the socialist’s plans.

By Joel Klein

09.03.25 — Via The Free Press

Education

Zohran Mamdani, the odds-on favorite to be the next mayor of New York City, has said precious little about education. But as someone who ran our school system for almost a decade, I can tell you what little he has said is alarming.

He is opposed to charter schools and said he wouldn’t allow any more of them. He is opposed to gifted and talented (G&T) elementary and middle schools. He is troubled by the admissions criteria for the city’s specialized high schools. He is opposed to mayoral control of the schools.

And he was even rumored earlier this summer to consider Jamaal Bowman, the highly polarizing, extremely left-wing former congressman, as a potential candidate to lead the school system as chancellor. I held that position from 2002 to 2010 while Michael Bloomberg was the city’s mayor.

Mamdani’s platform is almost certain to hurt the mostly black and Latino kids who live in the city’s poorer communities while driving middle-class and affluent families out of the public school system.

Let’s start with charter schools, an issue on which the evidence is overwhelmingly compelling. Charter schools are a public-school option—free to students and available to all, by lottery if oversubscribed. But in contrast to traditional public schools (called “district schools”), charter schools are operated by private, generally nonprofit organizations rather than by government bureaucrats.

When Bloomberg took over, there were just a handful of such schools in the city, serving a thousand or so students. Today, as a result of Bloomberg’s determined commitment to create new opportunities for traditionally underserved kids, there are 285 charter schools, with a total of about 150,000 students, about 90 percent of whom are either black or Latino.

Every one of those students could have attended a district school, but their families chose a charter school instead. That fact, by itself, speaks volumes about what parents in underserved communities think is best for their children.

The results prove that these parents knew what they were doing. Year after year, the students in the city’s charter schools outperform comparable students in district schools. On the most recent state tests in math and English language arts (ELA), for example, black students in charter schools had a proficiency rate of 61.5 percent in math and 58.6 percent in ELA. Black students in district schools had a proficiency rate of just 34.3 percent in math and 40.3 percent in ELA.

At the same time, Latino students in charter schools had a proficiency rate of 60.5 percent in math and 55.2 percent in ELA, while Latino students in district schools had a proficiency rate of 35.7 percent in math and 39.4 percent in ELA.

I’m a Public School Teacher. The Kids Aren’t Alright.

Those are huge differences. To put a bit of icing on this cake, independent academic studies have repeatedly confirmed that the city’s charter schools dramatically outperform its district schools, including in an exhaustive, book-length study by Stanford University professor Thomas Sowell, titled Charter Schools and Their Enemies.

Not surprisingly, parents want more charter schools. Mamdani says he won’t allow that to happen. But why not, especially since he styles himself a champion of the underclass? The answer is easy: The teachers union despises charter schools because, unlike the district schools—which are all unionized—most of the charters aren’t.

The teachers union is the most powerful force in urban politics, and in a city like New York, it can be suicidal for a politician to oppose the union. Just ask Eva Moskowitz, the former chair of the New York City Council’s education committee, who took on the union and lost her bid for Manhattan borough president as a result. (Moskowitz got her revenge by going on to run 57 remarkably high-performing charter schools in the city.)

Although opposing the union is politically unwise, supporting its agenda can be devastating for kids. Even as it skillfully paints itself as caring about students, the union always puts its members first, protecting even incompetent and abusive teachers and insisting that compensation be based solely on seniority, not performance. For the union, accountability is a four-letter word. Mamdani evidently got the message and, by forcefully opposing any new charter schools, looks to be willing to sacrifice the kids to keep the union on his side. So much for educating the underclass.

Mamdani is also ready to sacrifice the most high-achieving kids in the system by jettisoning the G&T elementary and middle schools that serve those kids. This time, he appears to be motivated by his preference for increased diversity at the expense of heightened excellence.

The G&T schools typically admit students based largely or exclusively on their scores on standardized tests. The data suggests that Asians and whites make up about 75 percent of students in these schools, while blacks and Latinos make up about 25 percent. Overall, Asians and whites are about 31 percent of the school system, and black and Latinos are about 67 percent.

In the eyes of critics like Mamdani, this apparently makes G&T schools enclaves for the privileged. But by eliminating those schools, Mamdani will deny the most high-achieving kids the education they deserve, while doing nothing for the other kids in the system. Perhaps he thinks that the kids who would have gone to the G&T schools will instead go to schools that are more racially and economically integrated. But that’s not how it works in the real world.

To begin with, New York is, unfortunately, highly residentially segregated. That means even if they don’t go to a G&T school, those kids will almost certainly attend a school in their community with students largely of their own race and ethnicity.

More concerning, many parents who can afford to send their kids to private schools will take them out of public schools rather than have them attend inferior schools in the name of increasing diversity. Others may leave the city altogether. These are typically middle-class families whose support can be critical for the public school system.

Mamdani should know this from his own experience. His parents sent him to Bank Street School for Children, a private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that serves kids in kindergarten through the eighth grade. When it came time for him to go to high school, Mamdani went to Bronx High School of Science, a specialized high school that generally admits students based on a single test score. Bronx Science has long been recognized as one of the best schools in the nation.

