This bill would grant student members of the right to vote on the decisions the councils take. If passed, out of the 13 votes per council, students would hold two of them. 

CECs consist of elected community members who evaluate the efficacy of educational programs, recommend improvements, approve zoning lines and weigh in on all things related to public education. State law currently requires that two students, serving in student government and nominated by their superintendents, serve on each of the 32 councils and one on each of the four citywide councils.  

Students on these councils attend the meetings, offer feedback and consultation, share informed perspectives — perspectives that carry unique weight because of their lived experience — yet when the time comes to decide, they have no voting power. 

This dichotomy reveals how  deeply shapes our civic relationship with young people. For decades, institutions have them from the democratic process or included them only in token ways.  

Ironically, CECs themselves perpetuate this pattern. Not only do they deny students voting power, but they have also failed to comply with state law requiring student representation. As of 2024, only 14 student seats were filled, leaving at least two-thirds vacant. An honest reflection of the law makes that not surprising. Would you sit on a council if you were the only non-voting member? 

This bill addresses both problems. It increases the number of students on each council and ensures that students not only inform decisions about policies affecting their daily lives but can cast votes on those decisions. It also broadens access by removing a requirement that the student members serve in student government.

When considering the utilitarianism of this bill, it is easy to understand why it hasn’t generated a lot of attention — it seems like an obvious ‘Yes.’ But pragmatism alone doesn’t guarantee success. Lawmakers introduced this bill in 2023 and three years later, it has yet to pass.  

This is particularly concerning as the new mayor and chancellor vow to improve our current governance model that gives the mayor control over our system. CECs are contingent on mayoral control and are expected to provide vital input to both the mayor and chancellor. Giving students a real seat at the table is a simple but important first step they could advocate for. 

The lack of traction likely stems from limited awareness, paired with to fully embrace the burgeoning movement for youth voice and enfranchisement.   

Fortunately, young people deserve the right to inform and influence the policies and practices that affect their daily lives.  

For those of us working in the youth civic and democratic ecosystem, we’ve witnessed young people’s perspectives and impact on policy from communities to the . We trust their judgment and benefit when we listen. This bill asks lawmakers in Albany to extend that trust.  

Research on adolescent development reinforces this need. By their early teens, young people’s brains are developing in ways that heighten their focus on . 

Evidence from the field and research alone will not secure this bill’s passage. Advocates must also demonstrate what this looks like in practice. , the original author of this bill, demonstrates that reality better than anybody in the city. 

For three decades, BroSis has in New York City. These efforts show how capable young people are and how essential their voices remain in galvanizing change. Young leaders bring insight into systematic challenges in ways that very few decision-makers can fathom, such as longstanding racial disparities in education as well as emerging challenges like artificial intelligence. 

EdTrust-New York has seen the same impact. Through the developed in partnership with BroSis and Adelante Student Voices, students have shaped policy conversations on school discipline, suspension rates and equity across the state. Their contributions have improved both the quality and urgency of those discussions. 

Together we view this bill as a catalyst for better informed education policy and a mechanism to ensure direct student representation. It will also help build civic ownership among young people. 

The bill will ensure the education reflects what students actually need. It also signals to young people, who are growing from the lack of access to the democratic process, that New York City is committed to engaging them and elevating their civic power.  

The strength of this bill lies in its practicality, but we should not mistake simplicity for insignificance. As advocates and policymakers consider how to improve mayoral control, they should take this simple and meaningful first step. This bill deserves full-throated support from anyone in New York City who values young people’s perspectives and believes they must play a meaningful role in the civic process. Let’s give high school students, not just a seat at the table, but a vote.

Instead of being asked to score at least a on tests of English Language Arts, mathematics, social studies, science and one optional exam, New York students will be assessed using standards. 

It is yet unclear as to who will be evaluating whether they can be considered:

• academically prepared
• creative innovators
• critical thinkers
• effective communicators
• global citizens
• reflective and future-focused

It is also unclear what the criteria for succeeding in each category will be.

When I asked parent subscribers to my mailing list how they felt about the shift, the answers split starkly into two camps.

There were those who cheered. Josh Kross, father of two high schoolers and one graduate, wrote, “Regents are outdated. Good riddance.” Moria Herbst added, “Other states don’t have them. Certainly not in Massachusetts, where I grew up. And Massachusetts does just fine!”

“I am deeply in favor of moving away from a standardized testing model,” said E.J., the Washington Heights parent of a first grader. “While Portrait of a Graduate is still being worked on as to how it will actually function, I’m encouraged by the idea and the possibility of it being a more complete picture of the human we’re sending out into the world.”

Other parents, however, were less enthused.

“Portrait of a Graduate is so fuzzy as to be meaningless,” wrote Rachel Fremmer, dismissively. “I didn’t think standards could be lowered any further, but they have been.” 

“It seems like a process that will make things more subjective for teachers, and thus less fair for many students,” opined Marina. “This seems like a vague requirement that will allow parents with resources even more leverage.”

Yiatin Chu, mom of a ninth grader, went even further, saying, “For those who criticize the Regents as a low bar/waste of time, why aren’t we improving it and making it more rigorous instead? Portrait of a Graduate is aspirational — over 40% of eighth grade students are entering high school not reading at grade level. I see the change to these graduation metrics for HS graduation as a way for the system to push kids out the door.”

New York City already faces the issues of straight A students being unable to perform equally well — or even pass — state elementary and middle school tests, not to mention high school Regents exams.

“Without objective tests, there is no way to gauge what kids are actually learning,” Diane Rubenstein predicted. “This will allow the (Department of Education) to give kids nothing in the classroom. This will give (them) cover to not teach.”

“Removing this requirement dilutes education standards even further,” agreed AW. “It plays very well into the current administration’s program of ‘equity,’ aka ‘mediocrity for all.’ It disincentivizes kids from learning and teaches them that if something is hard, just protest and it will be removed from your path, even to your detriment.”

For many parents, the perceived lowering of standards will hurt city students when it comes to competing not just nationally, but internationally.

“If USA high schools become less competitive, that’s not good for the next generation,” Jenny worried, while Ella added, “Our kids will fall behind other countries. We are already falling behind in the world. My kids cannot compete with foreign students.”

Of the that currently have high-school exit exams in place, New Jersey ranked No. 2 in the country for educational achievement for 2025, Virginia was No. 13, Ohio was No. 15, Florida was No. 19, Texas No. 31 and Louisiana No. 35. (Massachusetts, which got rid of its exit exams in 2025, is, as noted above, ranked No. 1. However, that ranking was achieved while the state still had its exit exam up through last year.)

In New York, while students will no longer be required to sit for Regents exams in order to graduate, they will still have the option of taking them in order to earn a .

This could have the effect of widening the gaps between students, rather than improving equity. Colleges and employers will be able to see who earned a Regents diploma and who opted to bypass established standards via a more subjective metric, which could imply less academic rigor.

Like those rejected from colleges that went SAT/ACT scores because they realized those were a reliable predictor of applicants’ capabilities, students who choose not to take the Regents exams could find themselves negatively perceived and penalized.

“I understand the growing pressure to move away from standardized testing, but we still need a meaningful way to measure student progress and evaluate our schools,” ventured Stephanie Cuba, the mother of children in seventh and ninth grades. “Education policy should be deliberate and comprehensive, not a series of reactive decisions. If you’re going to dismantle the old system, you need a clear, credible plan to replace it. Without that, we’re operating without a compass.”

Right now, with Profile of a Graduate details vague and , New York risks graduating multiple cohorts whose achievements will not be properly valued. The repercussions might follow them for years.

The report, released this month by the education reform nonprofit Available to All, builds off The new report found overlaps and similarities among dozens of redlining maps from 1938 with school attendance zones in New York City, Long Island, Westchester County as well as upstate cities, such as Albany, Buffalo and Niagara Falls.��

The report also identified New York as “one of many states where a parent can be arrested and criminally charged for using an incorrect address to get their child into a high-quality school,” with one such incident occurring as recently as .��

The state’s laws and regulations make it “one of the strictest systems of residential assignment in the country,” the report said, adding it limits a to take advantage of — a practice that allows students to attend public schools outside their assigned district.

“There’s this paradox of New York, where it’s run by progressive politicians, it’s a very democratic state,” said Tim DeRoche, founder of Available to All, “but it’s the most segregated.”

Across the United States it’s common for sections of the same town or city, neighborhoods and streets to have communities that look vastly different from one another because of historical government-led housing segregation.

Redlining, the practice of drawing boundaries around neighborhoods based on race and denying mortgage assistance to areas considered “hazardous” or “undesirable” typically housing people of color, was more than 50 years ago. Despite this, many public services, including , still perpetuate inequitable access to resources and opportunity based on housing.

While school districts themselves are drawn through legislative processes, districts are often given autonomy when drawing attendance zones for schools. Both boundaries, the report said, “carry on the legacy of redlining in New York.”

“Public schools must be ‘,’ and … if you look at the system we have across the country, you can see that we are falling so far short of that — and the primary reason for that is that we assign kids to schools based on their address,” DeRoche said. 

The report used Public School 19 and Public School 16 as examples. Both schools are in the north Bronx’s school District 11 and are located about a mile from one another — a 20-minute walk — but serve contrasting populations.

The Bronx

Attendance zone boundaries for P.S. 19 “mirror, almost perfectly, the area deemed to be ‘desirable’ by the racist redlining map drawn by federal government bureaucrats in 1938,” the report said. Whereas P.S. 16’s boundaries fell directly in a declining area, according to the 1938 map.

The remnants of redlining are echoed in both schools’ data — where P.S. 19 educates a population that is 43% Black and Latino and two-thirds low income, with 62% reading proficiency. That compares to P.S 16’s 88% Black and Latino student body, 95% of whom are low income with grade level reading just over 30%.

Schools like P.S. 19 “become almost quasi-private schools,” DeRoche said.

There were many examples across the New York City Public Schools system, as well as several upstate school districts.

Manhattan

Queens

“It’s really hard to find a place [in New York] that’s not segregated or a school district that’s not experiencing either racial segregation or some sense of class segregation,” said Kris DeFilippis, a former assistant superintendent in the New York City Department of Education, who is now a clinical professor at New York University. “Not much has changed. … Wherever those lines were drawn [in the 1930s], it has largely stayed the same, unless there’s been a movement toward gentrification.”

In Albany, New York’s capital, New Scotland Elementary School was zoned over neighborhoods identified as desirable in 1938. The school serves a student population that is less than half Black or brown (41%) and low-income (47%) with reading scores near 60%.��

Just about two miles away at Giffen Memorial Elementary School, more than three-quarters of students are Black and Hispanic (84%) and qualify for free and reduced priced lunch (84%). Less than a quarter of students at Giffen Memorial read on grade level (21%).

Much of Giffen Memorial’s attendance zone lines up with 1938 redlining declining areas.

Albany

“You wouldn’t see these massive gaps [in demographics and student achievement] between two schools two miles away … if those two schools were truly open to kids,” DeRoche said. “The government has to be enforcing that in some way. How are they enforcing it? Well, they’re enforcing it with these maps. The kids on the wrong side of the line aren’t eligible to go to the public school that’s a mile [or two] from their home.”

In upstate New York, while there’s access to charter and magnet schools, school choice within a district is limited among traditional public schools. Students are generally required to go to the school in their attendance zone, “unless there are exceeding circumstances,” DeFilippis said, “but that is rare, it just doesn’t happen.”

In New York City, “it’s a bit different,” DeFilippis continued. Students typically attend a local elementary school before choice options open up in middle and high school grades across the metropolitan area  – creating its own challenges and limitations when it comes to admission to later grades.

“There’s almost like a false narrative that in New York City students can go where they want,” DeFilippis said, “but it’s not entirely accurate.”

For a student, traveling across the city to attend a school that works best for them can be difficult and it may also be challenging to get into competitive schools because they “haven’t had the same experiences at the lower grades that their peers have had,” DeFillipis said. So, ultimately, the current setup, “does not lead to equitable outcomes for Black and brown students, or low-income students, at all.”

The report recommended possible solutions for lawmakers to consider, such as decriminalizing address sharing, requiring every public school to reserve at least 15% of seats for students who live outside the zone and allowing students to enroll in any public school within a three-mile radius of the child’s home.

The underlying principle, DeRoche said, is to “just decrease the link between where you live and which schools you’re allowed to attend.”

“These policies have been bad, not just for educational opportunity, but I think they’ve affected urban development and I think they’ve affected how our cities work and don’t work,” DeRoche said.

It’s not widely acknowledged as such, but America is experiencing a surge in anti-tax politics.

You see this of course on the right, which has always been skeptical of taxation. But we’re also starting to see a version of this on the left.

The growing progressive interest in exotic new tax-policy ideas — like Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna saying they can  — shows a left that has lost faith in the idea of asking Americans to pay higher taxes in exchange for more and better public services.

And whatever you think of the Sanders/Khanna proposal, it’s important to understand that this kind of plan doesn’t scale well to small states or to cities and counties since it can be relatively easy for people to leave to avoid the taxes.

