How Do We End Mayoral Control?
Mayoral control of the city schools is facing a serious challenge. It might be the most significant challenge in more than two decades of scandals, outrages, protests, hearings, and timely renewals of the mayoral control law with minimal modifications by the state legislature.
Zohran Mamdani has become the clear favorite to be the next mayor in the general election coming in November 2025. He won the Democratic Party primary on June 24 with a groundswell of support, massive door to door canvassing and an unprecedented voter turnout. He is campaigning on a program of freezing rents, opening city-run grocery stores, providing child care, ending fare collection on MTA buses and raising taxes on the wealthy. He also opposes mayoral control.
As the frontrunner, his stance on governance for the public school system is a likely reason why Michael Mulgrew pushed for UFT delegates to give Mamdani its endorsement last week. The union had remained neutral during the primary, purportedly because an online poll showing UFT members were polarized between Mamdani and Cuomo. Effecting an alignment with Mamdani was no picnic for Mulgrew. Mamdani’s consistent support for the rights of Palestinians and condemnation of Israel’s war on Gaza after being constantly grilled on it by reporters and debate moderators endeared him to many and made him odious to others, including many among Mulgrew’s Unity caucus supporters and UFT retirees.
We may be wrong about this, but it seems safe to speculate that Mulgrew’s push for an early summer endorsement was meant as something other than a show of affinity for Mamdani’s platform for an affordability New York. One only has recall that Mulgrew launched a lawsuit to stop congestion pricing in 2024 which would have significantly reduced the revenue MTA is now getting. Rather, was more the result of strategic thinking on the part of the UFT leadership. By claiming a seat at the table among Mamdani’s supporters the UFT might have a better chance of influencing the next big swing in the governance of city schools.
This and several future posts are meant to provide background for a discussion of how mayoral control can be ended as soon as possible. Here we will begin by looking at what happened during the first two terms of the Bloomberg administration. These years saw the enactment of the law in 2002 and its renewal in 2009.
During the 2000s New York City was saddled with a version of mayor control as authoritarian as in any other major city, including Chicago which had led the way during the 1990s by establishing a CEO of the schools and abolishing its elected school board. This was not because the New York State legislature prescribed such a lopsided a concentration of power. Instead, Michael Bloomberg used the authority accorded him in 2002 to expand his powers and reduce the powers of those below him in ways the legislature never foresaw or allowed for. It was a monumental power grab.
Writing in 2009 at the time of the first renewal of the law Stephen Sanders, who in 2002 was chairperson of the state assembly’s Education Committee declared, “The school system that has been constructed by this mayor and his chancellor is not the one envisioned by the 2002 law. The law intended to strengthen the hand of the mayor and chancellor, not grant him exclusive and dictatorial powers.” The mayor control law of 2002 law for the first time gave the mayor power to choose a schools chancellor unilaterally. The chancellor then selected the thirty-two local district superintendents. These superintendents would continue to be administrative leaders in their districts answering to the chancellor. The law also gave the mayor the ability to appoint a majority of the central board, seven with borough presidents getting one seat each to appoint. Bloomberg renamed it the Panel for Education Policy (PEP). This central board, according to Sanders, was to “retain a meaningful role and continue to maintain jurisdiction over citywide educational policy issues and contracts.”
At the district level the local boards were replaced with Community District Education Councils (CECs). Council members would be selected by the Parent Associations from schools in the district. The superintendents were obliged to work with the CECs, which would hold monthly open meetings “to hear from the public and discuss educational priorities for their district and to make recommendations as well as to exercise some specific duties and oversight.”
The community school boards that the CECs replaced were established by the 1969 decentralization law in response to the tumultuous years of conflict with a Board of Education’s unresponsive to minority parents and a movement for community control pressed by Black and Puerto Rican activists. The legislation provided for elections to the more than thirty local boards which had the authority to choose their own superintendents. They could not decide on curriculum or the hiring of professional titles. Nor did they manage the contracts for major services. They did control hiring of school aides and minor purchasing contracts, and how school buildings could be used for evening activities.
Election to the school boards was the entry point for political careers. It provided a start for prominent minority legislators and progressive politicians like Robert Jackson and Ivette Clark as well as Sanders himself and Bill De Blasio. The local boards were opposed by nearly all the mayors from the 1970s onward.
It is common to think of Michael Bloomberg’s gaining power over the schools singlehandedly like a kind of hostile takeover. It is also a history of centralization in our era must include an account of the inscrutable giveaways. It is at most speculative to name the most important factors that went into Randi Weingarten’s support for Bloomberg’s power grab. One was his promise to increase spending on the city schools. A component of that spending was increased salaries for teachers who at the time the mayoral control law was being passed had been without a contract for 18 months.
Another was the probability that Bloomberg would improve the city’s education statistics, levels of proficiency in reading and math, and progress in closing the so-called achievement gap between white, Asian and Back and Latino students. The accountability crusade, which was supported by Democrats as adamantly as Republicans was putting enormous pressure on schools and teachers across the country. Bloomberg had made his fortune on selling data. Were he to pull off a New York City “miracle” Weingarten would have made sure that teachers shared the credit.
Check back to this page for Part 2 of the article
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