And while there were very few black and Latino students at Bronx Science, that didn’t deter Mamdani from going there himself and getting a superb education. Indeed, if Bronx Science were no longer a test-based specialized high school, or if Mamdani hadn’t gotten into it or one of the other specialized high schools, he likely would have gone to private school, as he did for the lower grades.

Despite being willing to gut the elementary and middle G&T schools, Mamdani hasn’t yet gone quite that far when it comes to the specialized high schools. Instead, he said that he would “support an independent analysis of the Specialized HS exam for gender and racial bias.”

It’s hard to see a principled basis for Mamdani’s distinction between G&T elementary and middle schools on the one hand, and G&T high schools like Bronx Science on the other.

If racial and ethnic segregation is his driving concern, they are all equally segregated. More likely, this seems like political subterfuge. The admissions test for the specialized high schools has already been independently studied and found to be unbiased. But Mamdani may have learned an important lesson from former mayor Bill de Blasio, who wanted to end the admissions tests but was thwarted in his effort to do so.

For the Asian community, whose children comprise the majority of students at these schools, ending the test is a third-rail political issue. In short, hiding behind a bias study, Mamdani appears to want to get safely through the election before telling us what he intends to do about treasured schools like the one he went to.

Let me be very clear here. Mamdani is absolutely right to be concerned about the paucity of blacks and Latinos at specialized high schools. But the solution is not to undermine some of the best schools in the country, which have a history of graduating large numbers of Rhodes Scholars and Nobel Prize winners, many of whom came from low-income families. That will only hurt the exceptional students who have long benefited from attending these schools.

The solution is to better educate children of color in the earlier grades so that substantially more of them can get into and enjoy the benefits afforded by the specialized high schools. That will make these schools more diverse and increase the number of children of color who go to the best colleges and achieve greatness.

Next, Mamdani has said he would abandon mayoral control of the schools in favor of some new, supposedly more parent- and community-based governance structure that he hasn’t described. Mayoral control was a hard-earned, critical reform achieved by Bloomberg. Before that, the schools were governed by a seven-person board, with the mayor appointing two members and each of the city’s five borough presidents appointing one.

It was a prescription for political patronage and paralysis. Bloomberg argued that education was every bit as, if not more, important than the other functions that a mayor is responsible for (such as economic development, safety, and health) and that the mayor should be empowered to manage the schools and be held accountable for their results as well.

No mayor after Bloomberg, including de Blasio, who disagreed with Bloomberg on almost everything else about education and has endorsedMamdani, has proposed ending mayoral control. They all knew what Mamdani seems willing to ignore: Diffusing power might sound popular, but it is a prescription for disaster. It enshrines the status quo, making it hard to get things changed while leaving no one accountable for the results because they are always someone else’s fault.

It’s hard enough to improve New York’s underperforming school system with mayoral control. Without it, it will become impossible, something that anyone familiar with the bad old days prior to mayoral control would tell you.

Finally, I have no idea if Jamaal Bowman will wind up as the next New York schools chancellor. Bowman endorsed Mamdani in the primary and called him “my brother.” That said, it’s hard to think of a worse choice.

A former school principal and member of Congress, Bowman has assembled a remarkably concerning record. He falsely set off the fire alarm during a House of Representatives meeting in order to avoid a vote, for which he was later censured by his congressional colleagues and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. He made patently irresponsible statements about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on New York and the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

Bowman compiled an abysmal record of academic achievement as a principal at a middle school in the Bronx. In 2019, after a decade of his leadership, only 26 percent of the students at his school were proficient in ELA and 30 percent in math, one of the worst performances in the entire city. Given that record, perhaps it’s not surprising he called standardized testing “a form of modern-day slavery.” But it’s certainly very troubling, especially for a principal or schools chancellor. If Bowman were to do for the rest of the city what he did for his own school, the system would be wrecked, and a generation of students, if not more, would pay the price.

New York is projected to spend more than $42,000 per student this year on public school education, the highest amount by any urban school district in the country. Mamdani predictably wants to spend more. Where he will get the money to do that, given all the freebies he has promised to residents of the city, is unclear. But whether he spends more or less won’t matter if he sticks to the positions he has already espoused. Every indication so far suggests that Mamdani is heading in the wrong direction.

His approach will not only be devastating for students in the Big Apple. It will also have repercussions elsewhere. As America’s largest school district, New York is often looked to as a learning lab for other cities and states: If you can make it there, as they say, you can make it anywhere.

When Bloomberg’s reforms delivered results, they were copied elsewhere. Indeed, many people who were part of the school leadership during the Bloomberg administration were eagerly sought after and went on to run other district and state school systems, including in Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Louisiana. Under Mamdani, New York, far from being a model and an inspiration for improvements elsewhere, will have to attach a “DNR” sign to its “reforms”—Do Not Replicate.

Unfortunately, given the divided field opposing him, every sign points to Mamdani becoming the city’s next mayor. This gives every New Yorker who cares about our children two choices: hope he changes his positions or elect someone else.