So, especially when it comes to local services, you really have to ask questions like “Can we make people feel that it’s worth paying more for this?” and “Can we get more value for the money that we are already spending?” Unlike with the federal government, where  in part because it was based on , local governments actually spend a huge share of their budget on direct provision of labor-intensive public services.

The most expensive of these line items is public school systems.

Education spending presents us with something of a paradox. We know from small-scale studies that marginal increases in school spending . In particular, fairly boring things like  are effective at promoting student learning, especially in low-socioeconomic-status schools.

So it seems to be the case that for a lot of schools there’s low-hanging fruit that could be addressed at least somewhat effectively with an influx of money.

On the other hand, if you look at large-scale cross-sections of American schools, it’s just not the case that higher levels of spending are strongly related to student outcomes.

The Urban Institute’s  shows that the top-performing state for eighth grade reading is Massachusetts. That’s a relatively high-spending blue state, but not the highest-spending state. Number two is Louisiana. On eighth grade math, Massachusetts is number two and Louisiana is number three (Mississippi is number one).

The highest-spending system, New York, gets above-average results (I’ve seen a lot of people express excessive negativity about this), but they’re not dramatically above-average in the manner of either lower-spending Massachusetts or dramatically lower-spending Mississippi and Louisiana.

Which is all just to say that even though there do appear to be useful opportunities to spend more money on schooling —  — it seems like just looking at the average expenditure in high-spending systems is not very useful.

And those of us who think there are things the government should probably spend more money on ought to confront the reality that in many states the government is already spending a lot of money, some of it on things that are not very useful.

Teachers don’t move to higher-paying states

The question of how you design a high-functioning school system is complicated, and it’s clear that money isn’t the only thing that matters. For example, one factor that has gotten a lot of attention recently, and that I believe is a dominant factor in explaining why Mississippi and Louisiana in particular have started doing so well, is curriculum.

A restaurant can buy quality ingredients and hire decent cooks and have everyone work hard, and the food is still going to be bad if the chef’s recipes are no good.

But even when you get high-level agreement on something like curriculum, you can run into implementation problems. When I spoke recently with two people who worked in state government in Louisiana on setting up the current curriculum framework (which has had good results), they told me that a lot of their teachers had been taught in education school that the concept of centralized curriculum was bad. So, even with a strong curriculum in place at the state level, it still took work to get to a broad agreement to actually teach the curriculum.

So there’s obviously a lot happening that isn’t directly related to spending, but I do think it’s worth focusing on the more tedious technical question of how school systems are paying their staff, especially the teachers, who account for the lion’s share of the money and the work.

New York is number one in overall  and . So how come teaching talent isn’t fleeing Mississippi and Louisiana for New York, where average teacher salaries are 70 percent higher?

There are, of course, many reasons someone may not want to move across the country, but we’re also seeing the hidden cost of bad housing policy. Due to the much higher cost of living in New York, the real value of a middle-class salary is quite a bit lower there.

We know that there’s a lot of domestic migration out of the coastal states, and that it’s primarily not rich people fleeing taxes but . But this ends up inflating the cost of providing frontline public services, which leads to higher tax burdens, which itself further inflates the cost of living.

Another issue, though, is that teachers just don’t move state-to-state very much.

A  on Washington/Oregon border counties found that “teachers along the state border were almost three times more likely to make a within-state move of 75 miles or more than to make any cross-state move.”

They attribute the lack of interstate teacher mobility to two things: one is that mid-career teachers tend to lose a lot of pension value, and the other is that teacher licensing and certification is handled at the state level in a way that discourages mobility. Policy toward interstate transfers of teaching certifications differs from state-to-state. But New York in particular is a  — it’s one of only three states that has not  the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification interstate agreement.

So while you might think that one point of paying teachers unusually well would be to make your state an unusually attractive place for teachers to move, New York undercuts that with high cost of living and also has regulatory policies that specifically discourage out-of-state teachers from coming in.

Rewarding veterans, not attracting new talent

The issue behind the issue is that the highest-paying states are the ones with strong collective-bargaining frameworks for public sector workers: The National Education Association says  have salaries that are 24 percent higher on average. And when labor unions negotiate compensation packages, they prioritize the interests of their existing members. That’s different from the mindset of an employer who decides to unilaterally increase compensation specifically for the purposes of recruiting new talent. An employer who is eager to attract new talent would, for example, put money into hiring bonuses, but a union is never going to demand that around a bargaining table.

That’s how states end up raising compensation without reducing barriers to entry.

It’s also why compensation in the more generous states is heavily backloaded. So while New York pays 70 percent higher teacher salaries than Louisiana on average, its entry-level salaries are only . That doesn’t come close to compensating for the higher cost of living. If you ask where “teacher” counts as a decent-paying job for someone just starting out, Mississippi and Louisiana look good and New York looks terrible, despite there being much higher average salaries in New York.

I don’t want to overstate the significance of this. Massachusetts, as noted previously, has very good school performance despite a New York-esque compensation scheme.

My guess is that other things like curriculum are moving the needle on outcomes, so I think we should look at it the other way around: What is the case for spending a lot of money on teacher salaries if not to make it easier to hire teachers? Plowing tons of money into backloaded compensation systems while making it hard for people to laterally transfer in is not a good way of achieving any of our education goals.

Of course, if you assume that people are perfectly rational maximizers of income across the life cycle, it’s possible that people considering entry-level teaching jobs care a lot about the fact that a teacher with 23 years of experience will earn dramatically more in New York than in Mississippi.

But in the real world, people are imperfect in thinking that far ahead. And they are extremely imperfect about assessing the long-term value of things like unusually generous pension and health insurance plans. Veteran members who are closer to retirement and have more health care needs place a lot of value on these benefits, so unions can end up bargaining for things that cost the state a lot of money but have very little juice in terms of teacher recruitment.

Pensions in particular also intersect with housing and growth policy in a nasty way.

If your community is experiencing rapid population growth, then you can spread pension costs accrued in the past across a relatively large number of present-day taxpayers. But if your community has low population growth, then the retiree hangover is a much larger burden in per capita terms. The economic impact is even worse if those retirees take their pension incomes to Sunbelt states, leading to New Yorkers’ tax dollars supporting the economy in Florida.

Governing is hard

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how structural roles in the political system can be at least as important as factional affiliation.

When Zohran Mamdani was in the state legislature, he voted for a law that created an unfunded mandate for New York City to reduce class size in its public schools. The comptroller’s office thinks this  and more than $1 billion per year in subsequent years. Not coincidentally, now-Mayor Mamdani .

It’s easy for even relatively moderate state legislators to vote for policies that push up school costs, and it’s hard in practice for even very progressive mayors to raise taxes.

Matt Mahan is running in California’s crowded gubernatorial election, arguing that  before raising taxes to fund new initiatives.

I think that’s a courageous and correct moderate/reformist platform. But even a politician who has a totally different factional identity and set of priorities should consider this. If you have a new spending idea that you truly believe in on the merits — whether it’s free buses or child care subsidies — then it shouldn’t be all that hard to identify something the state is already spending money on that is not as good or important.

Not just as an exercise in sloganeering but as a way to actually get things done.

Even if you assume there are zero political or substantive problems with raising huge sums of revenue from new special taxes on billionaires, residents of high-tax places will reasonably ask “Why not use the money to cut my taxes?”

The explanation for increasing net revenue — as opposed to just making the base more progressive — has to be that the money already allocated is being well-spent.

Unfortunately, state budgets are quite complicated, so I can’t just write down three bullet points for cutting waste. But if you start looking under the hood of major budget categories like teacher compensation, you start seeing problems pretty quickly. I get why taking this on is nobody’s idea of a good time, but with the public increasingly cranky about taxes I don’t think there are any easy options available.

When I asked the subscribers to my how they felt snow days should be approached, I received a variety of answers, ranging from approval to frustration to constructive criticism.

For some, a snow day was greeted simply as a welcome break. 

“Kids need to be kids,” wrote Jessica Feinstein, an Upper West Side mom of elementary and middle school children. “Many in politics have forgotten this. Playing in the snow with family and friends is more than just a childhood pastime. It’s important for social-emotional health.”

The majority were relieved that they didn’t have to navigate remote learning while working from home. 

“A real snow day should be with no remote instruction,” Greenwich Village mother of three Kaya Heitman said. “Parents are still required to work remotely on a snow day, and assisting multiple children with remote instruction is awful for parents also juggling their own meetings.”

“It is particularly unreasonable to ask children under the age of 6 to participate in synchronized remote learning,” said Harlem mom Maria McCune. “During the January storm, the school expected my 4-year-old to participate in two Zoom meetings. It was necessary for me or my husband to participate, given that she wasn’t capable of navigating on her own. Despite the school’s best effort to make these sessions educational, they were an absolute disaster. I am confident my child learned nothing essential during that time.”

“If I have to take time off my own work because staff and/or kids can’t get safely into school, which is understandable,” added Amanda, “don’t make me try to be a teacher, hovering over my kid, fighting with them to do work in an environment that is not conducive to the effort. This is miserable for all and does not result in meaningful strides forward in their education.”

On the other hand, some parents said remote learning made their lives easier.

“My husband and I both needed to work from home on Monday,” said Amber, mom of a second grader. “It would have really helped if remote school had been in place. It allows us to focus on work while our daughter stays in her normal routine and logs in virtually.”

Marie D. agreed. “If closure becomes necessary, there should be remote classes available, along with learning packets that each child can complete independently.”

Nearly everyone who responded to my query was sympathetic to the needs of those who rely on public schools for child care and meals. They offered a variety of solutions.

SW suggested, “All grades should be given an option to drop in to any school location in-person if child care, a warm location or a meal is needed. Before the start of each school year, schools need to take a poll of staff willing to come in on snow days at bonus pay. If there is not enough staff that volunteer to be available, then that school is physically closed on snow days. If there is enough staff to open the location on a snow day, then that school gets listed as a Snow Day Location where students can go regardless if that is their regular school location. DOE should publish a list of Snow Day Locations on their website by the end of November so people, staff and meals can be planned for such an emergency.”

Regardless of how they are handled, all agreed that snow days must be built into the school calendar so as not to lose class time NYC students cannot afford to go without.

“My 10-year-old self would hate to hear me say this,” Brooklyn’s Melinda LaRose admitted, “but I think the February vacation should be eliminated. It’s too close to the winter break. If Presidents’ Day was kept as a long weekend, that would give four snow days to play with and/or end school a little earlier in June.”

McCune concurred: “I would be willing to lose the midwinter break so the schools can have more flexibility for a return to traditional snow days in the future. Navigating precarious sidewalks and streets is not worth it if it ultimately puts people in danger or in unsafe situations. Perhaps giving the city and property owners an additional 24 hours after a snowstorm for cleanup (without school) can help. There is the consideration of children who need a hot meal and can only access these through school resources, but I think this can be resolved in a way that does not involve the nonsense of navigating crosswalks that are not appropriately cleared, or walking on the street instead of a sidewalk because the sidewalk is not appropriately shoveled.”

As with anything, it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time. School closures and free play will always be preferable for some, while others would rather their children be engaged in remote learning, and still others will need in-person child care no matter how brutal the commuting conditions. 

Just as I advocate for school choice in selecting the optimal learning environment for every family, snow days should also be a matter of personal preference, with schools offering a variety of options, depending on a given family’s needs, and no penalties for whichever choices they end up making.

But rhetoric alone does not produce impact. Progressive intent is not the same as progressive design or progressive results.

After years inside the nation’s largest school system, helping build improvement strategies and working with families who have rarely experienced the benefits of reform, I believe the mayor’s education plan is strong on aspiration but thin in two areas that determine whether equity becomes reality: a clear framework for communities to shape policy and the system’s capacity to move reforms into practice.

Mamdani is right to speak urgently about expanding opportunity and addressing racial disparities in achievement and discipline. But without a design process rooted in Black and brown students’ experiences, and without the operational strength to turn vision into daily action, New York risks repeating a familiar cycle. The city has produced many equity plans – some I’ve helped craft – that were bold on paper but failed to change the lived realities of the children they targeted.

For decades, New York City has produced reforms for communities rather than with them. Mamdani wants to change that. He describes a future where families, students and educators help shape the policies that govern their lives. But valuing co-creation and building the infrastructure for it are two different tasks. That gap is where his plan is most hazy.

His platform does not yet outline a concrete process for shared design. What does engagement beyond listening sessions look like in a system this large? How will students and families, especially those most affected by inequities, help shape solutions, not just identify problems? These questions remain unanswered.

This absence of structure is not hypothetical. In 2019, the city attempted a more collaborative model through the Imagine NYC Schools initiative, a call for students, families and educators to redesign existing schools and imagine new ones. I was deeply involved in its creation and implementation. It demonstrated that meaningful community design is possible.

But Covid-19 and institutional challenges stalled progress, and the city lacked the long-term supports needed to sustain it across crises and leadership transitions. The lesson was clear: Co-design succeeds only with sustained investment, careful scaffolding and continuity that outlasts political cycles.

