As he prepared to take office, Mayor Mamdani made national headlines about whether he could revive integration efforts in New York City’s public schools.
Those questions resurfaced this month after the incoming classes at the specialized high schools — eight competitive public schools that admit students based on the results of one test — were again not representative of the city’s racial diversity. Black and Latino students, who make up the majority of the school system, received 3.5% and 6.5% of admissions offers, while Asian and white students got 56.5% and 23.5%, respectively. At Stuyvesant High School, the most selective of the group, three of 777 admitted students were Black.
With his first full school year as mayor around the corner, Mamdani has yet to put forward a detailed plan to desegregate the schools. Still, there are signs the issue is at the top of his administration’s education agenda, even as his positions have been quietly evolving, with less emphasis on admissions reforms he once championed as a state lawmaker or even a mayoral candidate.
In appointing Kamar Samuels, Mamdani selected a schools chancellor who’s explicitly named integration as one of his top three priorities for the educational system.
City leaders faced intense pressure to address the school district’s reputation as one of the most segregated in the nation in the late 2010s. But whereas the debate then largely centered on racial integration, Mamdani and Samuels want to expand the push to mixed economic and disability status or primary language.
The mayor and his chancellor have also acknowledged as part of their racial equity agenda the need to solve for differences in quality of education before a rising eighth grader sits for the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test.
“Our focus,” Mamdani said at an education press conference last week in Manhattan, “is on how do we provide the best possible education for every single student across the city?”
“When we’re looking at our school system, we know that there’s so much more work to be done, especially to address the racial inequities that we’ve seen,” he added. “Not just frankly when we’re talking about the disparities and admissions of one test, but across the system as a whole.”
“And one of the focuses of these past six months in the conversations we’ve been having internally with our chancellor, deputy chancellors, with the team at DOE is, ‘How do we start to address that in real tangible ways?’”
As an assemblyman, Mamdani was a fierce critic of the admissions test used at specialized high schools, going so far as to call for “the abolition of the SHSAT.”
But after he entered the mayoral race, Mamdani — a graduate of Bronx Science, another specialized high school — reversed course. He dropped his opposition to the SHSAT, but promised an independent study of the entrance exam for racial and gender bias. In the younger grades, he said he would phase out Gifted and Talented admissions in kindergarten, another school program that used to receive criticism for separating students often along racial lines.
About 13% and 18% of students in gifted programs are Black and Hispanic, compared to a quarter and 37% who are white and Asian, according to 2024-25 school year data, the most recent available. The data represents a significant rise in the number of students of color in gifted classrooms since the program shifted from tests to teacher recommendations.
The mayor has yet to make the kind of systemwide changes to gifted programs that he promised on the campaign trail. His spokesperson would not say if that plan is still under consideration for future school years, despite multiple inquiries by the Daily News. Asked for an update on the SHSAT independent study, Mamdani would not commit to such an analysis, but that his administration would continue to “monitor” the disparities.
As a candidate, Mamdani also backed recommendations from a school diversity advisory group under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, which advised the school system to phase out gifted programs, make the middle school admissions process less competitive and suspend the opening of new selective high schools. But in an unrelated interview last month, Samuels distanced himself from the task force and its perceived emphasis on admissions.
“If you think about the SDAG — the School Diversity Advisory Group — they had a whole host of things (to focus on),” Samuels told the Daily News. “But the things that they chose to focus on were admissions-related. And that sucked the energy out of the room.”
“If you’re going to try to go at, like, specialized high schools and G+T, those things kind of take the energy out of the room. And so, you have to really start from a holistic place, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”
The task force did not wade into the specialized high school debate, which is largely determined by state law and the de Blasio administration was already seeking to overhaul. It also made recommendations about teacher diversity and less punitive student discipline that were largely overshadowed by the admissions proposals.
Matt Gonzales, a school integration advocate who also served on the advisory group and Mamdani education transition committee, would like to see city leaders make bold policy decisions, including on school admissions — but cautioned against any approach that seeks to “move bodies around and call it a day.”
“In a city as beautifully diverse as New York, our definition of integration needs to be more inclusive and intersectional than more of a binary racial divide,” said Gonzales. “Our school system isn’t just broken down by race — it’s broken down by other layers. So, I welcome the chancellor’s more evolved approach.”
The Mamdani administration is also setting policy under President Trump, who’s pledged to crack down on efforts related to diversity, equity and inclusion: “We’re in a federal landscape where I do think the administration needs to tread carefully and strategically,” Gonzales said.
Yiatin Chu, the co-founder and co-president of the advocacy group Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, which opposes the progressive admissions reforms, suspects Mamdani and Samuels want to avoid the divisiveness that existed in education politics under de Blasio. She also said the reputation of specialized high schools as a monolith does not jibe with the experience of current students, including many South Asian families that are part of Mamdani’s base.
“If you walk the halls, if you’re standing in the schools, you wouldn’t think the schools are not diverse,’” said Chu, who’s also a parent at Stuyvesant and an alum of Bronx Science.
“We tend to look at this from a very political, adult, non-family perspective of, oh, it doesn’t represent the city,” she added. “But parents don’t … look for that necessarily. They’re just looking at, is a school teaching my kid how to read?”
To kick off his school integration push, Samuels launched working groups in five school districts, which meet monthly to develop proposals designed to specifically address their neighborhoods and promote academic rigor. The first cohort include School Districts 3, 7, 13, 16, and 25, with a goal of convening working groups in all neighborhoods by 2028.
“Closing racial disparities across our system is central to our work,” said Dominique Ellison, a schools spokeswoman. “The recent launch of the District Working Groups is a direct result of that effort — bringing district leaders and educators together to build a school system that is rigorous, safe, and truly integrated.”
Ellison added the Mamdani administration is also updating its racial equity plan, including a chapter on the public schools.
“True integration means more than sharing a building,” she said. “It means every student has access to rigorous coursework, strong support services, and a school community where they can thrive.”