New York City’s Last Dictatorship

A version of this article appears in the April 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.

On a school night last May, Alyssa Cartagena, age 19, logged on to a New York City Department of Education (DOE) Zoom meeting from her boyfriend’s bedroom. She needed to once again explain why West Side, a transfer alternative school that admits older students who have fallen behind in credits, dropped out, or need a fresh start, should be allowed to stay in its building on West 102nd Street.

After her son Shawn was born in January 2022, Cartagena had planned on taking a year off from The Heritage School, where she was in the 11th grade. “My school was far and I didn’t have a babysitter,” says Cartagena, who lives with her son in Harlem. Like many new teen moms, this would have put her at risk of never finishing high school or attending college.

Transferring to West Side allowed her to stay in school and on target to graduate, which she did in June of 2023. The school offered in-house day care, health care, counseling, and teachers and administrators trained to support students in her situation, who were trying to simultaneously graduate and manage complex life circumstances.

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On this evening, the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, or the PEP, was set to vote on a proposal to swap West Side’s building with The Young Women’s Leadership School’s much smaller home across town in East Harlem. The DOE used enrollment numbers to justify the swap: Leadership, a magnet school serving girls grades 6–12, had a student body almost twice as large as West Side’s, 450 versus 240. But their school site, located in an office building with cramped hallways and half a gym, could not host the day care or the clinic, which would remain at West Side.

Enrollment was down at West Side in part due to changes in graduation requirements during the pandemic. Longtime staff expected enrollment to rise again as the system moved back to stricter criteria. But that wouldn’t happen if students like Cartagena couldn’t get critical services at school. “We shouldn’t be looked at as numbers,” Cartagena says. “If we aren’t able to graduate, our kids will struggle. They’re treating our babies like they don’t matter either.”

After putting Shawn to bed, Cartagena stayed awake to hear the pleas of her fellow West Side supporters—a group of more than 100 teachers, parents, students, former administrators, local city council members, state legislators, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and Comptroller Brad Lander. But although West Side’s advocates had the numbers, Leadership had something more important: the mayor, and a governance structure that allows him to enact education policies unilaterally.

Mayoral control puts the outcomes of tens of thousands of students in the hands of one politician who may have little experience in education.

Mayor Eric Adams appointed the NYC school chancellor, David Banks, and the founders of Leadership’s network, the billionaire Tisch family, had contributed to the foundation where Banks was previously employed and donated generously to Adams’s mayoral campaign.

Though elected officials and non-mayoral appointees to the PEP suggested alternative spaces for Leadership, Chancellor Banks doubled down on his support of the swap, emphasizing that West Side could make do with less: less school-appropriate space, less access to wraparound services, less everything.

Cartagena eventually dozed off, but she woke up in time to hear all 11 mayoral appointees in attendance vote yes to the building swap, enough to carry the motion. “If central wants it, if the mayor wants it, it’s gonna pass, regardless of who says something,” said Tazin Azad, the Brooklyn borough president’s appointee to the Panel for Educational Policy.

She echoed other non-mayoral appointees who said they were heartbroken by a system that wasn’t hearing them and the people they represent.

Fighting for Democracy in Schools

In the state of New York, an elected school board governs 678 out of 680 school districts, a higher rate than the 97 percent of districts across the country with school board control. Only in Yonkers and New York City—a system with just over one million students—does the mayor decide what’s best for schools and the children they serve.

Mayoral control puts the outcomes of tens of thousands of students in the hands of one politician who may have little experience in education, and whose motivations may be more tied to donors or financial partners.

When the state legislature granted Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s request to take control of New York City’s school system in 2002, local superintendents no longer answered to elected district boards, but took their cues from the chancellor, appointed by the mayor. Whatever influence or opportunities for collaboration parents and educators had in the old system, as imperfect as it was, disappeared in a cloud of promises to fix the schools.

In other cities, removing the power to elect school board members occurs predominantly in districts with a majority of Black and Latino students. “Elected school boards are just different because they were designed to be this independent body, sort of closest to the community,” says Verjeana McCotter-Jacobs, a lawyer by trade who is now the executive director and CEO of the National School Boards Association. “We have much data that speaks to school board policy directly impacting outcomes for kids.”