Mamdani’s plan does not yet include those commitments. It references student voice but does not require schools to establish student design teams with real authority. It encourages family engagement but does not build mechanisms that allow families, particularly Black and brown families historically marginalized, to shape how equity efforts unfold at the school level. Nor does it commit to updating initiatives based on continuous community feedback.

When communities are excluded from design, schools often reproduce the very conditions they aim to change. Interventions miss cultural complexities. Strategies misread disengagement. Metrics track what is convenient instead of what matters. Designing with the community, not for it, creates structured partnership with those who understand inequity from lived experience. Mamdani has named this value, but he has not yet built the durable process to realize it.

The Implementation Gap Leaders Overlook

Even if Mamdani’s plan were perfectly designed, another challenge remains: What happens when bold vision meets operational reality?

Many reforms fail not because they are misguided but because they lack viable implementation. School systems are complex ecosystems; change in one area creates ripple effects everywhere else. Black and brown students — already navigating inconsistent instruction, resource instability and high staff turnover – are the first to feel the consequences when reforms move faster than the system can absorb them.

Mamdani speaks extensively about vision. He rarely addresses capacity.

Who will train more than 1,600 principals and tens of thousands of teachers to implement these shifts? Who will modernize data systems so inequities are tracked accurately? Who will prevent new initiatives from piling onto unfinished ones, creating reform fatigue that destabilizes schools already under pressure?

An equity agenda without an implementation strategy remains aspirational. The cost of weak execution is not symbolic. It appears in teacher turnover (an issue Mamdani has pledged to address), inconsistent instructional quality and widening trust gaps between schools and families. These conditions disproportionately harm Black and Brown students regardless of ideology.

New York needs more than bold leadership. It needs leadership grounded in proximity to the students and families who live with policy consequences. Trust is earned when leaders treat communities as partners and designers rather than recipients of reform.

Mamdani can move in that direction by requiring major reforms to undergo equity audits led by students, families and educators from the communities most affected. He can also invest in developing more Black and Brown school leaders, who are essential to translating policy into the daily rhythms of classrooms.

None of this work is glamorous. It will not generate headline-ready accomplishments in the first hundred days. But it is the only path to lasting change.

The election of a progressive mayor has raised expectations. But New Yorkers should not assume that the right values automatically produce the right outcomes.

If Mamdani wants his legacy to be more than moral clarity, he must pair vision with structure. That might include:

• Establishing permanent, school-based community design councils with real decision-making authority, not just advisory status.
• Piloting major reforms with a small group of schools before scaling citywide, allowing communities to shape implementation in real time.
• Expanding funding for neighborhood-based partnerships with trusted community organizations to anchor reforms beyond political cycles and sustain accountability.

His selection of New York City Public Schools veteran Kamar Samuels as chancellor is a promising step. Samuels brings credibility and lived experience that could help bridge the gap between City Hall and school communities. But even strong leadership must be supported by systems that distribute power, build capacity and institutionalize feedback.

Black and brown students have waited long enough for promises to become practice. In this climate, the city cannot afford to get this wrong again.

We worked hard to address the knowledge gap between what students and their families knew and the viable career pathways that were available to them. In many schools, however, these gaps are not addressed, a challenge that is particularly acute for students considering non-college pathways. While opportunities exist, the systems designed to help students find and access them often fall short. 

That’s why as president of New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit organization that has supported NYC schools for over 35 years, I’ve led an effort to create a to ensure that students can access opportunities by design, rather than by chance. 

Today, as students increasingly seek postsecondary pathways beyond the two- and four-year degrees that educators are most familiar with, we must rethink how we support young people to navigate their choices with clarity and confidence. College remains a powerful and important route. For most students, it is the right choice, and we should continue to prepare them well for it. But a substantial share of students are also considering vocational training, industry certifications and apprenticeships, either as a path directly into a good job or as a first step on their educational and career journey.

The challenge is that reliable, comprehensive, publicly accessible information about these opportunities is extraordinarily hard to find. In many cases, if a young person plans to pursue career training, they and their counselors are left to navigate a maze of websites that present information in ways that are incomplete, confusing or inconsistent.

The was created to make the full range of free or low-cost postsecondary career training opportunities in New York City visible, comparable and accessible to everyone. Launched in 2024 with support from The Heckscher Foundation for Children, the Career Directory is a free, open-access digital platform that compiles over 300 programs across the city: from medical assisting to carpentry, commercial driving to cosmetology, information technology to early childhood education.

What makes it transformative is not just the number of programs it includes, but the clarity it provides. Each listing is verified and standardized, with key details such as eligibility, cost and aid, program duration, credential earned and location.

To build it, our team began with a review of existing tools in the field. We then held dozens of conversations with counselors, workforce providers and community partners to understand the information students need to make decisions about which programs are the best fit for their interests, priorities, and long-term goals. 

We built relationships with providers so we could call them directly, confirm details and translate their information into a format students and counselors can use to evaluate their options. Maintaining accuracy isn’t a one-time task, but an ongoing commitment. 

We iterated on the design and conducted user research to help us understand what kind of support students and counselors need to explore career training options with the same clarity and rigor as they approach the college selection process. We’ve now trained hundreds of educators and expanded our work beyond the tool itself, developing lesson plans, one-on-one advising worksheets, quick-start videos and professional learning for counselors so the Career Directory is a platform for learning and guidance.

The response from educators has been remarkable. One counselor noted, “For students that are not interested in going to college or are unsure about college as their pathway, it gives them lots of information at their fingertips to find and explore. There is no way I could give them all these options to search.”

The directory has gained significant traction since we launched it. We’ve now reached over 38,000 users, and thanks to a new grant from the CD&R Foundation, we have committed funding for maintenance through summer 2027. This support means that tens of thousands of young people will continue to have access to clear, actionable and up-to-date information about the landscape of opportunities available to them after high school. 

As proud as I am of the project, I also know it is only one piece of what the field needs. Too often, students stumble onto job-training programs or career pathways by accident — through a chance conversation, a lucky internship or a personal connection that limits access to those who already know about them. If we want every young person to navigate their postsecondary path with intention, we need to build systems that don’t leave their futures up to chance. 

There is more work to do, and doing that work requires partnership across schools, government agencies, community-based organizations, employers, funders, and the broader public. No single institution can solve this alone. 

New Visions for Public Schools and The 74 both receive financial support from The Heckscher Foundation for Children.

 During his successful bid for mayor, Zohran Mamdani argued these prices, which have increased 43% since 2019, are driving families out of the city.

In response, the Democratic Socialist proposed an ambitious fix: universal free child care for all kids under 5, regardless of their family’s income.

To help him execute on this largely popular, yet hugely challenging promise, he’s brought on Emmy Liss, an expert in the field who was instrumental in the rollout of universal pre-K and 3-K under former Mayor Bill de Blasio.��

Liss has spent the years since working on early childhood policy and advocacy issues, partnering with cities and counties across the country as they launched their own publicly funded programs. She’s also worked as a consultant at and a child care policy advisor at the .

Liss and Mamdani say they plan to strengthen existing free pre-K and 3-K programs, while also scaling to include all 2 year olds, through a program they’re calling 2-Care. The first 2-K seats are set to open this fall for families with the greatest need, followed by an additional the following year. 

The first two years of the program, which the administration has promised will be fully scaled by the end of Mandami’s first term, will be by the state, through a $500 million investment, announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul back in January.

New York City parents can currently access free 3-K and preschool through a variety of providers, ranging from district public schools to community-based organizations and licensed home-based centers. In the almost 44,000 students were enrolled in 3-K and just under 60,000 in pre-K.

For the initial rollout of 2-K, Liss told The 74 that the administration will focus on partnerships with community and home-based providers, the organizations and small businesses already doing this work, a number of whom faced under de Blasio’s rollout of universal 3-K and preschool. 

Integrating this patchwork landscape of care options will not be easy, and ultimately Liss said she’s hoping for more than just a shift in policy: she also wants a shift in ethos, in which early education is no longer seen as a privilege, but rather a public good.

“In the same way that we think about public education being available to every New Yorker, child care should be no different,” she said. 

The 74’s Amanda Geduld recently spoke with Liss to dig into the key tenets of the mayor’s plans and hear lessons learned from her last time in city government. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you paint a broad-stroked picture of some of the main goals of the proposed universal, free child care program? How quickly will you be able to scale it over the next four years?

The broad-strokes vision is exactly as you said: Our goal is to ensure that every family has access to a free, high-quality, culturally responsive early care and education setting — across a range of different settings — for their children who are under 5. We know that care has to be provided in a range of settings by caregivers who are compensated and respected and trained appropriately, and that families have options that work for them, whatever their specific needs might be. 

We see benefits to that on so many levels: It benefits children to be in high-quality early learning settings where they can learn and grow and develop, and it benefits parents and their ability to stay in the workforce. 

Obviously, the fact that we are pushing for free is a huge saving to families. That’s $20, $30, $40,000 back in their pocket on an annual basis, which changes their own economic status as a family. We see universal child care as a real mechanism to stop the out-migration of working- and middle-class families in New York City, because that’s who we see leaving the city at really an unprecedented rate. 

And then this has broader and wider economic benefits as well. New York City on an annual basis loses over $20 billion because of child care gaps. Families who leave the city, families who do not have the disposable income to spend in our economy, losses to business as they have higher turnover rates, and all of those trends we hope to see reversed with the implementation of universal child care. 

What we’ve laid out as an implementation plan and vision is that by this fall, we will launch our initial 2-K seats with about 2,000 kids, and we’ll really deliver fully on the promise of universal 3-K and pre-K. Over the course of the first term, we’ll continue to scale up the 2-K program so that we are serving all 2-year-olds whose families want to participate in this program by the end of the mayor’s first term (in 2029). And then we’ll continue to grow and scale from there, working really in partnership with the state as we do.

How will you determine where those initial 2,000 seats are? What sorts of questions will you ask families to determine where the greatest need is?

We’re looking at a couple of different factors. We’re looking at family economic need. We’re looking at unmet-need for child care for 2-year-olds — so parts of the city where we see limited supply of free or subsidized child care options for families today. 

We are also looking at where in the city we have child care providers who have the capacity and interest to begin partnering with us right away. We recognize that there are many parts of the city where there is not enough child care capacity today, and so part of our challenge and opportunity over the next couple years will be to expand capacity in those areas. 

We’ll have more news soon on where we’re headed this fall with 2-K, but those are a couple of the factors we’re thinking about. 

Mayor Mamdani has been explicit in his vision that this will truly be a universal, high-quality program. In terms of accountability, it’ll be pretty easy to determine if it’s universal. But in terms of the quality piece, what are you going to be looking at as benchmarks to make sure that each of these centers are not only available but also high quality?

This was something we thought a lot about in the early rollout of pre-K and 3-K, and I think we’ll continue to apply a lot of the same thinking here. We will look at — just as a baseline — ensuring that all of the places, centers and home-based providers we partner with demonstrate a very high standard of health and safety (and) that we know children are being cared for responsibly in those environments. 

But it’s also about making sure that the caregivers and educators are trained and able to provide a highly responsive and developmentally appropriate experience for the children in their care. In the past, we have leaned really heavily on coaching and support as a vehicle to make sure that we are supporting providers to meet those goals, and I think we’ll continue to build on a lot of that same work. 

Quality can look and feel really different from program to program, and we want to honor and respect the range of different setting types that we partner with, and the different ways that high quality early education can look. 

For us, access and quality have to go hand in hand: that as we grow access, we are continuing to invest in quality as well.

There have been debates nationally about targeted approaches to child care (that only serve the lowest-income families) versus universal ones (which serve all families). For folks who aren’t as familiar with this space or might push back on the goal here of universality, how would you respond to them? And how would you respond to those who might be skeptical of an investment this large in child care generally?

First, I would say that we’ve reached a point in New York City where child care is, frankly, not affordable for anyone. Last year, the comptroller’s office put out research suggesting a family would have to make over $300,000 to comfortably afford child care for even a single child. 

So when those are our economic realities in the city, it’s not as though we were talking about passing on a luxury good. Child care is a necessity, and when you are in a position where families earning mid-six figures can’t afford child care, let alone our most economically vulnerable families, I think that’s a real call to action for the economic imperative that we address this. 

We’re also really trying to shift the conversation here from access to early education being a privilege to something where it really is a public good. In the same way that we think about public education being available to every New Yorker, child care should be no different. 

We also recognize that when you restrict access to incredibly important programs like child care, you actually hurt the families who need it the most. When we put onerous means testing on these programs and ask families to supply months — even years — of pay stubs, ask them invasive personal questions in order to gain access to child care, it keeps families out, and it keeps out the families who need care the most. 

By stripping those barriers away, and no longer asking families to demonstrate that they deserve child care — but actually treating it as the public good we believe it should be — I think we will see participation grow from all families, and especially the families, again, who we know need these services most and are kept out when we put these barriers in place.

Mayor Mamdani has talked about making sure this serves all children, including those with disabilities. How are you thinking about including these children and addressing their specific needs?

