New York City’s public schools are controlled by the mayor. For most of the twentieth century, the schools were managed by a Board of Education, whose members were appointed by a combination of the mayor and the borough presidents and sometimes other officials (NYC has five boroughs). When billionaire Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor in 2001, he asked the legislature to turn the entire school system into a Department of city government, like the Police Department, the Fire Department, the Sanitation Department. The mayor is solely in charge of choosing the members of the school board and hiring the system’s chancellor. (Personally, I have come to believe it is a very bad arrangement because the mayor has so many other responsibilities.)
So, it matters a lot–for the families and 1.1 million students enrolled in the public schools–who will be mayor and what his/her plans are for the schools.
Leonie Haimson, who leads Class Size Matters, has compiled a brief summary of each candidate’s views on education. You will notice that none of the candidates is proposing an end to mayoral control, though some apparently believe that parents and students should have some voice.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great. I’m glad she’s collecting and compiling the candidate plans for public schools students.
The ed reform echo chamber are discussing the mayor’s race exclusively on their positions on charter schools:
https://www.the74million.org/article/new-york-city-mayors-race-features-striking-new-posture-on-charter-schools/
Apparently public school students are of so little interest to ed reformers they’ve completely omitted them. Isn’t NYC the largest public school system in the country? How do you “evaluate” the candidate’s on “public education” and omit public schools?
Check the box on lockstep promotion and funding and support of charters and you’re golden in ed reform. Plans for public schools and public school students? Who knows and who cares.
IMO, this a real hole public school supporters and advocates can fill- we can discuss public school students, who somehow seem to have disappeared from “public education policy”. Ed reformers will promote and cheerlead charters and vouchers- they have that more than covered. We can be the people who serve public school students.
Some people are, let’s face it, VERY slow learners. The Education Deformers, and the bureaucrats and union leaders, who allow the so-called, laughably named “accountability-based, data-driven” deformations to continue, are among these.
Which makes me wonder, when half of the American West burns down and half the population dies of heatstroke and the other half is without power because of blackouts, will this be enough to convince voters there that people like Cancun Cruz and Jabba the Trump know as much about climate and global warming as do pet rocks?
I think politicians like it when the entire discussion is around charters and vouchers. Then they don’t have to offer anything positive or productive on public schools.
“Choice!” Next question.
It’s the best thing that ever happened to them. They don’t have to lift a finger on public schools, and…they don’t. They haven’t had a positive or student-centered agenda on public schools for 20 years. Say “charters and vouchers!” and they don’t need one.
That’s why I am so suspicious of Kathryn Garcia, who supports lifting the charter cap so that NYC has an unlimited number of charters.
Once you say “charters work so well”, no reason to do anything to make public schools better. Just open more charters.
exactly right: the arguments for choice and testing are extremely shallow, but repeated often
This is an example of how the ed reform echo chamber control the dialogue and narrative around public education, leading to big omissions:
“Biden also signaled his administration may be radically changing the federal government’s approach to improving academic outcomes in schools by tucking into his proposals a major increase in funding for supporting and expanding the Department of Education’s Full-Service Community Schools Program.
That program’s budget languished at a miniscule $30 million and was, in fact, canceled altogether for fiscal year 2021 due to COVID-19’s impact on schools and communities, according to a letter from acting director Elson Nash. Yet Biden’s budget would boost funding for FSCS by $413 million, an almost fourteen-fold increase, to $443 million, according to Chalkbeat.”
I had no idea there were 5000 “community” schools in the US, or that Obama didn’t fund and Biden has (proposed) funding them.
The reason we don’t hear about them is they’re public schools. There can be no positive discussion of any public school because that gets in the way of promoting the ideological “choice” focus.
These public schools went their own way. They broke from the narrow, rigid ed reform mold. We could have more of this. We don’t have to accept the strictures of ed reform and remain within their narrow view. We can do better than that, but we can’t do it hiring ed reformers- they don’t support our schools.
