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.

 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.

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.”

Therefore, the response begins at City Hall.   

Education leaders and equity advocates reject the idea that standing up for students and protecting funding are mutually exclusive. Both can and must be pursued. Every child in New York City deserves to feel safe, seen and supported in school. The new administration should be guided by that commitment. 

EdTrust-New York has expressed to work closely with the Mamdani administration to fulfill the long-standing promise of free, universal child care for children age two and under, as well as full access to Pre-K and 3-K. Families across the city still pay up to $26,000 annually for child care, and too many remain on waitlists.

Meeting this demand requires sustainable funding, additional child care sites, a well-paid workforce and full-day programs in neighborhoods where families live. Such investments would give all children a strong start. 

New York City must also confront the alarming reality that nearly half of fourth graders score below basic proficiency in reading, with even worse outcomes for Black and Latinx students. While initiatives like NYC Reads and NYC Solves mark progress, they need ongoing support and expansion.

EdTrust-New York encourages the Mamdani administration to continue expanding multilingual materials, provide interventions for English learners and students with disabilities, and ensure that all educators receive training in the science of reading. At the same time, the city should work toward developing a comprehensive adolescent literacy plan to support middle and high school students.

Mamdani’s leadership should reflect a deep commitment to a curriculum that honors the identities and experiences of all students. Fully implementing culturally responsive education means expanding Black, Native American, AAPI and Latin studies, as well as giving educators the training and tools needed to teach the curricula. The city’s schools also need greater investment in collective care teams, educators, counselors, nurses and social workers who can provide the academic and emotional support students need.

Segregation continues to divide New York City students by race and class. The incoming administration has an opportunity to take meaningful steps toward integration by encouraging all districts to create integration plans, using admissions models such as lottery. The city also needs to recruit and retain more educators of color and publicly report school integration data to track progress. 

The Mamdani administration should also protect and support immigrant students and multilingual learners, who face growing threats from federal policies and systemic barriers. Schools can strengthen scaffolds in literacy and math, expand bilingual curricula  and provide mental health services for students facing trauma.

In addition, older immigrant students should have access to the full high school experience, not just for language acquisition or diploma-completion programs. Higher education partners can also play a vital role also by expanding financial aid and creating safe, supportive pathways for undocumented students to attend and graduate from college. 

Improving school climate is another key priority, particularly the need to shift from exclusion and punishment to belonging and support. With more than a third of students chronically absent — especially Black, Latino, and those from low-income backgrounds — and many affected by punitive discipline, the city can invest in restorative justice and mental health programs.

That should include funding restorative initiatives in all schools, training educators in healing-centered approaches and increasing weighted funding for the most-affected student groups. 

Under mayoral control, New York City has achieved important system-wide progress, such as the expansion of universal pre-K and the launch of NYC Reads. Mamdani should maintain this structure but ensure stronger accountability and input from parents and students. He can build on this success by ensuring that parents, students and caregivers, who should be granted voting power on Community Education Councils, have meaningful influence over district policy decisions. 

Finally, the Mamdani administration should expand access to college and career pathways. Too few students can enroll in college in high school programs that boost college success. Let’s expand these programs citywide, closing access gaps and strengthening support in college. That should include proven initiatives like CUNY’s ASAP and ACE, which help students persist and graduate despite financial emergencies. 

As Mayor-elect Mamdani prepares to lead the nation’s largest school system, he inherits both profound challenges and enormous opportunities. This moment offers a shared chance to build a public education system that not only aspires to equity but truly delivers on that promise. 

was originally reported by Jennifer Gerson of . .

She’s a centrist Democrat and newly minted grandmother born and raised in Buffalo whose first childhood home was a trailer by a steel plant. 

He’s a Democratic socialist and a newlywed, born in Uganda and raised mostly in New York City by a renowned film director and a Columbia University professor.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral nominee in New York City, are an unlikely political pairing in many ways. But what brings them together is a shared interest in affordable child care — specifically the idea of making it universal for New Yorkers. 

It’s a policy Hochul has stressed while talking about her support for Mamdani, who is likely to be named the winner of the city’s mayoral race after polls close Tuesday. 

“I’ve had conversations with Assemblymember Mamdani about how we can get to universal child care. I believe we can. I believe that,” Hochul said this month at an event with Mamdani at the Boys & Girls Club of Queens in Astoria.  

Experts in child care policy and the politics around it see the shared ground for these two politicians — even if they don’t agree on all the details — as emblematic of how critical the issue has become to many voters, particularly younger ones. It’s especially true in New York City, which is heavily Democratic, and the state, which is solidly so. 

Reshma Saujani, the founder and CEO of Moms First, a national group organizing on paid leave and affordable child care, said that she’s seen a shift in the past two years and that “universal child care is quickly becoming a platform issue on every single Democratic platform.” 

Amanda Litman, the president and co-founder of Run for Something — which recruits and supports young, progressive candidates to run for local and statewide office — said affordability is the issue defining millennial candidates’ races right now, as evidenced in the Mamdani campaign. The fact that child care figures so prominently is no surprise, she said, since for many millennials, struggling to afford child care is part of their lived experience. 

“Politicians who want to win and who want to be seen as fighting both for families but also for the future of the economy will position themselves accordingly,” Litman said.

Enter the unlikely partnership of Mamdani and Hochul. 

“I think we’re at a turning point,” Hochul said in a phone interview with The 19th. “There’s a larger narrative around this now.” 