As we think broadly about making sure that our supply of early education seats matches family demand, we have to be focused on meeting needs of children with disabilities, and then as we continue to expand to serve children who are younger and younger, making sure that we are drawing all the necessary connections between early education and early intervention; that we are equipping program leaders and teachers with the training they need to support children who may be identified as having a developmental delay or disability; and then continuing to think innovatively about the right program models to meet family need.

Another place where we’ve seen gaps historically is for really young kids living in homeless shelters or who are otherwise not in stable, consistent housing. I know that Mayor Mamdani that’s a real priority for him as well. Can you give one or two specific examples of how kids in those environments will be served under this program?

As we look at where to expand 2-K to first, and at areas where there is great economic need, we will look at places where we have large numbers of families with young children in shelter, and as we develop outreach plans to make sure families are finding their way into 2-K we’ll make sure that we’re partnering closely with the shelter providers and others in the community to connect those families to services. 

We recognize that for many families, government isn’t always the most trusted voice, particularly families who have gone through real challenges and have faced government systems in not always the friendliest light. So we have and will continue to look to trusted community partners, who those families may go to for support, to make sure that we can leverage them and they can help connect families to care as well.

The universal 3-K rollout under the de Blasio administration was largely regarded as a successful program, but one critique was that home-based child care providers — who are typically women of color — often felt locked out of the system. You just mentioned (some other states that) did good work to address this. Can you talk about some of the policies they implemented?

If you look back at the implementation of pre-K and then 3-K in the city, I would talk about those two things differently. There are laws and policies and regulations that exist at the state level that make it much harder to bring (home-based) providers into the city’s pre-K program. In other states, the funding structures are set in a way that makes it much more straightforward for those providers to participate in their state pre-K programs. And so I think that’s an area where we can look at other states as examples.

With 3-K, and then as we think about now the expansion of 2-K, the city has tried to take a really different approach, and is trying to make sure that our programs are inclusive of home-based providers. I think in some other parts of the country, they’ve been really thoughtful in the ways that they have done outreach to providers to make sure that they are aware of the opportunities to participate. They’ve provided business coaching and other sorts of operational and administrative support to help those providers come into their public systems. 

They’ve thought about contracting mechanisms that are responsive to providers, so thinking about ways that providers can enter into contracting agreements that don’t have to be in English necessarily, for example, recognizing that home-based providers often do speak and serve children who speak languages other than English.

I think there’s been a real investment in some other communities, and I think New York has done this in pockets, but there’s more opportunity for us to do this and just supporting these providers — these women primarily — and empowering them as business leaders and giving them resources and support so that they can continue to grow and sustain their businesses. 

And then thinking about the ways in which we can take administrative load off of their plates. These are women who are working 10-, 12-hour days, providing care to children, and then on top of that, doing all of the prep work and the cleaning and the cooking and everything. They’re one-woman operations in many cases. So to then ask them to take on an incredible contractual, administrative business load on top of that, I think just looking at all the ways in which we can simplify and streamline the process for them.

A report out of looked at the economic disparities between caregivers working in these different environments and found that those running home-based programs often earn far less than the minimum wage (on average about $6 an hour) and certainly less than those running center-based programs. 

How are you planning on approaching that partnership and making sure that home-based providers are truly earning a living wage and that they can keep their doors open to keep serving families?

We recognize that there are incredibly inequitable gaps here, and that this is something providers have borne for decades and decades. For too long the work of home-based providers in particular, has gone under under recognized, underpaid, under respected, and it’s something we know we have to address, and we’re going to look at all the different options for how we can close some of these gaps.

Child care and early childhood education are obviously areas where you’ve devoted so much of your career, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what drew you to this space initially, and why this is such an important issue to you.

I’ve always been really interested in the role that government can play in actually ending child poverty, and so I started working in education policy, because I saw education as a real anti-poverty lever. I was particularly drawn to early childhood education because it’s not just about the child, but really about the whole family and how we can change the economic reality that families face. 

I was also just so privileged to work in government at the time of the expansion of 3-K and pre-K, because it gave me this very front row seat to what’s possible when government sets big goals. What we were able to deliver over the course of eight years for families — with the expansion of 3-K and pre-K — really just cemented my view about what’s possible when the public sector activates around that kind of a goal, and so I’ve been focused on it ever since. 

Then, on a personal note, as now a parent of young children, I really see the incredibly important role that child care plays in a family’s life, and I think that that motivates me as well — just thinking about my own experience and the access I’ve had, and how that allows me to come and do a job like this every day, knowing that my children are safe and nurtured and cared for and developing and growing. That’s something I want for every parent.

“I felt loved while I was on campus by my professors,” Johnson said. “I felt affirmed. I saw people who looked like me aspiring to complete higher education, and telling me, ‘I want to be a doctor, I want to be an educator or a lawyer.’ ”

Johnson is now looking to make that experience possible for a new generation of students of color, as the founding principal of the first early college high school in New York City inspired by historically Black colleges and universities. HBCU Early College Prep High School, which opened in Queens, New York, in fall 2025, is part of a broader effort to create innovative, community-driven and accelerated high schools designed in the style of HBCUs like Delaware State.

Students will graduate with not only a high school diploma, but also an associate’s degree and a guaranteed spot at Delaware State, founded in 1891 and ranked 10th overall among all HBCUs today. Just as important, they will experience a unique school culture modeled after Delaware State and other HBCUs. In fact, by their junior year students will be taught directly — but remotely — by Delaware State professors for certain courses.

Although New York City is home to more than 100 higher education institutions, it has no HBCUs. In fact, there are none in all of New York state.

“Young people of color just are not being exposed to HBCUs at all,” Johnson said. “We’re not even talking about HBCUs,” whose distinguished list of graduates include former Vice President Kamala Harris, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and actor and producer Samuel L. Jackson, to name a few. “And if we are, we’re either discrediting them, or we’re telling students that they can’t afford it, or they don’t give scholarships — none of which is true.” 

That concern is echoed in UNCF’s recent , which finds that many K–12 students — especially students of color — still lack meaningful exposure to HBCUs. The report underscores the urgent need for clearer, intentional pathways connecting young people to these historically Black institutions.

The new school, and the broader effort to develop HBCU-inspired high schools, is made possible with support from a partnership between UNCF (formerly the United Negro College Fund), the XQ Institute and Transcend, a national nonprofit that helps to design and support innovative schools. This coalition of organizations is also in the early stages of transforming an existing New Orleans public school into an HBCU-inspired, early college high school, with other communities also being explored for such efforts.

“This work only happens because of the strength of the partnership,” said Sarah Navarro, the chief of schools and systems for the XQ Institute. “UNCF brings deep expertise in what makes HBCUs so powerful for student success. Transcend supports and facilitates the design process with communities. XQ ensures the model is built to transform high school — not just launch a single school. 

“Together, we’re not just opening a new campus. We’re building a scalable model for how high schools across the country can connect students to college, culture and opportunity in a lasting way.”

Key hallmarks of HBCU Early College Prep include accelerated coursework, youth voice and choice, real-world learning and a deep connection to the local community.

Students are taking college courses beginning in ninth grade, with teachers receiving training by faculty at Delaware State, said Shawn Rux, a senior executive director in the Office of New School Development & Design at the NYC Department of Education, a key partner of the coalition. Eventually, those students will take virtual classes with Delaware State professors.

“The ‘intentionality around the school design” is key to this enterprise,” said Sekou Biddle, vice president for advocacy at UNCF. As part of the effort, the team asked, “What is it that we know about the HBCU experience that is so catalytic for students? And what if we were intentional about bringing those elements into high school?”

“It’s around [school] culture, it’s around instruction, but then it’s around bringing those principles to life,” Biddle said.

Channeling the ‘HBCU Magic’

To Rux and others, it’s not just the academic challenge; it’s the combination of that rigor with a strong, positive school culture that nurtures students and provides them a thoughtfully designed support system.

“I call it the HBCU magic,” said Rux, a Delaware State alumnus himself.

A valuable resource and reference point for the design of the new school came from a 2020 UNCF report, Biddle said.

“HBCUs are often overlooked as sources of effective methods for producing high-achieving Black students, although their existence is based on this very premise,” the Imparting Wisdom report notes. “HBCUs have been engines for ingenuity, academic excellence and social justice for decades, and the strategies and practices they implement can inform educational practices and systems.”

The report identifies a series of recommendations based on three “best practices” among HBCUs including: cultivating nurturing support systems with a high level of student and faculty interaction; leveraging African American culture and identity; and setting high academic expectations and an intentional college-going culture.

Competition to attend the new public high school was fierce, with some 1,000 applicants for about 100 seats. The school will grow each year, as it progresses from having ninth graders only to eventually a full slate of students in grades 9 through 12.

To apply, students are required to not only submit their academic credentials (including test scores), but also write a short essay about the Amanda Gorman poem, “The Hill We Climb,” and submit a video statement about themselves. While many students in the new class attended other New York City public schools previously, some came from private and parochial schools, according to Johnson.

“Our school is actually bringing students back into the public school system,” she said.

Designed for Belonging

Among those to earn a spot at the new Queens public school are ninth graders Mya Williams and Chance Thomas.

Mya, an aspiring veterinarian, was attracted to the school after hearing about it at a school assembly. Principal Johnson had been visiting middle schools to drum up interest.

“She talked about how we would get an associate’s degree at the end of our four years, and we would get college credits,” Mya said. “And that really caught my attention.”

Both students describe their new school as academically demanding, but also supportive.

According to Chance, the school is cultivating students’ work ethic and valuable skills like time management. “They definitely push us with the workload and the expectations, because a lot of our peers [at other schools] don’t have that,” she said. “Expectations are really high, but our professors [how teachers are referred to] are really supportive.” 

“I think it’s good that we’re challenged,” Mya said. “It’s preparing us for college.”

The two students also highlighted the “house” system, akin in some respects to sororities and fraternities, or to the student houses featured in the Harry Potter books and films, an analogy offered up by Principal Johnson. In fact, HBCU Early College Prep uses a point system like Hogwarts School, with rewards for those that amass the most. But in this case, the houses are named after well-known HBCUs like Spelman College and Howard University.

The experience “builds a sisterhood and brotherhood within those houses,” Chance said.

“Listen to how these students talk about their school. They’re describing rigor and community in the same breath,” said Aylon Samouha, co-founder and CEO of Transcend. “That’s not an accident. That’s the result of intentional design.”

“When students feel like they belong to something meaningful,” Samouha said, “when the adults around them have high expectations and real support structures, engagement stops being something you have to manufacture. It becomes the natural byproduct of a school that was designed with students’ full humanity in mind.”

Coming “home”

It didn’t take long for ninth graders at the new school to experience Delaware State firsthand. In November of last year, HBCU Early College Prep organized a field trip for students over homecoming weekend.

During the visit, the ninth graders toured campus and participated in a pinning ceremony with the college president. Over time, students will have the chance to attend career fairs and other activities at Delaware State, said Kareem McLemore, the university’s vice president for strategic enrollment management and international affairs. And, they will be earning college credits from the institution each year.

The high schoolers also had a chance to meet with upperclass students at an existing early college high school located on the Delaware State campus to better understand the accelerated model.

As part of the model, each student also is paired with a “success coach,” an upperclassman from Delaware State who can provide remote support, including tutoring and personalized academic advising.

As a brand new school with only ninth graders right now, HBCU Early College Prep is still early in its journey. But Principal Johnson, Rux from the city education department and their coalition partners are aiming high:

“We just want to make sure,” Rux said, “that when students walk out that door at the end of their four years, they’re fully prepared to really take on the world.”

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of The 74.

As New York City schools ramp up their focus on job readiness programs, a parent board overseeing high schools is calling on the Education Department to implement career aptitude assessments for all ninth and 11th graders.

“It helps with the ever popular question of ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’” said Lawrence Lee, one of the sponsors . “It’s a big world with lots of different options and choices. I think many people look around and think their choices are only what they can see around them.”

, like other schools across the state and nation, are increasingly focusing on career education. There are more than 130 career and technical schools plus over 260 career and technical programs offering internships, apprenticeships, and job-focused courses across the five boroughs. But often, students are left to navigate a complicated application process without guidance on how various programs, electives, internships, career and technical tracks, and postsecondary paths might align with long-term goals, the high school council board members said. They believe the career aptitude assessments can help students reflect on their choices to improve how they select courses and work toward real-world goals.

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“By 11th grade, those decisions directly affect college applications, workforce credentials, and financial planning. Rather than leave those moments to chance, these assessments can give students the agency to better understand their own talents and to see multiple futures for themselves,” said Deborah Alexander, one of the resolution’s sponsors.

Education Department officials said they will review the resolution, but added they currently use platforms that offer interactive career exploration activities and generate tailored career options based on students’ interests.

“This career planning is also embedded in 1:1 advising, ensuring each high schooler receives personalized support in mapping out their next steps,” Education Department spokesperson Isla Gething said in a statement.