Once in place, mayoral control is typically used to make sweeping changes, which backers say would not be possible if power were distributed or shared with community members.

The law establishing mayoral control in New York City included a sunset clause. This June, state legislators will decide whether or not to renew the mayor’s powers.

In 2022, the New York State Legislature extended mayoral control for two years and, in a nod to advocates, added more parent-elected members to the PEP. But the math continues to favor the mayor, who gets to appoint 13 of the panel’s 23 members.

The renewal bill also charged state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa with conducting a “comprehensive review and assessment of the overall effectiveness of the city of New York’s school governance system.” That assessment is due March 31 and could play a major role in the final outcome.

A coalition of parents, advocates, teachers, and public school alumni from all over the city are working to make sure what happened to West Side and so many other school communities stops. They recently selected the name Democracy in NYC Schools. The group meets frequently, gearing up for hearings Commissioner Rosa is required to hold in each borough to gather public input. They stand on the shoulders of several coalitions that came before them whose members wrote reports and pushed hard for similar changes. They hope 2024 will finally be the year legislators end mayoral control of the school system.

“No mayor should ever have unfettered control over children’s futures,” says Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the city’s leading teachers union. “Because when they make a mistake, it causes a lot of problems and damage.”

Sen. John Liu of Queens chairs the state Senate’s committee on New York City education, and will play a big role in his fellow legislators’ decision on whether to renew mayoral control. He says Rosa’s March 31 report will factor heavily in his thinking. “We essentially commissioned the report. We take it very seriously,” say Liu.

“The system of school governance, mayoral control or some other system, should not be reflective of who the mayor happens to be,” says Liu. “It should be a system that works best no matter who the mayor is.”

As New Yorkers consider their options, they can look to Chicago. Right now, Illinois legislators are working through the details of a recently passed law requiring the city to move to a fully elected board, after nearly 30 years of mayoral control.

How Chicago Won an Elected Board

In 1995, the Illinois state legislature granted then-Mayor Richard M. Daley full control of the school system. Since then, Daley and his successor Rahm Emanuel closed or completely revamped the schools of over 70,000 students, according to a WBEZ report. Of the students who experienced closures and “turnarounds,” under 600 of them were white and more than 85 percent were Black.

The mayors said they were targeting underperforming and/or under-enrolled schools, but schools with enrollment declines in wealthier areas remained open, advocates say, and subsequent studies showed students from closed schools’ math scores suffered for four or more years afterward. In addition, majority-Black neighborhoods with closed schools saw increased declines in population.

In response, community groups, scholars, parents, students, and teachers built a 15-year, citywide campaign to secure the right to elect a representative school board. “I was an education organizer for the historic Kenwood Oakland Community Organization,” said Jitu Brown in an interview with PBS in 2022. “We fought to save this school, a four-year campaign that resulted in a 34-day hunger strike. Black parents who were deeply engaged in the education of our children had to go to those lengths in order to be heard.”

In 2010, the Chicago Teachers Union elected Karen Lewis, a high school chemistry teacher, as president. A whole child and whole school approach became central to the union’s efforts and was articulated in a report entitled “The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve,” a document they continued to build upon after Lewis’s four-year tenure. The 2018 version emphasized the need to create Sustainable Community Schools “where students, parents, and their communities play key roles in their children’s education, in partnership with educators.”

Parents went door-to-door collecting signatures on a petition to put a nonbinding referendum supporting an elected school board on the ballot. They succeeded in getting the topic before voters in many wards across the city, most recently in 2015. In the 37 wards that voted, the proposal overwhelmingly passed.

The New York City school system is 41 percent Hispanic, 24 percent Black, 17 percent Asian, and 15 percent white.

This clear mandate from the public was instrumental in moving legislators to act. In July of 2021, the Illinois legislature passed a bill requiring that Chicago transition to an elected school board. Details of the electoral map are still being sorted out ahead of elections set to begin in November.

