With a few days to go a widely used betting site, polymarket.com reports 95% of the bets are on Mamdani to win and latest polling results agree see here. While it’s never over till it’s over I think the only question is whether Mamdani receives a majority of the vote, remember, not ranked choice voting, a plurality wins.
Education was way down on the voter issue list: affordability and safety topped the list, childcare and the quick phrases, freeze the rent, free buses, city-run supermarkets in food deserts.
The NYTimes reports,
Zohran Mamdani, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez united on Sunday for a huge rally in Queens, casting Mr. Mamdani’s once unlikely candidacy for mayor of New York City as a powerful step forward in the Democratic efforts to push back on President Trump.
If elected, Mr. Mamdani will assume the mayoralty having set an extraordinarily high standard for his own success. His meteoric rise through the race has been fueled by a promise to make the city more affordable through four signature policy proposals. He has promised universal child care, free buses, city-owned grocery stores and a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments.
But as the stars of the liberal world reveled in the moment, they were contemplating what awaits after the Nov. 4 election, if they win, when Mr. Mamdani and his movement will face a far tougher challenge than even a long-shot campaign: running the largest city in America and proving to the political world that their agenda can be replicated across the country.
Mandani does have an education plan, an excellent plan, see here; however his plan requires significant additional dollars and has received virtually no ink except for a sentence on mayoral con
Zohran supports an end to mayoral control and envisions 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—strengthening co-governance through the PEP, SLTs, DLTs, and CECs in particular.
In the other areas picking a chancellor or retaining the current chancellor does involve a transition, and a major decision: what follows mayoral control?
Chalkbeat reports the Mandani team met with a wide range of advocates,
Last week, a handful of Mamdani campaign staffers organized a roundtable discussion with dozens of education advocates, parent leaders, and experts to solicit input on what Mamdani should prioritize if he is elected on Nov. 4, multiple people in attendance told Chalkbeat.
The conversation covered several broad topics in virtual breakout rooms, including funding, community schools, literacy, “privatization,” youth groups, students with disabilities, English language learners, children experiencing homelessness, and artificial intelligence, according to a meeting agenda.
One topic of discussion was Mamdani’s vow to end mayoral control of the city’s public schools, which allows the mayor to select a schools chancellor and appoint the majority of the Panel for Educational Policy, or PEP, a board that votes on major contracts and policy decisions. Mamdani has pledged to replace mayoral control with a “co-governance” model that includes more input from students, educators, and parents, though he has not said what that might look like.
Jonathan Greenberg, a Queens parent leader invited to give a short presentation on mayoral control at the meeting, laid out a plan backed by the Education Council Consortium, a coalition of parent leaders. The proposal would extend the mayoral control law in the short term while giving the mayor fewer votes on the PEP. (State law grants the authority of mayoral control, which is up for renewal in June 2026.)
“That would create a functional PEP that would have to be engaged and have meaningful discussion on the issues rather than simply taking what the mayor says and voting,” Greenberg said.
Meanwhile, a commission would come up with a more detailed vision for reforming the school governance system to be implemented later.
The Mamdani staffers who participated in the meeting did not weigh in on that proposal.
Will Mayor-elect Mamdani nibble around the edges, give up control of the PEP, keep the current chancellor in her current position or appoint an insider as an interim chancellor until a commission can come up with a new management system in a few months or maybe extending the current system for a year?
In other words painting over the flaking paint on a building with fatal construction flaws.
The de Blasio and Adams administration were committed to a magic bullet educational system. de Blasio poured 1 B into ThriveNYC, I visited a number of the designated ThriveNYC schools, chaos, external organizations in schools more disruptive than helpful. Adams mandated top-down reading and math programs and the current testing and remediation system. Teachers viewed as mechanics tightening bolts rather than professionals working collaboratively with children to address the most effective interventions. The Adams administration goal: increasing scores on the required State tests, tests scrubbed by the State to increase scores, on the April round of tests everyone did better. The Empire Center for Public Policy reports,
This … release of 2024-25 math and reading test results from the NYS Education Department reopened a nagging question:
Why are New York’s public school students showing steadily higher proficiency levels on state-administered tests when their scores on federal tests have been getting worse?
Part of the answer seems to lie in the Education Department’s grading methods. For most of the past dozen years, the department has been gradually lowering “cut scores” – the minimum number of questions students have to answer correctly in order to be considered proficient at each grade level.
The NYC School System needs a rebuild, the current frequent testing/remediation approach is both boring for our students, intended solely for a presser lauding increased test scores and devalues our teachers. The Center for Assessment discusses the importance of school cultures and assessment cultures, I recommend you read the whole article entitled Assessment Culture and Assessment Systems here https://www.nciea.org/blog/assessment-culture-assessment-systems/
Features of assessment culture that are supportive of teaching and learning— such as valuing assessment for learning and having clear structures in place to support collaborative analysis—facilitate the likelihood that desired characteristics of a balanced assessment system, … will be observed.
In contrast, hindering aspects of assessment culture—such as a narrow focus on data trends, the use of assessment results primarily for accountability, and rigid structures focused on test prep—make it more likely that an assessment system will be less balanced as characterized by incoherence and limited instructional utility
Understanding the challenges that need to be addressed to improve an assessment system can help to streamline efforts. If, for example, a school knows that educators overly emphasize the state summative assessment—spending hours on test prep and teaching to the test—instead of focusing on cultural aspects related to that challenge (e.g., beliefs around the purpose of the assessment; how summative assessment results are reported and discussed), can help ensure that these are accounted for when establishing a strategy for change.
Improving assessment culture and assessment systems is an iterative process, not a linear one. Using both lenses to view assessment practices in a school or district will lead to more deliberate and strategic decisions, which ultimately will benefit teaching and learning.
In other words, treat teachers as professionals, with ownership of practice living in collaborative school communities, not cogs on an assembly line.
Tune in to the next post for specific recommendations.
Ed in the Apple: Blogging on the Intersection of Education and Politics Title 
The NYC School System needs a rebuild
That rebuild has to start by empowering teachers with the knowledge and authority to develop curricula to meet the needs of the students in front of them. No two students learn at the same rate or the same way. There are general guidelines that can inform instruction drawn from the studies of how children learn to read, to make sense of the squiggles on the page and turn them into sounds and words, but no one approach will work for every student.
I can vividly remember the first time I was able to sound out a new word (“gar-den”) by recognizing the separate syllables, not the individual sounds of the letters. I learned to read differently than my peers because I had a strong visual memory so I could use word parts to build new words. I didn’t know that there were phonics rules based on letter sounds until I started teaching learning disabled students and studied their workbooks.
Once a student can attack unknown words, s/he becomes a proficient reader when given interesting things to read, and, again, no two students will be interested in the same things. Students only become more proficient as readers when they read more. This is described as the “Matthew Effect;” to those who have much, more will be given. The more widely a student reads, the more information they accumulate, the more they can read and understand new material. The constant assessment for reporting purposes distorts that educational goal as the material on tests is too brief and scattershot to increase the student’s knowledge bank.
The tyranny of testing was applied from the top down by administrators and politicians with little of no experience in classrooms with real students, especially not with struggling students. It has not accomplished its purpose, to make all students proficient readers, because that can only happen in the one-to-one interactions of skilled teachers with individual students.
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