The high school council members want students to take “developmentally appropriate, research‐based” assessments in the fall of freshman year and spring of junior year, saying it will help provide more guidance especially for students from historically underserved communities and those learning English as a new language.

“Some students grow up surrounded by professionals who talk openly about their work and pathways, but many do not,” Alexander said. “That difference can shape who sees themselves as an engineer, a nurse, a filmmaker, an entrepreneur, or who never considers those possibilities at all.”

The online career assessment industry has exploded in recent years: An across the country use off-the-shelf advising tools from more than 20 companies, and many others use custom tech tools.

Some research suggests that career aptitude tools can help students better understand their strengths, that might otherwise not have been on their radar. Some experts suggest the tech tools can also help erode , when it comes to career advice.

But evidence of how effective these tools are remains scarce, which is why education research organization MDRC has embarked on a long-term analysis of two of the tech tools, expecting to release results in the summer. Though the tools offer schools a way to advise students without having to hire more counselors — doing deep dives into what kinds of careers fit a student’s aptitudes and personality as well as what kind of degree to pursue and potential salary ranges — they often need, said Rachel Rosen, a senior research associate at MDRC.

“They’re not perfect,” Rosen said of the tools. “They are better if there is a teacher or an adult who will take the information and really work closely with the students on understanding how it can help them think creatively about what the tools are saying.”

While MDRC researchers don’t yet have definitive answers on whether the tool helped reduce bias, they did find that by the time students take the assessments, they already have some of their own assumptions about who they are and what kinds of careers they might do, Rosen said.

“They felt like they knew themselves better than the tool,” she said, and while the tools still had potential, “they need some good adult guidance to go with them.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

New York City received more than 50,000 applications for its free preschool programs in just two weeks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Friday.

That number is about half of the total applications the city received last year for its 3-K and prekindergarten programs — some 94,840. But families of 3- and 4-year-olds still have nearly a month to apply, and many families often wait until the end of the application window since applications are not accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Applications remain open through Feb. 27.

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“Every child deserves access to free, high quality childcare – and we’re making sure families across the city know that now is the time to enroll in 3-k and pre-K,” Mamdani said in a statement.

Mamdani seems to be taking a page from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s playbook, when the former mayor launched the city’s massive free pre-K program a decade ago and made outreach a major focal point. De Blasio’s administration to get the word out, particularly in low-income neighborhoods where families were less familiar with the city’s new offerings, and staffers called families of 4-year-olds across the city to encourage them to apply.

Former Mayor Eric Adams, however, did not focus as much on outreach, complained City Council members, who fought for more funding to to families. Last year, about 1 in every 5 seats for the city’s free child care programs for children ages 4 and under, or more than 27,000 of roughly 136,000 seats, went unfilled,

The new mayor has a vested interest in making sure : Not only did he vow to strengthen the city’s 3-K program and ensure that it’s truly universal, showing the demand for the city’s existing programs will help shore up support for his 2-Care program for the city’s 2-year-olds.

In her recent executive budget proposal, Gov. Kathy Hochul to help New York City roll out its 2-Care program and committed to invest $500 million over two years in the program. The city is aiming to create 2,000 new child care seats for 2-year-olds in high-need areas of the city in the fall, then grow to 8,000 seats the following year, and reach all of the city’s 2-year-olds by the end of Mamdani’s first term.

On Friday, Mamdani visited a home-based child care provider in Manhattan’s Chinatown as a way to show his commitment to the providers who operate out of home and often offer care that is culturally and linguistically responsive to families in their communities.

The administration will likely have to rely heavily on home-based providers to scale up its 2-Care program, which will pose many logistical hurdles. That from losing kids to 3-K and pre-K programs and the COVID pandemic. More recently, the Trump administration’s have affected the immigrant-heavy workforce, advocates and providers have said.

Emmy Liss, a former de Blasio administration staffer who is heading the mayor’s Office of Child Care, acknowledged that not all home-based providers fared well in the rollout of the city’s 3-K and pre-K programs.

“We want to work closely in partnership with them in this next phase of work, because we cannot do this work without them,”

Families can apply to 3-K and pre-K online through or by calling 718-935-2009. City officials said any family that applies by the deadline will receive an offer.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Teachers are rightly concerned that AI cheats and shortcuts will erode students’ independent thinking and that increased screen time will the social skills and human connection kids need more than ever in a technology-powered world.

As New York City superintendents, one in the Bronx and one in Brooklyn, we decided to lean into this moment and try to develop AI-powered teaching assistants that increase student thinking, foster human connection and complement effective teaching practice.

As a guide for sorting through the many AI product pitches in our inboxes, we focused on NYC’s big goal of increasing reading achievement and decided to concentrate on improving our core English Language Arts classes. We didn’t want another supplemental solution — an extra intervention when core instruction fails to meet the needs of diverse learners. Instead, we wanted more students to receive the support and feedback they need during class, so fewer of them require additional help. 

Since the New York City Public Schools had already done a lot of to improve phonics instruction and foundational reading skills in the , we decided to focus on middle school, where rigor increases along with students’ struggles. We met with principals who wanted to be early adopters share our goals and an early demo. Eleven schools in the Bronx district and three in Brooklyn signed up.

We did not want the entire class to become tech-powered; rather, we targeted the AI toward the most challenging parts of the lessons, when students were doing close reading and writing. Teachers assign each student to a small group, and they all open their Chromebooks and log into , which takes the texts and questions from the curriculum, makes them interactive and provides more targeted support for students who need it. 

Students first collaborate with their partners, discussing their initial thinking about each question. Then, they type or speak their response into the AI. The technology confirms what the students understand through instant feedback and then pushes them to go deeper, often directing them back to a specific portion of text and asking a follow-up question that guides them from literal comprehension to inferences and author’s craft. As one student said, “It’s like the handout is talking to me.” 

While all this is going on, teachers review a live dashboard that shows every student’s level of understanding of every question. If the teachers see students are struggling, they can provide immediate assistance to get them back on track.

After about 15 minutes of students working together with each other and the AI, the teachers push a button and the AI synthesizes the two biggest misconceptions in the class in real time, suggesting a discussion question to address each one (this was a “wow” moment for our teachers!). The teachers then lead a targeted class discussion, often with a lot more student participation than usual because the kids feel more confident after working with the AI and their partner.

Finally, all students complete an exit ticket, often a short written paragraph about the final question of the lesson. They again receive up to three rounds of real-time feedback on their work and revise their writing after each round. 

Based on 2025 New York State test results, classrooms that used these tools at least twice a week for the year doubled their rate of growth compared with the rest of their district. In in the Bronx, for example, those students saw growth of between 14 and 16 percentage points over the previous year, compared with a 7-point improvement overall.

While we are still learning, we hope the knowledge we gained will help other educators actively shape this next generation of AI-powered tools. Here’s some of what we learned.

First, it was important to ensure that our AI tools worked seamlessly with the high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) we had already adopted. As Heather Peske from the has highlighted, AI tools that instantly allow teachers to create lesson plans, change assessments or dial down the level of challenge risk undermining the quality and consistent learning progression on which HQIM curricula are built. 

Second, it was important to increase student collaboration, both in small groups and during full-class discussions. Most early AI products follow the old paradigm: Students put on headsets, look at a screen,and work silently on their own. No one knows the full complement of skills that young people will need in their AI-powered futures, but will be even more critical than it is today. 

Third, the biggest decisions we made were pedagogical, not technical. We wanted the AI not just to support students or save teachers time, but to help our educators be more effective. Our teachers helped design the “misconceptions spotlight” tool so they could see and address the biggest areas of student struggle. They also asked for a “highlight” tool so they could celebrate strong student thinking and call out exemplary work for discussion when the learning is still fresh and relevant.

Fourth, the North Star of any improvement effort must be student outcomes. Based on the 2024 NAEP results, reading achievement nationwide is at its lowest level in 30 years. In adopting any AI tool, school and district leaders must clearly define their goals at the beginning of any partnership, and then rigorously evaluate the impact. The is leading a movement to better align incentives and ensure contracts are tied to clear measures of student impact.

The decisions school leaders make today will shape tomorrow’s outcomes. When educators both embrace the transformative power of AI and hold tight to the values and knowledge of effective instruction, every school can build the future all students deserve.

Correction appended Jan. 29

When The 74 started looking for Bright Spots — public schools that are beating the odds  helping low-income students learn to read — it was hard to miss how well charter schools performed. Charters made up 7% of the elementary schools in our national sample but 11% of those that we identified as delivering exceptional results, with reading scores that far exceed what might be expected given the poverty rates of the populations they serve.

Charters were even more overrepresented in New York. There, charter schools made up 9.5% of the state sample, but they earned 38.5% of the spots on our list of exemplars. 

By our metric, the 10 highest-scoring schools in the state were all in New York City — and seven of them were charter schools located in the Bronx. Another was a charter school in Harlem, and the other two were traditional public schools in Brooklyn.

Click on the yellow dots to see the details for each Bright Spot school. Click anywhere in the map to close the data box. (Map: Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The74)

All serve a high concentration of low-income students, with 66% to 92% of children qualifying for free- or reduced-price lunch. And yet, 90% to 97% of their third graders were proficient readers in 2024, the year of our analysis. In comparison, the proficiency rate for all third graders across the state was just 43%. 

The highest-scoring school by our metric was the Success Academy Bronx 5 Upper Elementary School. In 2024, despite a 90% poverty rate, 94% of its students scored proficient in third grade reading. In , its students did even better, with 96% scoring proficient in reading and 100% doing so in math.

In fact, Success Academy has 21 of its schools on our Bright Spots list. The Icahn charter network has five, South Bronx Classical has three and the KIPP, Zeta and Harlem Village Academy networks have two each.

But even beyond charters, it is clear that families with young children in New York City in particular are blessed with a variety of good options. Of the 143 exceptional schools across the state, 97% — 138 — are in the city, and 84 of those are traditional district schools. 

As one example, in 2024, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis elementary (PS 66) had 81% of its students qualify for free- or reduced-price lunch, yet 84% of its third graders read proficiently. It also did even better in , with 71% of students with disabilities, 84% of Hispanic students and 87% of all students scoring proficiently. These rates all far surpassed the statewide average.

These stats may be heartening, but New York City might soon be able to provide even better options for families.

As a district, the city is in the midst of sweeping changes to how literacy is taught. That initiative, called , requires schools to use one of three phonics-based reading programs with a track record of producing student gains. As that program continues to roll out, participating schools saw last year, and incoming Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels to double down and make teaching vulnerable students how to read his “No. 1 goal.”

These are promising signs of progress. On the charter school front, it bears noting that there’s a on how many can operate in New York City, and as the maximum has already been reached, no new ones can open until that cap is lifted. According to the advocacy group StudentsFirstNY, New York City students are on charter wait lists. New Mayor Zohran Mamdani has charter schools’ expansion in the past, but he may need to reconsider, given their prominence among the ranks of Bright Spot schools.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified one of the charter school networks with schools on our Bright Spots list. The networks are Success Academy, Icahn, South Bronx Classical, KIPP, Zeta and Harlem Village Academy.

Sorry kids, New York City students will still not have a traditional snow day, no matter how many inches fall.

School will be in session on Monday, whether in-person or remote, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Friday as he provided an update on the preparations for a potentially massive winter storm heading to the area over the weekend.

The mayor said he will make the final decision by noon on Sunday whether classes will pivot to remote learning. The city is also canceling Sunday’s Public School Athletic League activities as well as any other Sunday school events.

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“I have to apologize to the students that we’re hoping for a different answer for a traditional snow day,” Mamdani said during a press briefing on the storm, acknowledging that the city has no flexibility in its calendar to cancel instructional days.

New York City schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said the city was committed to swiftly sharing information about schools.

“We know that families need timely, clear information to plan their schedules,” Samuels said.

He also said that schools will be flexible in their approach to remote learning.

“No one is asking kids to be on a device for six hours and 20 minutes,” Samuels said. “Some learning will be synchronous. Some will be asynchronous. You can still have your hot chocolate, you can still go out and enjoy the snow.”

Education Department officials are encouraging students and staff to log in to remote learning platforms over the weekend to make sure they can connect and to avoid technical glitches Monday morning, according to a letter to principals obtained by Chalkbeat. School leaders were also encouraged to stagger school start times for each grade level by 15-minute increments “to ensure a smooth login experience,” the email states.

The National Weather Service is predicting , and the city is gearing up. Schools across the five boroughs are reaching out to their students to ensure they have devices and understand how to log on in the event of a remote school day.

This is the first major logistical test for the mayor and his new chancellor. A big chunk of the city’s nearly 900,000 students — all high school students and those attending 6-12 schools — already had the day off for a teacher professional development day. But the day might be complicated for many parents of young children: They might be frustrated with remote learning and prefer that their kids play outside, or they might be scrambling for child care, especially if they must work in-person.

Many families also depend on schools to provide their children breakfast and lunch.

Schools last closed in-person classes because of snow two years ago, and it did not go well: , despite efforts to . The Education Department subsequently conducted another drill, but it was optional, .

“We are preparing for the possibility of remote such that we do not repeat those mistakes of the past,” Mamdani said.