Critics say elected school boards are overly political, ignoring the interests of students. But Pauline Lipman, professor of educational policy studies at University of Illinois Chicago, says mayoral control “could not be more political. It’s serving the interests of real estate developers, of the corporate leaders of the city. It’s making decisions that harm Black and brown communities.”

“The research we did showed, in districts that have bigger boards and boards that are elected through some kind of regional process, who are therefore closer to and more accountable to their constituents, they tended to be more representative of the population of the city as a whole,” says Lipman. “They tended to be more working class, more people of color.”

To ensure Chicago’s elected board meets the needs of all students, Lipman and fellow advocates from Teachers for Social Justice, along with groups from across the city, proposed allowing undocumented parents to vote in school board elections. But the final bill did not include this provision. “If you could get undocumented folks to be able to vote, then that, in fact, does make the election much more representative and much more likely that you’re not going to get the same corporate CEOs,” Lipman says.

Chicago advocates also called for school board campaigns to be publicly financed, with a limit on how much any individual candidate could spend. The Los Angeles school board provides a cautionary tale. A 2017 Los Angeles Times analysis shows contributions to candidates totaled $15 million. Charter proponents shelled out nearly $10 million, while unions spent just over $5 million. According to Lipman, without checks on campaign finance, it’s easy to end up with something very similar to the appointed board that an elected board is meant to replace.

Twenty Years of Mayoral Control in New York City

Margaret Kelley served on the school board for nearly eight years in District 15, which includes Red Hook, Park Slope, Sunset Park, and Carroll Gardens, but in 2003 her tenure came to an abrupt halt. Community Education Councils (CECs) replaced elected district boards and all sitting members were removed. The power to hire, fire, and evaluate superintendents at the local level transferred to the chancellor, Joel Klein, who was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg.

When she was on the board, parents stopped Kelley at the grocery store or on the street to talk about district or school policies. The board had access to the superintendent, could ask for data or for an explanation of a particular policy and was guaranteed a comprehensive reply—powers not seen since the onset of mayoral control.

The system was not without its problems; some district boards were infamous for nepotistic hiring practices. But supporters say that district boards also fostered innovation, including some of the first bilingual education programs in the city. “We could take a problem that is clear in all the schools and study it, do the research and write a report that was helpful in delivering what it is we wanted to do,” Kelley says. “We were really tuned in to trying to help make the schools better.”

Though mayors had tried to take over the school system before Bloomberg, they did not have his deep pockets. Between campaign and personal accounts, Bloomberg donated $1 million to his Republican counterparts in Albany at around the time the law was changed.

Mayoral control’s biggest boosters, like Joel Klein, touted it as the only governance structure that makes sense, especially in big cities. Klein was Bloomberg’s appointee to lead New York City schools from 2002 to 2010, despite no degree or previous work experience in education. He believed in education as the main vehicle to escape poverty, and that schools should be run like corporations.

“Let’s stop ignoring basic economic principles of supply and demand and focus on how we can establish a performance-driven culture in every American school—a culture that rewards excellence, elevates the status of teachers and is positioned to help as many students as possible beat the odds,” wrote Klein in a “manifesto” co-authored with leaders of mostly mayoral-controlled districts and published in The Washington Post.

One month later, in November 2010, Klein resigned as chancellor and began working for Rupert Murdoch at News Corp. The manifesto’s authors also praised student data systems and education technology, something Klein would go on to sell to many districts around the country, before the company he helmed, Amplify, lost News Corp more than $370 million.

Proponents have alleged that mayoral control would increase achievement levels and close the achievement gap. “Neither of those promises has really been met,” says Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

One set of data is not enough to fully understand learning in New York City under mayoral control, but it’s still instructive. From 2003 to 2019, New York City’s fourth grade students’ average math scores were the same as their peers’ nationally, while a significant gap persisted between students in higher- and lower-income families.

Though graduation rates in New York City have improved over the past 20 years, some of those gains resulted because of new credit recovery policies implemented under Klein that made it easier for students to finish high school.