https://progressive.org/magazine/triumph-of-community-schools-bryant/
Thanks for sharing our Mayoral candidate comparison report, Diane, but actually what you wrote above is incorrect. The Department of Education is not like any other ” Department of city government, like the Police Department, the Fire Department, the Sanitation Department.” Actually, the Mayor has far more power over our schools than these other governmental agencies, as the City Council cannot pass laws that affect educational policy unlike in these other areas. The only authority that the Council has over our schools is to require more reporting in different areas, and indirectly through the budget . The system of mayoral control that the state devised has no effective checks and balances at the city, district or school levels. Thus it is more akin to an autocracy than the democratic systems that exist at the federal, state and local levels. I wrote about this here: https://classsizematters.org/the-need-to-improve-mayoral-control-by-providing-checks-and-balances/
I was surprised there was nothing about charters. The only “check and balance” on charters are the people who sit on the authorizing committees — in the case of the SUNY Charter Institute, which seems to specialize in giving charters to well-funded no-excuses chains to open wherever they want in NYC, that is 3 white lawyers. Since Pedro Noguera quit in disgust nearly a decade ago, the only “check and balance” are people who love the charters that billionaires love. (I do think they might do some checks and balances on charters with no political connections, but that is hardly comforting.)
Is your organizing neutral about charters?
I actually believe there are legitimate reasons for NYC to have magnet schools that only have to teach the most motivated and easy to teach families. But there are absolutely no legitimate reasons that those schools should only be answerable to 3 lawyers that have connections to Cuomo, and not to the Mayor.
^^^As noted below, the chart did contain the candidates’ position on charters and I overlooked it.
But I do think that once charters proliferate again, there is no chance for smaller class sizes or any other improvements that a Mayor can make, because a vast majority of public schools that will be under the Mayor’s control will be the ones who teach the students that charters refuse to teach due to their needing far more resources. Since the students will need disproportionately more resources, and we can count on charters to keep lying and claiming they are teaching the very same kings of students but just doing a better job with their non-union teachers, there will be no political will to help public schools, but a lot of political will to create more charters for all students whose education costs are less than average.
I am very confused about why there is nothing about their positions on charters here. Is Leonie’s group neutral about this?
Basically, a large swath of charter schools currently use public money from the NYC public school system and are not be controlled by the Mayor so whatever is on this list is completely irrelevant for all of those charter schools that can do anything they want, as long as their authorizers upstate are fine with it.
Kathryn Garcia supports lifting the charter cap so that all of these policies listed here would have nothing to do with how even more of the schools that NYC taxpayers support from the public school budget are run.
Those charter schools can have large class sizes or small class sizes or be on-line. And the more that those schools proliferate by targeting the least expensive to teach students, the fewer students there will be that attend public schools that any of the information on the chart relates to.
I don’t really understand why it matters that the candidates are making promises that don’t sound much different than what the de Blasio administration tried and is trying to do. As long as the majority of motivated families are in charters, there will be little political will to spend a penny more than what is left after all the money allocated to charters is spent. And since those students will be the “left behinds”, their families will not be heard anyway.
^^^As Leonie Haimson correctly noted below, there was a section on charters in her chart.
I do stand by my position that it will be near impossible to accomplish much if an even larger proportion of the NYC public school budget is spent to fund charters (over which the Mayor has no oversight) that are free to cherry pick the least expensive students and concentrate the students whose education is significantly more expensive in the public schools.
Any effort to do so will be met by the dishonesty that if charter schools are able to achieve great results on less money, so should those public schools, and if only those public schools used more discipline and had better (non-union) teachers, they would be better. That false narrative pervades all of K-12 education.
There is a long section on charter schools on p 3. Not sure how you could miss it.
Thank you! I am sorry, that was entirely my oversight. I even double checked before I commented, but somehow missed the heading on the second columns.
Thank you for putting together such a useful chart and for your organization’s good work.
you’re very welcome. feel free to share with others.
Reading through most of the candidates’ positions on education should make voters yearn for de Blasio, whose willingness to take strong positions to support public schools was the reason he got my vote.
de Blasio promised to enact a universal pre-k program. Which he did. He promised to do all he could to reverse Bloomberg’s “charters should be given NYC resources but can do whatever a group of folks upstate approve of” policy. Which he did (although the horrible DINOs in Albany who were eventually defeated passed legislation to stop him — legislation that Kathryn Garcia and some candidates love so much that they are campaigning on a platform to have even more legislation that would order her to follow the wishes of an upstate charter board and do whatever they order.)
Maya Wiley is the candidate of AOC and Jamaal Bowman. And surprisingly, she is also the choice of very moderate, pro-charter and very powerful Hakeem Jeffries, who clearly understands (or at least his mother does!) that unlimited expansion of charters that NYC public schools fund from their budget and provide space for but have no oversight over is a very bad idea.