Samuels recalled the 2024 remote snow day as a “day that will live in infamy” and said, “We’ve stress tested the system, both in person with students logging in and as well. We’ve had simulations so we are prepared now.”

The most recent test, Samuels said, was in December.

“We’ve increased the capacity to make sure that we can house as many students as possible on that day,” Samuels added. “So we now have the capacity of having a million students logging at the same time within 60 seconds.”

The mayor and chancellor offered conflicting messages this week about whether closing school altogether, with no remote learning, could be an option. Samuels that remote learning would be required if school buildings are shuttered, though Mamdani that he was mulling a traditional snow day.

Changes to the school calendar make cancelling school difficult, if not impossible.

The city stopped having traditional snow days in 2020, deciding that schools could instead offer remote learning to help meet the mandated 180 instructional days as more holidays have been added to the calendar.

The state allows certain professional development days to count toward that number, and because of that, New York City students are only in

Mamdani emphasized the steps the city is taking to prepare for the storm.

More than 2,000 sanitation workers are going to start 12-hour shifts starting Saturday evening as the city issues a hazardous travel advisory for Sunday and Monday. He urged people to take the storm seriously and stay home.

The city’s subway and bus system is expected to be operational, said Janno Lieber, CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Something shifted. That day, Jomeilin worked almost entirely on his own, asked one question of the assistant about where to find a quote and submitted his response. When a 3 out of 4 appeared on his screen, Jomeilin let out a small yelp, broke into a grin and asked, “Can I call my mom?”

The introduction of the platform came after teachers and school leaders spent months discussing ways to incorporate artificial intelligence to improve reading comprehension and the quality of student writing. What if an AI tool could show teachers exactly what each student was struggling with in real time, so they could give targeted help, instead of waiting a week to see patterns in graded work? The result was the launch of the teaching assistant in DREAM East Harlem Middle School’s sixth-, seventh and eighth-grade English classes. 

Marjorie and Ashlee start their class by explaining to students what they will be reading, what they will learn, the steps to understanding the text and how to approach the assignment, which focuses on one key element of the reading. Students make notes on scrap paper as they read the full text on their school-issued Chromebooks. Then, they do a close read of a smaller excerpt on the AI assistant’s platform and answer questions regarding what they read. These questions build in complexity as students work their way up to writing a full response.

Students respond to the AI assistant’s suggestions, note which advice they will adopt and why, and submit those annotations with their revision. Ashlee and Marjorie then discuss the annotations with the students and coach them through any further revisions that are needed.

The AI platform mirrors what the teachers would do one-on-one with students. It surfaces issues that Ashlee and Marjorie are already watching out for and enables them to address them with students in real time. The platform pulls together all student responses at once, showing the teachers where the whole group is struggling and highlighting strong examples from students who got it right. Teachers can see what those students did to succeed and share that approach with classmates who are stuck.

Across the school network, AI assessment and data tools have saved each teacher about 50 hours that otherwise would have been spent grading student work and entering data. Instead, they are using that time for small-group instruction, extra lesson planning and instructional practice sessions. Since the platform was introduced in October, students’ performance on benchmark assessments rose by about 5 points in math and 2 points in English — changes the school attributes in part to the extra targeted instruction those hours made possible.

But not everything about this AI adoption has been smooth. Early on, some teachers worried that requiring students to write rationales for why they accepted or rejected the assistant’s feedback felt like busywork. Sometimes, the AI feedback was too general and needed more teacher input. Other educators found the rubric too rigid for open-ended creative tasks.

DREAM’s leadership and curriculum team adjusted after listening to the teachers, building more flexibility into the system and clarifying when to use the AI platform and when to set it aside.

Other schools have asked what it would take to replicate this. Early success at DREAM has stemmed from giving teachers time to learn and master AI tools before students start using them and building in guardrails that train and enforce ethical AI use.

Jomeilin’s success that afternoon wasn’t about his use of AI itself. It was about two teachers who spent weeks thinking through his specific needs, how AI could fill the gaps and how to catch his struggles early. Marjorie had been skeptical of AI at the start of the year. year. She worried that the students who most need to build independence could become too reliant on AI.

What changed her mind was watching students like Jomeilin work through a full writing process, make decisions about feedback and build confidence along the way. Jomeilin has changed his mind about writing, too.

Does your child’s public school have a library?

The City Council now requires New York City’s Education Department to report data on school librarians and library access.

The first-ever report of public school library data was released last month, and revealed that across 1,614 public schools, 1,016 have a library. Yet, there were only 273 full-time librarians and 12 part-time librarians.

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Research access to school libraries with certified librarians tends to result in better academic performance and higher graduation rates at those schools. One showed that a loss of librarians is associated with lower reading scores.

City Council passed school librarians data law after years of advocacy from parents and librarians who warned of a drastic loss in librarians across the city. In 2023, school budget item lines to find that nearly a third of schools with more than 700 students did not have a librarian listed in their budget, even though state standards require all secondary schools with more than 700 students to have a full-time certified librarian.

This year’s data paints a similarly dire picture, and advocates have concerns about both what the data reveals and the accuracy of the data itself. For one, they are critical of the method the Education Department used to report on the number of schools that have libraries. Also, having a library space without a librarian remains a concern.

“Even if all the numbers are accurate, it still … paints a picture that there’s still so much work that needs to be done,” said Roy Rosewood, a school librarian in Queens who’s been advocating for librarians since 2013.

Rosewood and other advocates are concerned that the Education Department used a school’s operating hours as a proxy for the school’s library hours, according to the data. Advocates and librarians told Chalkbeat that this is not a reliable measurement of a library’s open hours, since libraries can often be shut down for testing, meetings, or other purposes.

“Last year, the library was pretty much closed all of April and May for testing,” said one librarian who is untenured and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “A lot of times when they shut down the libraries for testing, they don’t even put the librarian to proctor those tests. So we’re not even in the space that is closed down.”

For those two months, she spent most of her time in the teachers’ cafeteria and periodically, she walked around the school with a cart of books for students to check in or out.

Advocates also pointed out the importance of having a librarian, not just a library.

“A physical space means nothing,” said Jenny Fox, a New York City public school parent and founder of Librarians = Literacy, an advocacy group focused on raising awareness about the city’s library desert. Fox said she spends a lot of time educating people on what librarians do, something that is often misunderstood or overlooked.

“They’re not just checking books in and out. They’re teaching your kids about media literacy, safety online, how to vet an article for truthfulness,” Fox said. Librarians build their own curriculum, help students with research skills, and are one of the only people in the school who interact with every child.

An Education Department spokesperson said the department recognizes that school libraries are “essential,” and noted, “There’s still room to grow, and we will continue expanding these numbers to bring more knowledge, books, and a culture of reading to more students.”

On his fourth day as New York City schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels visited a Brooklyn school, and parents and educators pressed him about the lack of librarians. He agreed that school libraries were “critical,” saying when schools in the districts he worked in got libraries put into their buildings, “you could see the difference in the culture that changes.”

Parts of the City Council’s school library law have yet to be implemented. State law states that students in seventh and eight grades are receive at least one period of library and information instruction per week. Only about 20% of K-8 schools and junior high schools have a full-time librarian, according to a data analysis from Librarians = Literacy, suggesting the law’s requirements aren’t being met. The anonymous librarian said she is only teaching four library classes, but there are about 60 classes of seventh and eighth graders at her school.

The data on the number of students in those grades who receive library instruction is set to be released on June 1. Next year’s data will also include information such as the number of non-licensed school librarians that are assigned to help fill the librarian gap, the number of hours per day licensed librarians are assigned to do school library work, and more.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

As Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as his new schools chancellor on Wednesday, he also reversed course on one of his main K-12 campaign pledges: He no longer plans to of the nation’s largest school system.

Instead, he will ask Albany to extend the governance model when it comes up for renewal in June. He said he will work alongside Samuels, a veteran New York City educator, toward a version of mayoral control that will “engage parents, teachers, and students in decision-making,” Mamdani said at a press conference on the northern tip of Central Park just hours before his inauguration.

His stance on mayoral control represents a major about-face for the city’s new chief executive. But Mamdani’s views on school governance compared with other mayoral candidates, and the idea to ditch mayoral control entirely had many skeptics, especially when paired with Mamdani’s sweeping plan to build a free child care system.

Mamdani acknowledged the challenges of the massive system he’s inheriting, with its $43 billion budget, roughly 150,000 staff, and nearly 900,000 students. While literacy rates are improving, he said, nearly 45% of the city’s students in grades 3-8 remained below grade level, . Roughly And thousands of teachers are needed to meet , particularly in hard-to-staff positions for special education, bilingual education, math, and science.

He said he now realizes that New Yorkers should direct their concerns to him.

“I will be asking the legislature for a continuation of mayoral control,” Mamdani said, “and I will also be committed with my incoming schools chancellor to ensure that the mayoral control we preside over is not the same one that New Yorkers see today.”

Under the current governance model, the mayor unilaterally selects the schools chancellor and appoints the majority of the Panel for Educational Policy, a board that votes on school closures, contracts, and other major changes to Education Department regulations. The panel is typically considered a rubber stamp of mayoral priorities, though Mayor Eric Adams left some vacancies on the board, resulting in

Mamdani pledged to incorporate community involvement in a way that will not be “ceremonial or procedural, but tangible and actionable.” He wants to restructure parent meetings for community education councils so that “working parents can actually attend them” and improve awareness of these elected parent boards that oversee school zones and advise on policy. Voter turnout for these boards .

Mamdani also promised to “improve the parent coordinator role to be a meaningful organizer of parents, rather than an administrative coordinator reporting to a principal.” The responsibilities of parent coordinators, a role created in the initial deal allowing for mayoral control, . Many do a tremendous amount of organizing already, particularly when it comes to helping homeless families, but many in the role have long complained about its low wages.

Mamdani said he chose Samuels because “this moment demands a new generation of leadership” that “understands our schools” and has a “transformative vision” on how to lead them.

As superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3 stretching from the Upper West Side to part of Harlem, Samuels oversaw , combining schools with different demographics as in one of the country’s most segregated school systems. He initially used that approach , where he also spearheaded a move away from gifted and talented programs that separate kids toward schoolwide enrichment models, . Samuels started out as a teacher and principal in the Bronx.

Mamdani made clear on Wednesday that he for kindergarten students, but that he has season.

Samuels’ work overseeing the Adams administration’s literacy curriculum mandate, NYC Reads, led to an increase in test scores, Mamdani pointed out. Samuels also secured more than $10 million in grants across districts 3 and 13 to advance integration efforts through admissions policies, mergers, and rezonings.

“Equity is not an abstract idea. It’s a set of choices we make together in policy,” Samuels said. “But what matters is not just what we do, it’s how we do it, by listening to educators, by respecting families, by seeing students, not just as data points, but as whole people with enormous potential.”

In recent weeks, some parent groups had been calling for Mamdani to maintain stability of the school system and .

Liss will be the new child care office head

Mamdani also announced that Emmy Liss will serve as executive director for the mayor’s Office of Child Care, a position that will be critical in realizing Mamdani’s pledge to bring free child care to New Yorkers.

Liss was the chief of staff for Josh Wallack, a top aide in the de Blasio administration who oversaw the Education Department’s rollout for prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds

“When I worked on the expansion of universal 3-k and pre-K, I saw firsthand what it means when city government comes together to deliver the families with the vision of universal child care,” Liss said on Wednesday. “We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to come together again, to double down on the city’s investments and to design and implement a program that truly meets the needs of families and sustains our child care providers and educators.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The rules were simple: Only eighth-graders could run. Seventh-graders could vote, but “had to just sit and watch,” as former student John McAuliff remembers, playing as special interest groups.

The seventh-graders weren’t having it.

Eighth-graders that fall “weren’t interested in politics,” recalled classmate Evan Roth Smith. “Meanwhile, our year was just chock full of, as it turned out, people who were already obsessed with politics.”

Among them was a bright, charismatic, soccer-loving 12-year-old named Zohran Mamdani. That fall, he, McAuliff and Smith plotted a stealth campaign that would overturn the game’s political establishment. Smith would be Mamdani’s running mate, McAuliff their campaign manager.

Among their key plays: Appeal to the youth vote, said McAuliff — in this case “eight-year-olds to 12-year-olds, basically,” who felt they were being taken for granted by the simulation’s two major parties.

After persuading teachers to let them run an independent-party primary — other kids ran as Greens, Libertarians, Communists and the like — Mamdani and his friends created their own entity: the COW Party, promising free chocolate milk at lunch. They created posters that riffed on the “” ads and, after persuading a classmate representing the National Organization for Women to endorse them, adopted the slogan, “I Want a COW Right NOW!”

“We were all sort of trying to poke holes in the world around us and trying to make it a more fair, caring place,” said McAuliff. 

Twenty-one years later, teachers and classmates who watched Mamdani campaign in 2004 — and who saw him advance through Bank Street more broadly — say the storied, progressive private school, located since 1970 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, played a key role in forging his public personality and nurturing his love of politics. They say it also informed the improbable in which the avowed state assemblyman became New York City’s mayor on New Year’s Day.