Mayoral control can also be detached from the realities of teachers and schools. In 2012, the DOE press office released teacher evaluation scores based on students’ test performance. The New York Post wrote a piece outing the teacher who performed the “worst,” neglecting to learn what led to her low score. Like many teachers of English language learners, her students were forced to take a test they could not possibly pass—some of them had just arrived in the U.S. Her low score was emblematic of an unjust rating system, not her actual performance, as reported by her colleagues and school leaders.

The Panel for Educational Policy is supposed to be a check on mayoral power. The PEP typically includes several public school parents, and many parents turn to the PEP when they want to be heard.

But during a move in 2004 that became known as the “Monday Night Massacre,” Bloomberg removed and replaced his PEP appointees to ensure his plan to hold back students who failed state tests would pass. Whether or not the policy was right for the system, members of the PEP, who were listening to the public and education experts, were not ready to pass it.

Natalie Gomez-Velez, a panel member at the time who opposed the policy but was not removed, recorded her memories of the massacre in a 2008 article in the Villanova Law Review. Gomez-Velez, a professor of law at the City University of New York, noted that the whole experience led her to question the purpose of serving on the panel, if members’ opinions and input were so unwelcome.

“The business model assumes that democratic governance is a hindrance to effective education. It assumes that competition among schools and teachers produces better results than collaboration,” wrote historian Diane Ravitch in a 2010 article entitled “Why Public Schools Need Democratic Governance.” “It treats local school boards as a nuisance and an obstacle rather than as the public’s representatives in shaping education policy.”

Letting Down Black, Latino, and Low-Income Families

Sally Nuamah, professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, grew up in a Black working-class community in Chicago, with a Ghanaian immigrant mother who deeply valued the promise of school and education. When she returned home from college in 2011, she was surprised to learn that many local schools were facing extinction, and realized how much closings were weakening the community as a whole.

“I heard community members talk about the closure of their schools like life or death,” says Nuamah, author of Closed for Democracy: How Mass School Closure Undermines the Citizenship of Black Americans. “So it became immediately clear to me that, for them, schools weren’t just spaces for learning. People perceived them as really central to any kind of economic or social or political stability and mobility.”

She identified many community members faced with school closures who experienced what she came to call “collective participatory debt,” which she describes as “the tragedy of people becoming model citizens doing what they think is required for democratic responsiveness, and learning over and over again that when it comes to certain populations, which in this case is Black and brown and poor, that the social contract, that democracy doesn’t apply to you.”

In the current era of mayoral control in New York City, Black and brown parents have been stripped of power in a school system that is 41 percent Hispanic, 24 percent Black, 17 percent Asian, and 15 percent white. “We are not seen or treated as a valid source or contribution to this system operating at all,” says Erika Kendall, CEC president of Brooklyn’s District 17, which includes parts of Crown Heights, Prospect Heights, and Brownsville.

Advocates outline a system of open and inclusive deliberation around key policies, and distributing power at all levels.

Speaking at a joint public hearing of the New York State Legislature’s education committees in 2022, Kendall summed up her district’s experience with mayoral control. “I think I can tie a direct line between mayoral control as an institution, and the decline of some of the poorest and, frankly, most predominantly Black and brown districts in this city,” she said. “And all I have to do is look at the business section of any of our newspapers, and see reports about how our former mayor [Bloomberg], the one who precipitated this decline, is now pouring just shy of a billion dollars into the charter school industry to really understand why.”

In District 17, nearly 25 percent of students attend charter schools, while only 4 percent of students in District 2, which covers a large part of Manhattan, attend them. Kendall regularly hears the frustration and anger of community members wondering why district leadership, which she argues is unable to meet community needs under mayoral control, isn’t doing more to protect traditional neighborhood schools from disinvestment. “The community sees this [influx of charters] as an indictment of the quality of our schools,” Kendall says. “But when the people in control of your community’s schools are not actually in your community daily, this is what happens.”

In the Bloomberg era, the District 17 community fought hard to save Paul Robeson High School, which their families had attended for generations. Around the time of the announced closure in 2011, Robeson was 88 percent Black and 11 percent Native American and Latino. Nearly 80 percent of its students received free or reduced-priced lunch.