But for her, the issue is nothing new. 

“I’ve been talking about this long before there was a mayor’s race with this position, and I’m glad we have other people who are supporting my position,” Hochul said. “As a mom-governor, this is personal and it’s something I raised in my first budget and I raised again this year. I love that people are talking about it through an affordability lens as well.”

Hochul said that years ago she had to leave a job she loved on Capitol Hill because she couldn’t find affordable child care. She’s concerned about how little has changed since — she’s now watching her own children, who have begun having children of their own, encounter the same issue.

As governor, she in the state, giving families up to $1,000 per child under the age of 4 and up to $500 per child from 4 to 16. This spring, Hochul also announced a in child care, including $110 million for new child care facilities, repairs to existing sites and new home-based programs. She also for child care assistance so that families of four making up to $108,000 are eligible for child care that costs just $15 per week. 

According to , the average annual cost of child care in 2024 for infants and toddlers in family-based care was $18,200, up 79 percent since 2019; for  center-based care, it was $26,000, up 43 percent since 2019. 

In her address in January, Hochul expressed her desire to create a roadmap for universal child care for New York state, forming a task force and considering revenue streams outside of raising taxes. 

Mamdani has proposed for New York City children six weeks through 5 years old and has discussed to do so. But the mayor of New York City does not have the power to raise taxes — to fund his proposal, he needs the assistance of the governor’s office. 

However, raising taxes is something Hochul has not expressed support for: Even after her appearance at a rally with Mamdani on Sunday was met with she in an interview on a Fox News podcast the following day: “I will say one energetic rally does not get me to change my positions. I assure you.”

Hochul told The 19th that it would take approximately $7 billion — more than the city’s police budget — to fund universal child care in New York City and close to $15 billion to implement it statewide.

In a statement, Mamdani’s spokesperson Dora Pekec told The 19th, “After rent, the number one cost facing families is child care — it’s driving working families out of this city, which is why Zohran Mamdani has made universal child care a cornerstone of his affordability agenda. Zohran is grateful for Governor Hochul’s partnership on the issue and looks forward to making universal child care a reality for all New Yorkers alongside her.” 

Hochul said she is happy to see that the conversation about child care has been shifted out of the realm of “women’s issues.”

“It’s about time that we have more than just the moms,” she said. “Having a mayoral candidate like Zohran Mamdani embracing this as well shows that this is not a gender-specific issue at all, and I think that’s the progress we’ve been needing.”

The Mamdani-Hochul alliance speaks to politicians’ belief that action on child care is critical to winning Gen Z and millennial voters who are feeling shut out of the promise of economic mobility.

“I’ve always said this, but whoever basically fixes child care will win the ballot box. … It is such a pain point and such a deciding factor for so many families and the trajectories of their lives,” Saujani said.

Rebecca Bailin founded New Yorkers United for Child Care two years ago when the city’s universal preschool program for 3-year-olds was under .  Since then, she has organized over 10,000 New York City parents around the issue of universal child care in the city. 

“In all my years of organizing, I’ve never seen something so resonant. People were ready for this because it really hits home. Yes, we care about our children and all the benefits of child care in terms of their development. But also this is about being able to work. This is about living our lives without totally going broke,” she said. 

Bailin pointed to recent data that shows that parents with children under the age of 6 are . 

She said her coalition includes low-income and middle-class parents who are feeling the financial burden of child care, but also those watching this struggle and seeing the toll it takes — something that is now reflected in Mamdani’s campaign. 

“This is aunties. This is friends who are sick of seeing their friends leave the city because they want a more affordable city and want to keep the community that they’ve come to love and not lose people when they start families. This is employers who want their employees to be able to afford the city,” Bailin said.

She credits Hochul for understanding this dynamic — and early. 

“Governor Hochul is hearing what people are saying. She’s understanding that this is a real crisis moment, not just for the city, but the entire state and the entire country,” she said.

Mamdani’s embrace of universal child care as an issue has laid bare an interesting gender dynamic. 

“I have been saying that for way too long, this was a ‘women’s issue’ — that people would say, ‘You made a choice to have children. This is your problem. Figure it out,’” Hochul said. “I think we’re seeing this transition from ‘It’s a you problem’ to ‘It’s a collective, societal problem.’ And that’s a very positive dynamic and one I’ve been working for for a long time.”

Political experts echoed the importance of Mamdani embracing the issue.

“It is rare that you see a young, childless dude talking about this issue. I think that he’s a really good messenger for this because it is not built into his bio — the way that most of his campaign is not built into his bio — but about what he’s hearing from voters,” Litman said. 

She said this is why the Mamdani-Hochul alliance on this issue is a strong one. “It’s not just, ‘The woman is trying to get it done,’ but they can send the message of, ‘It’s the public servants who are trying to get things done.’ I hate this reality, but this is the reality and this is the reality that gets us to a place where we don’t have to spend some $30,000 a year on child care.”

Saujani stressed that getting universal child care in New York City would have a huge impact nationwide. Seeing a city of this size — and a state this diverse — funding and implementing this would be a strong signal that child care is not just a personal problem for a family to fix, but an economic problem that the government can and should manage. 

“Voters are drowning. They’re being priced out of the American dream,” Saujani said. Reducing the cost of child care is “not just a sound bite, but a real reality that people are looking for when asking, ‘Have you changed my life? Have you helped me thrive, not just survive?’”

This story was originally published on The 19th.