“The school did the right thing by letting a bunch of kids who were really into something play a bigger role in it than the kids who weren’t,” said Smith, now a . “That was prescient in terms of exactly what Zohran did over this last year.”

In its wisdom, Smith said, the school in 2004 enabled Mamdani and his pals to engage in a timeless political maneuver: If the establishment isn’t delivering, “someone has to beat down the door.”

‘The fifth-graders loved him’

Founded more than a century ago in New York’s West Village, the school, part of a larger , has long espoused a hands-on philosophy of learning. First-graders, for instance, spend their entire year exploring , starting in the classroom and expanding to the neighborhood via field trips and interviews. In a culminating project, they build a detailed neighborhood out of materials like cardboard, wood and clay, and create original plays that explore the life of the city.

Fifth-graders spend the whole year — its geography, culture and history. The year culminates in a wide-ranging debate around Mao Zedong’s leadership and impact on Chinese society.

During last year’s New York mayoral campaign, Mamdani’s connection to the school surfaced only occasionally, most notably in a of 2004. Otherwise the school served almost entirely as a stand-in for Mamdani’s and elitism: The New York Post dubbed it “” and a lengthy piece on the mayor in Britain’s conservative devoted exactly nine words to Bank Street, calling it “a pricey private school known for its progressive commitments.” 

called it “a private, ultra-progressive academy long favored by Manhattan’s liberal elite” and noted both its high upper-school tuition — now north of $66,000 — and the fact that students address teachers by their first names.  

More often, Mamdani’s championing of Democratic Socialism simply drove conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats crazy: After he won the city’s Democratic primary in June, President Donald Trump “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” 

In November, after Mamdani beat his nearest opponent, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, by more than 200,000 votes, Trump to the White House, where he changed his tune, saying, “We have one thing in common: We want this city of ours that we love to do very well.”

Born in Uganda, Mamdani arrived in New York City when he was 7, the child of high-flying intellectuals: His mother, , is a well-known Indian-American filmmaker whose credits include Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake. His father, , is an anthropology professor at Columbia University.

As a student at the tiny school, Mamdani impressed just about everybody he met.

Classmate McAuliff recalled him as “extremely generous and, even at that age, extremely charismatic, which is an age where you don’t even really know what that is yet.” A bit of that charisma likely rubbed off on McAuliff, who’d go on to work in the Biden administration and in November for a Virginia state house seat long held by Republicans.

Brooke Nalle, Mamdani’s seventh-grade humanities teacher, recalled his “dimply, bright, sweet smile” and remembered him as “incredibly adept at speaking to adults.”

“He is truly the most charismatic person I have ever met in my life,” she said. 

Nalle still remembers the day in 2004 when Mamdani asked if she needed a personal email account. At the time, Google was offering Gmail, its new service, on an basis. Somehow, Mamdani had invitations to share. Two decades later, Nalle laughed at the memory: “I am **@gmail.com because of Zohran, which is just bananas.” 

She and others recalled him not just as charismatic but generous with his time and attention, especially with younger classmates. 

“You can always tell a kid is a good kid, a good egg, when they are nice to the younger children,” said Nalle. “The fifth-graders loved him, and he was really sweet to them.”

She noted that Bank Street, for years located in a six-story highrise off Broadway, in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, at the time required students to eat lunch in their classrooms. Most days teachers ate with them, and most days Mamdani brought “this delicious snack” in his lunch known as a kathi roll: One for him, another for her.

Striving to ‘live democratically’

Mamdani’s state legislative and transition offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several who knew him in this period say the school played a key part in his personal and political development — not to mention his adventurous spirit, his ease with being in public and his ability to work both sides of an issue.

Founded in 1916 by philosopher and educator , a peer of education pioneer , Bank Street College of Education was among the first to champion child-centered learning as an alternative to the memorization-heavy rote learning in vogue at the time. 

Originally called the , it brought together educators, social workers and psychologists to study how children actually learn — rare for its time. 

That led to several overlapping missions, with Bank Street over the years training thousands of educators even as it turned to its School for Children as an in-house research lab for new ideas.

The school’s influence has been widespread, affecting even our popular culture: In 1921, Mitchell made the case, in a , that children’s stories should be anchored in the real world and familiar objects, not in fairy stories or fantasy lands. She created Bank Street’s , a workshop that nurtured the careers of many children’s authors, including , whose 1947 picture book Goodnight Moon turned the common objects of a child’s bedroom into a perennial bestseller. 

Another Writers Lab alumnus, author , once that the fearsome creatures in 1963’s Where the Wild Things Are aren’t fantasy characters — they’re his unkempt, Old World Jewish relatives, who’d “pick you up and hug you and kiss you. ‘Aggghh. Oh, we could eat you up.’” 

The school’s longtime aims not only to encourage children’s intellectual curiosity, flexibility and “gentleness,” but urges them to “live democratically” inside and outside of school.

Key to living democratically, said Shael Polakow-Suransky, Bank Street’s president, is the ability to understand different people’s perspectives.

A former senior deputy chancellor of New York City Schools, Polakow-Suransky said Mamdani’s experiences at Bank Street may well play a large role not just in how he campaigned but in how he governs: Education makes up 37% of the city’s budget, with “tremendous opportunities” to shape the lives of children and families. 

Mamdani has already put forth an proposal that promises free care for every child from six weeks to five years old, offering child care workers wages that match those of public school teachers. 

But he also faces the daunting task of educating a huge influx of migrant students that over the past several years have both challenged the system and, in truth, kept its enrollment from .

Inaugurated on Jan. 1, Mamdani has moved quickly on education, naming a new schools chancellor a day before he was sworn in: currently oversees Manhattan’s District 3, which covers the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights and parts of Harlem. A former teacher in the Bronx with nearly 20 years of experience, Samuels also led school integration efforts and worked to scale back gifted programs.

Mamdani also reversed course on a campaign promise to end mayoral control of schools, saying he’d ask the state legislature for a continuation of the policy. New York’s mayor picks the chancellor and appoints most members of the , which oversees schools.

Mamdani on Wednesday promised to enact mayoral control differently: “I have been skeptical of mayoral control in the past,” , “even at times going as far as wanting to end the system entirely.” But he acknowledged that New Yorkers “need to know where the buck stops: with me.”

Notably, said Polakow-Suransky, Mamdani may well rely on his alma mater for help with one key task: Keeping schools in the nation’s largest district staffed and running smoothly: Bank Street is now the city’s foremost principal training program, minting as many as 300 new principals a year — and 500 to 600 teachers. 

‘A student who didn’t want to play the thing that was easy’

After Bank Street, the young Mamdani attended the city’s selective public . He’d later earn a bachelor’s degree at in Maine.

Asked whether it’s a bad look to have an alumnus of an exclusive private school become the new mayor, Polakow-Suransky shrugged. “A lot of our leaders go to private schools,” he said. “It’s rare to have a Democratic Socialist leader, and so that’s why people are asking that question.”

As New York City private schools go, he said, Bank Street is a bit different, not just in terms of philosophy and pedagogy. Students of color comprise a majority, and two-thirds now receive financial aid — far more than in Mamdani’s era. It’s also one of the most diverse private schools in the city, both racially and socioeconomically.

Much of the Bank Street curriculum still relies on immersing students in role-playing exercises, asking them to step into the shoes of people they might not always agree with.

Relying on simulations “creates a lived experience in a classroom setting that feels very real,” said Polakow-Suransky. “It sticks with you. It teaches you a lot of the dilemmas and questions and skills that you need to be an active participant in a democracy.”

Longtime humanities teacher Ali McKersie, who trained at Bank Street and taught there for 26 years, said founder Mitchell believed creative, experiential learning that fosters ethical development can help strengthen democracy. 

As the eighth grade humanities teacher in 2005-2006, McKersie introduced Mamdani and his classmates to the foundational principles of democracy in ancient Greece, then “fast-forwarded” to American democracy with an extensive judicial branch simulation loosely based on the First Amendment principles of the 1969 case, which granted students the same free-speech rights in school as elsewhere. The case pitted junior and senior high school students against their school after they vowed to wear black armbands in silent protest against the Vietnam War. 

Mamdani, she recalled, argued on the side of the school board, which wanted to limit expression to minimize disruption.

From there they undertook a 12-week congressional simulation, taking on the roles of actual legislators. Mamdani, the scion of Upper West Side cultural royalty, played  , the moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island. 

“I remember that being a really interesting choice,” said McKersie. Mamdani “was always a student who didn’t want to play the thing that was easy. He wanted to be challenged.”

More to the point, she said, he liked being a consensus-builder. 

McKersie recalled that the students that year in Room 420 — yes, they got the joke about the number associated with — were “really an exceptional group of young people. They wanted to dig into tax policy! I just remember being surprised that they were really interested in the mechanisms of funding around bills.”

So in addition to debating the usual suspects — gun control, abortion, the environment — tax codes were on the table, she said. “They were asking really fundamental questions around equity, and what’s what’s equitable. What does justice look like at the level of minutiae, at the legislative level?”

The simulation that year became such a part of the students’ fiber that McKersie would sometimes have to throw them out of the classroom at the end of class just to end debates. They’d carry it to lunch and would often still be discussing issues after school. 

One morning, she showed up to class expecting students to spend the day writing a bill, only to be presented with the finished version. They’d stayed up late, they said, hammering out the details over the phone. 

In that seminal 2004 mock election, classmate McCauliff recalled, the trio “got very granular” about the vote counting. Each class had only 40 or 45 people, so they were “able to figure out who Zohran needed to talk to, figure out what each person wanted to hear about.” 

In the end, the COWs won the independent primary and took on the establishment. The granular approach apparently worked: Mamdani and Smith won by a single vote.

For Smith, it was a confirmation, for all of the striving seventh-graders, “that you can just go for it and try it and beat down the door. And sometimes it works.”

For decades, too many of our children were taught to read using methods that research has shown to be ineffective. The result was predictable. Year after year, nearly half of city students left elementary school unable to read proficiently, with the deepest harm falling on low-income communities, English language learners, and children with dyslexia and language-based learning disabilities.

NYC Reads, launched just two years ago, is the city’s first serious attempt to change that trajectory. It replaces “balanced literacy” with instruction grounded in the science of reading, a body of research showing how children actually learn to decode, comprehend and enjoy written language. Teachers are receiving new training, curricula are being aligned to evidence and families are beginning to see the benefits.

The early results are promising. This year, reading proficiency among New York City students in grades 3 to 8 rose more than 7 percentage points — one of the largest single-year gains in recent memory. An evaluation of over 1,000 teachers who completed The Reading Institute’s Science of Reading Intro Course found a 34% increase in knowledge of reading science concepts, which they are now applying in classrooms across the city. Behind these numbers are children who are not only able to read books, but also tackle word problems in math, understand passages in science texts and see themselves as successful learners.

Educators themselves are telling us this shift matters. Teachers who once felt ill-prepared to help struggling readers now report “aha” moments as they change daily instructional practices, replacing outdated strategies like guessing at words with evidence-based methods that build fluency and confidence. For students who had begun to fall behind, the difference is life changing. That is the kind of momentum New York cannot afford to lose.

National research shows that third-grade reading proficiency is a . Children who cannot read fluently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school. They are less likely to pursue higher education, more likely to face unemployment and more likely to be entangled in the criminal justice system. The stakes could not be clearer. Literacy is not just an academic issue; it is an economic and social justice issue.

That is why the city cannot afford to let this progress stall. The new mayoral administration will face pressure to put its own stamp on education policy. But abandoning NYC Reads, or even watering it down, would mean turning back the clock to the failed practices of the past and leaving another generation of students behind.

I was encouraged to see Mayor-elect Mamdani speak positively about NYC Reads during the campaign. Now I urge him to make an early, public commitment to sustain and strengthen NYC Reads. This means fully funding the initiative, ensuring that teachers receive the ongoing training they need, and reporting progress transparently. 

It also means having a schools chancellor with a proven record of championing literacy programs grounded in reading science. If Chancellor Melissa Avilés-Ramos remains in her post, or if another literacy-focused chancellor is appointed, that could be a strong signal that the city is serious about preserving reforms already underway, including reading curriculum changes under NYC Reads.

New York City already has elected officials pushing in the same direction — from Assemblymember Robert Carroll’s legislation expanding dyslexia screening and early intervention to Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon’s efforts to ensure that teacher preparation programs use evidence-based methods in their literacy courses. The next mayor must match that commitment.

As a reading scientist, Brooklyn College professor and founder of The Reading Institute, I have seen firsthand how quickly children can grow when teachers are equipped with the knowledge and tools that research supports. When schools align instruction with how the brain actually learns to read, students who once struggled begin to thrive, and educators regain a sense of confidence in supporting all students.

Literacy is the gateway to opportunity. It is the foundation for every subject, every grade, and every pathway into the workforce. New York has begun to show what’s possible when we finally take reading science seriously. For the sake of our children, our city and our future, NYC Reads must stay.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at

Mayor Eric Adams’ shakeup to elementary school reading curriculums had a clear goal: to align instruction with the “science of reading,” the catchphrase for a longstanding body of research.