These students came from communities that experienced government disinvestment and structural racism. Yet former Chancellor Klein could not understand why they would be upset that he could find no other solution than to phase out a school with such “wretched performance,” in his words. He didn’t account for how Robeson had welcomed many students from other closed high schools, which some felt had contributed to its eventual struggles.

“The absence of resources and accountability, feels like the DOE divested—from Black teachers, Black administrators, Black families, and Black students,” Kendall said at the 2022 hearing. “We are being systematically given to a fully unaccountable system. And I don’t believe the current conversation around renewing mayoral control considers that.”

Adams’s Big-Money Support

This has all resulted in increasingly unequal outcomes for New York City students. A 2019 Research Alliance for New York City Schools report found 77 percent of Asian students and 68 percent of white students enrolled in college immediately after graduation, a much higher rate than their Black and Latino peers, who enrolled right after high school just over 50 percent of the time.

Even the promises of Mayor Bill de Blasio (2014–2021) to end the “tale of two cities” fell short. A 2021 UCLA Civil Rights Project report shows about 85 percent of Black students and 75 percent of Latino students attend schools that are 90 percent or more students of color. White and Asian students were typically placed into schools with higher-quality education.

Under New York’s current mayor, racial and economic segregation are likely to grow because of increased academic screening in admissions and plans to open more specialized high schools.

Three-fourths of families in NYC public schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and/or other benefits. Roughly 1 in 9 students experienced homelessness last school year. New York City’s Independent Budget Office reported in 2022 that students in schools with concentrated poverty did less well on state tests than peers who came from the same economic background but attended more economically integrated schools.

Adams’s overall position on selective admissions is backed by key donor support and endorsements from groups like Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, whose leaders, cozy with Moms for Liberty, were recently caught writing anti-trans messages on a private chat group. Ronald Lauder, a booster for specialized schools, donated $5,100 to Adams in December of 2021, after he’d already won the mayoralty. And Michael Bloomberg, who regularly meets with the mayor, was instrumental in expanding the number of specialized schools.

Selective admissions, while it fits with education reformers’ notions of meritocracy, is not well backed up by research. A recent study comparing schools in the U.K. that do and do not screen students into selective and nonselective schools suggests that screening might not be beneficial to the highest and lowest achievers. “There’s no evidence that [selective systems] add to increasing overall performance,” says Xin Shao, research fellow at the Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities at University College London.

Ahead of the 2022 renewal, Mayor Adams argued that elected school boards were hobbled by patronage and political corruption. These claims have become particularly ironic, as more and more of Adams’s closest aides are indicted or have their devices confiscated by the FBI.

Shortly after Adams became mayor, his partner, Tracey Collins, landed a job in the DOE as senior adviser to the deputy chancellor of school leadership. “She turned around schools. Should she leave the DOE because her boo became mayor? I don’t think so! Come on, let’s stop this,” Adams said at a press conference last June.

More recently, the mayor started focusing on Chancellor Banks’s accomplishments, all of which are boosted by a six-person press office at the DOE, with assists from the press office at City Hall. (Currently, there are four people in the press office, but two positions are unfilled.)

“When you look at what this chancellor has done, why would we mess with what is working,” says Adams. “That’s why I’m excited about going to Albany and showing how successful we have been.”

Though Adams has an approval rating of only 31 percent for his handling of schools, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, some powerful donors continue to advocate for keeping him or any mayor in control.

In December, Kathryn Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City and often quoted in the press, shared why she continues to support mayoral control in an article in Gothamist, arguing that it promotes “less contention and more effective allocation of resources.” Her support extends beyond speaking to the press. The Partnership’s PAC gave $2,000 to Adams’s mayoral campaign, $25,000 to the New York State Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and Wylde personally contributed $3,500 in support of Gov. Kathy Hochul in recent years.

Mayoral control also means the chancellor can’t push back when Mayor Adams cuts his budget or implements other policies that could damage students, like forcing migrant families to move between shelters and disrupt their children’s educations midyear.

“Many districts that retain a separate school system governed by an elected board are doing well,” says Jeffrey Henig, professor of political science and education at Teachers College. “Given the various pros and cons, I lean towards favoring an elected board, but I’d counsel against assuming it would make NYC education better all by itself,” says Henig, who has long studied mayoral control. He adds that conversations about school governance also offer opportunities to unearth the public’s educational vision, which he says is even more important than a particular governance structure. “Mayors can take a leadership role in school reform without necessarily demanding formal power to do so.”

Brooklyn Knows What’s Going On

The message state legislators received at Boys and Girls High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant in early January was as clear as the night’s sky.

On the stage, Education Commissioner Rosa was flanked by members of the state Board of Regents, including Chancellor Lester Young. Behind them, a large screen projected speakers’ faces so that people in the back of the sleek red-and-black auditorium could see their peers when they spoke.

More than 80 percent of speakers at the largest of the five hearings demanded that the state end mayoral control, including many who asked for an elected board.

Chief among the criticisms of the Adams/Banks administration was budget cuts, including for schools supporting newly arrived immigrants. The cuts have made it impossible—perhaps by design—to implement class size reductions mandated by the state. Teachers were also frustrated with a new reading curriculum they said doesn’t connect with students’ culture.

Though the law says the commissioner’s report should include student input, few students spoke at the hearings and those who did were highly critical of Adams and mayoral control.

As Tea Healy spoke, her mother, Paullette, rubbed her back.

“My mother, aunts, and so many people have spent years of my childhood fighting for the schools my brother Lucas and I deserve. And do you know what they’ve never had despite all of their work—all the PEPs, and all the committees and task forces? Power,” said Healy. She referred to the mayor, who starts every press conference by blasting the song “Empire State of Mind,” as a “party promoter.”

Some people went to great lengths to get their say. Teacher Megan Moskop stood with her three-month-old in a carrier for more than three hours, waiting for a chance to speak. Mavis Yon pushed through the pain of a recent surgery and limped up to the mic.

“Marvin Gaye said, ‘What’s going on?’ But I can tell you, the mayor and the PEP don’t know what’s going on,” said Yon, who teaches math to fourth and fifth grade students. She described working in a school that was closed against the community’s wishes during the Bloomberg era. “Mayoral control was out of control then, and it’s out of control now.”

Tajh Sutton, who had a friend read her testimony because she was home with COVID, took on the mayor’s habit of referring to mayoral control as “mayoral accountability.”

“There is nothing and no one held accountable under mayoral control,” said Sutton. “Someone would answer for the lack of sports and arts programming in the same neighborhoods with a cop in every train station.”

Tazin Azad, a non-mayoral PEP appointee, took to the mic describing the absence of democracy on the system’s governing board, even for its own members.

“The current iteration of school governance was never built to empower underresourced, disenfranchised people. It’s only meant to empower one person,” said Azad. “Why is it that we accept that majority Black and brown global majority people of New York City are thought to be incapable of proposing, creating, and then participating in a school governance structure that represents them?”

A Critical Few Months

New York City advocates are not asking for a complete return to the system before mayoral control, a time historians refer to as decentralization. Groups like the Education Council Consortium and The Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) are more aligned with the movement for community control in the late 1960s, led by Black and Latino parents who saw enacting solutions that bubble up locally as the key to student success.

In a handout that groups distributed at recent hearings, they outline a system of open and inclusive deliberation around key policies, policymaking that is centered on the needs of the most disenfranchised communities, and distributing power at all levels.

Legislators will have two months to dig into Commissioner Rosa’s report before the June deadline to renew, revise, or change school governance in New York City.

Rosa says she can’t control whether or not her report influences policy. Some senators, like Liu, are not weighing in until they’ve read it. Others, like Gov. Kathy Hochul and Assembly Education Committee chair Michael Benedetto, both of whom have received endorsements from Adams in the past, have already said they support an extension before taking into account public feedback or Rosa’s report.

“We’ve made every attempt, from the website, advertising, come out and share your best thoughts, and we will produce a report at the end of it, and then we turn it over to the governor, we turn it over to the legislature,” says Rosa. “And it is their decision.”