Today is the first day of class for New York City public school kids, an exciting moment for students, parents, and all New Yorkers who value what our school system — the largest in the nation by a long shot — does for us. But what’s different about today is that this will be the first full school year in which Mayor Mamdani and his schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, will be in charge from start to finish, as the last school year began under Mayor Eric Adams and his chosen chancellor.
It is decidedly not going to be a year of coasting along. Mamdani and Samuels will be faced with issues that have plagued our system for years or decades, including lagging reading scores, persistent racial segregation in schools, the ever-evolving conversation around specialized high schools admissions, an inability to provide proper services to students with disabilities, problems with school transportation and so on.
Pile on dropping enrollment, the encroachment of AI, the threat to learning and social bonds from technology, a federal government hell-bent on dictating what can be taught and how, and you’ve got a delicate few school years ahead, in which weighty decisions will have to be made about the future of our schools system in addition to the already herculean task of running it day-to-day. Many decisions made by city government are consequential, but among the most are those that are literally meant to shape our next generations.
Running this huge enterprise this requires clear accountability, which means the buck must stop somewhere. That should be the mayor, the elected executive of the city, and the chancellor thus appointed. It should not be the intransigent legislators in Albany, nor should it be the United Federation of Teachers, nor some chaotic and political school board that will represent disparate interests and act slowly in a fast-moving environment.
Once upon a time, as an assemblyman, Mamdani had not been supportive of mayoral control of schools, and it’s easy to understand why; Albany loves to hang this over the mayor’s head as a cudgel to extract other concessions. Now that he’s mayor, Mamdani understands why this is not sustainable, and we hope that state lawmakers will drop their games and join him.
Education has always been a changing field, but we have to say that the pace and intensity of change has accelerated and there’s no indication it will slow. After decades of the primary tools of pencils, rulers, textbooks and chalkboards, educators and administrators now are tasked with discerning the proper implementation of technologies that are themselves evolving in real time, and which promise to upend not only education but human relationships in ways that are still unclear.
We hear constantly about overlapping crises in the schools — the crisis of attention, the crisis of literacy, the crisis of teen mental health, now the encroachment of AI tools that threaten to let students glide by an entire education without really having to learn much.
The only way through is having a clear-eyed understanding of what we want our schools system under Mamdani and Samuels to achieve, which is that our students grow up knowing how to act in our free society, and can make decisions to benefit them and their community, through learning math, history, critical thought, social skills, sports, music and so on. Mamdani and Samuels will be held responsible for this, and they can celebrate if and when they succeed.