But in the , some literacy experts worried that there wasn’t enough emphasis on the basic theory and research behind the . As hundreds of schools transition away from , many teachers have craved guidance.

A free training program available to New York City teachers aims to fill that gap, helping thousands of educators parse the fundamental principles of the science of reading. The program, now in its second year, was developed by , a nonprofit launched by Katie Pace Miles, a Brooklyn College professor.

“I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just about the how‚” Miles said. “No matter what curriculum they have, they’ve got to know: What are the tenets that actually move the needle for readers?”’

Miles underscored that the training could also help address a long-term challenge: Curriculums often come and go during a teacher’s career. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who will take control of the city’s schools on Jan. 1, has , though he has indicated teachers should have more flexibility around how to implement it in their classrooms.

The emphasizes phonics — how students learn the relationships between sounds and letters — a . Other segments cover vocabulary, comprehension, writing, and reaching neurodivergent learners. Video footage from three New York City public schools is woven throughout the training to show how teachers are using the science of reading in real-world classrooms.

The introductory course has free slots for nearly 1,200 New York City teachers for the remainder of this school year (it is also free for all CUNY students). When the slots are filled — or for teachers outside the city— the cost is $25. Of the 2,800 people who took the course last school year, more than 2,000 were from the city’s public schools. (The course is funded by the Benedict Silverman Foundation, which , and the Heckscher Foundation for Children.)

Experts say the training could help fill gaps for teachers who did not receive adequate instruction in their teacher preparation programs about how children learn to read, as schools of education for failing to embrace the latest research on reading. New York State officials have said they’re working .

Cut to the video: Recorded literacy lessons inspire change

At P.S. 189 in Washington Heights, Principal Johanny Grullon has embraced the additional training, setting aside time during the school’s existing Monday training blocks.

Now, virtually all of the school staff are taking Miles’ science of reading course, including art, music, and gym teachers.

“Everybody plays an important role in teaching students how to read,” Grullon said. “The gym teachers aren’t gonna take out flashcards … but I want them to think about: What can I do in my daily routines as kids are warming up to develop vocabulary?”

The science of reading intro course has won attention from other states. Last school year, P.S. 189 showed off the training program to the governors of Rhode Island and Colorado, along with a representative from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office.

Julia Rosa, the library teacher at P.S. 189, was one of the first educators at the school to complete the training and helped convince her colleagues it was worth the time.

The video footage from other New York City classrooms helped persuade her to shift some of her approaches — and try new ones. When her students ask her to spell words during writing exercises, she used to reflexively give them the answers, worrying that veering into spelling exercises would district from the lesson. But videos of students making confident spelling guesses help convince her to change.

In another video, Rosa saw a phonics lesson that involved students using their fingers to trace out letters in blue sand. That activity seemed like it would make a mess in a room with over 20 children. But soon, she was off to the dollar store to buy tupperware containers to try it herself.

“Seeing it done — it gives you more confidence to try it,” she said.

Education Department officials said they hope the training will help teachers reluctant to change their practice and give them a more solid foundation as they deploy the new curriculums.

Staten Island’s superintendent is encouraging educators to take the training, and nearly 1,000 teachers in the borough are enrolled. Allison Angioletti, a district achievement and instructional specialist in the Staten Island superintendent’s office, said she hopes the training helps teachers tailor their lessons and navigate curriculums that are often packed with more content than can fit in a traditional literacy block. On Staten Island, teachers are required to use Into Reading, the .

“I want them to be good decision makers,” said Angioletti. “I want them to keep the parts that are most helpful to kids about how they learn how to read.”

Literacy experts said the relatively short course was unlikely to spur major changes in student achievement by itself. But Tim Shanahan, a former Chicago Public Schools official who oversaw that district’s training efforts, said it is still important.

“There are lots of things that need to happen to raise reading achievement,” he said, “and one of them is professional development.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Dual-enrollment programs are open to students at all levels of academic proficiency, not just the certified high achievers. In fact, that low-income teens and others historically underrepresented in higher education experience the biggest positive impacts from being given early access to college work.

So, if so many of the teens who need early access to college-level work the most are earning credits before graduation, it begs the question: Is high school necessary?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to send students directly to community college after middle school, so they might begin accruing credits toward a college degree while covering the same material they would learn in high school anyway? 

I have written before about how my son dropped out of his highly ranked high school due to boredom but wasn’t allowed to enroll at CUNY without a diploma. Being able to head straight to college after eighth grade would have been a game changer for him, and for our family.

Cost, of course, is a factor. But New York state already has a that subsidizes a community college education for students ages 25 to 55 entering in-demand fields. Why not extend it to 14- to 24-year-olds? It should make no difference, from a financial perspective, if the state is paying for a student to attend a public high school or a community college. 

It could even end up saving money in the long run, as the student would substitute two years in community college for a traditional four-year 9-12 education. Students who transferred to community college after ninth, 10th or 11th grade — whenever they felt ready — would still spend fewer years in the public education system, while the academic result would stay the same.

But the benefits of allowing willing students to bypass high school entirely and enroll directly in community college wouldn’t be limited to bureaucratic economizing. For instance:

• It would help families save money on college expenses, if the student could transfer community college credits to a four-year college.
  
•  It would lower dropout rates for bored students like my son, and for the kid who is constantly asking, “Why do I need to learn this?” College courses are much better at demonstrating why students need to learn the material, especially if it’s part of a major they have chosen. And the earlier students commence their college career, the .��

• In the case of New York, it would help prevent brain drain. All three of my children attended college out of state. The situation likely would have been different if they’d been able to do two free years of community college as soon as they were ready for it, and then seamlessly transfer to a four-year State University of New York school.��

• It would bolster community college enrollment and help those schools remain sustainable. Currently, students attending CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College are high-schoolers. Under-18 students also make up the majority at five other community colleges statewide.
  
• It would make community college an equally valued and desired education destination, not something to be mocked. One of my son’s high school teachers would taunt his class that if they didn’t study hard, they’d end up “stuck” at the nearby community college. As a parent, I was furious with the demeaning description.

• If even a fraction of New York City high schoolers opted to go straight to community college, it would help with the looming mandate for smaller class sizes. With fewer students entering ninth grade, the district wouldn’t need to scramble as much for extra teachers and physical space to meet the 2027 requirement, and it would open up seats at some of the most coveted high schools to students who might have been shut out otherwise. Fewer families would leave for private schools, which would bolster the city’s public school enrollment numbers.

• Finally, over a lifetime, college graduates than adults with only a high school diploma. The earlier students can finish college and enter the job market, the earlier — and more — they can start earning.��

This doesn’t mean that students who wish to follow the traditional high school-to-college route should be blocked from doing so. Those who decide the community college route is not a good fit for them should have the option of returning to traditional high school, too.

But allowing teenagers who believe they are ready to skip high school for college to do so would be a win-win for students, for families and for the public school system at every level.

Naomi Veerasammy and her 2-year-old daughter leave their Jamaica, Queens, apartment weekday mornings by 6:30 a.m. and head to the home of whichever friend or relative has agreed to watch the toddler that day.

Veersammy, a paraprofessional at a public elementary school, relies on a rotating cast of relatives and friends to watch her daughter for little to no pay, so she can still make it to work by 8 a.m. on the city bus.

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The single mom nets under $2,000 a month in income and can’t afford full-time day care, which costs between .

“It’s very, very hard on me financially, mentally, physically to find a sitter for my daughter every day,” Veersammy said, adding that her daughter needs stability.

Hoping for more stable child care, Veerasammy applied for worth an average of $300 a week for kids up to age 13 from low-income families across the state.

Veerasammy met , but the city . She’s now on a waitlist that has mushroomed to 10,000 city children. It’s a glaring indication of both the exploding child care affordability crisis for the city’s middle- and low-income families and the insufficiency of the current publicly funded options to help defray those costs, experts said.

The massive waitlist is also an acute crisis in and of itself — one that threatens to and shutter .

Andrea Davilar, a family child care provider in St. Albans, Queens, currently has only four of her 12 full-day seats filled. She suspects there are families on the waitlist who are interested in enrolling their kids, but can’t until they receive vouchers.

“Are they trying to force us out of business?” she said of the city’s waitlist. “They have to remember we are the backbone behind the workforce.”

Losing family child care providers is something the city can ill afford at a time when incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani is hoping to — an expansion that would likely lean heavily on home-based programs.

That’s part of why some observers are encouraging Mamdani to make clearing the voucher waitlist his first step on what could be a long road to building free child care.

Issuing vouchers to those 10,000 kids would bring “virtually free child care immediately” to a wide swath of city families, said Lauren Melodia, an economist at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs who studies child care.

“It’s not the big vision … but you want to be able to deliver services to people while you’re building the big vision,” she added.

Mamdani’s transition team didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Vouchers are a key tool for infant, toddler, after-school care

The vouchers can be redeemed at a wide range of child care providers or even used to pay approved relatives or friends. They’re an especially critical resource for families with kids 2 and under who don’t qualify for the city’s free 3-K and prekindergarten programs as well as those who need care outside of school hours.

Separate from the vouchers, the city funds a limited number of free seats for kids 2 and under from low-income families. But families often don’t know about the seats or how to apply, experts have said. Roughly 40% of those seats .

Officials in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration said the voucher program’s costs are soaring because of the program’s popularity, an increase in the voucher’s value, and a growing number of families who are supposed to receive subsidized child care as a condition of their federal welfare benefits.

Officials predict the city will need a total of $2.9 billion from the state in the upcoming budget — $1.8 billion more than the city typically receives — just to maintain the program.

Melodia, the economist, said the cost of providing vouchers to all the families on the waitlist for a year would be more modest: around $155 million.

Gordon Tepper, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul, said “no one has done more to support and expand child care statewide” than the governor, noting that she has doubled funding for the voucher program and wants to reach universal child care.

Demand for vouchers boomed as eligibility widened

The voucher program’s current budget crunch traces back to a .

Prior to the pandemic, the city to families receiving federal cash assistance, whose child care the city is required to subsidize because their benefits come with work requirements.

Those work requirements relaxed during the pandemic, keeping more families at home with less need for child care. The number of vouchers going to those families fell from over 55,000 in 2017 to under 19,000 in 2022.

That drop, combined with a one-time infusion of federal relief funds, allowed Hochul to significantly expand the eligibility criteria for the vouchers, opening them to families who make under 85% of the state median income, or roughly $114,000 a year for a family of four.

At the same time, Hochul nearly doubled the value of the vouchers, from an average of $154 a week in 2019 to $301 a week last year. The change made the vouchers more attractive to families and providers — and expensive for the state.

City families flocked to the vouchers. Enrollment in the low-income voucher program

The changes created a major budget cliff.

After federal pandemic aid dried up, city officials resumed enforcing work requirements, bringing an expected surge of families who receive federal assistance to request vouchers.

To avoid kicking thousands of families out of the program each month, city officials asked the state, which has historically funded most of the voucher system, to commit an additional $900 million to the $1 billion city program.

Hochul eventually agreed to free up an additional $350 million for the program, contingent on the city chipping in the same amount.

That infusion allowed the city to continue offering vouchers to the majority of families who were already enrolled, city officials said. But it wasn’t enough to enroll new families.

Starting last May, the city began placing eligible new applicants for low-income vouchers on a waitlist, which has grown from to its current 10,000.

Parents on voucher waitlist are desperate for relief

For families stuck on the waitlist, shouldering the costs of child care on their own often comes at the expense of other basic needs.

Milana Kochishvili, a mother of two elementary school children in southern Brooklyn, applied for vouchers after her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, leaving the family to rely on her $72,000 annual income as a payroll specialist at a plumbing company. But she has been on the waitlist for months.

The only after-school option that works with her schedule costs about $800 a month. With $4,500 a month in take-home pay — nearly half of which goes to pay rent — it’s an expense she can’t afford.

“I’m in a position now where I can only afford basics,” she said. “God forbid the car breaks or something like that, that’s it.”

Adams recently , with a pledge to add 20,000 seats by 2027. But for some parents who work longer hours, the schedule of the city’s free programs don’t fit their needs.

Kimberly Watson, a single mom of an elementary student in Brooklyn, works as a caseworker in a hospital and needed an after-school program with longer hours. The private program she found costs $450 a month — an untenable expense for Watson, who takes home roughly $2,700 a month in income and spends $1,200 on rent.

She applied for a child care voucher and cleared the eligibility threshold, but was placed on the waitlist. Paying for child care has left her behind on some utility bills — and even on her rent, she said.

Getting a voucher would mean she can “just cut back on one thing that I have to worry about so I can catch up on other things.”

For Veerasammy, the paraprofessional with a 2-year-old, there could be some economic relief on the horizon: that would give paraprofessionals a $10,000 recurring annual bonus.

But she said that money would go toward paying off credit card debt, leaving her still in need of a voucher.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .