Once more, the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and his schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, will have to beg and haggle with state legislators over something that should be a non-issue: mayoral control of schools.

Both the state Senate and the Assembly left mayoral control out of their budget resolutions they proposed this week. For shame. Mayoral control expires on June 30, just 110 days from now.

For decades now, Albany lawmakers have extended this control only in fits and starts out of the recognition that it makes sense for the buck to stop with the mayor and his chancellor, yet they refuse to take the natural next step of long-term or even permanent extension of this control.

These perennial fights over control of schools certainly don’t serve the system’s nearly 850,000 students. They don’t serve the dedicated teachers who have in recent years navigated the emergence of addictive and omnipresent social media, a pandemic that shut schools down, serving homeless students, and the fear engendered by the Trump administration.

They don’t serve superintendents and administrators, who need predictable, steady leadership to ensure their schools’ success. They only serve Albany legislators, who get to lord this over the mayor every other year or so and try to extract concessions and horse-trade.

It’s rich for state Sen. John Liu to attempt to tie this to the class size bill, an unfunded mandate that Albany foisted on the city. Yes, it is state law and the city must comply, but we fail to see how threatening to throw the entire Department of Education into chaos is going to serve the interests of the classrooms that this law was ostensibly going to make better.

As for Liu’s cryptic desire to “increase stakeholder input” into the schools governance process, the stakeholders that most matter here are the New York City electorate, who voted in record numbers last year to elect Mamdani mayor and vest him with the authority to run the system as he sees fit.

Legislators had their issues with Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, but many of the new mayor’s former colleagues are all-in; Liu himself endorsed and was a prominent surrogate for Mamdani during his campaign last year. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be disagreements or that Albany has to go along with everything Mamdani hopes to do, but mayoral control is absolutely crucial to the cornerstone effort to expand pre-K for 2- and 3-year-olds, something that everyone seems on board with.

If legislators really want to help their onetime colleague succeed, that’s the way to do it, not via throwing him a bone with things like the resurrection of the limited free bus pilot, which probably won’t give us any more actionable data than the last pilot did and will serve relatively few New Yorkers, certainly fewer than the hundreds of thousands of families around the city who rely on the smooth operation of the schools and are counting on the child care expansion. 

The ideal length of time for a mayoral control extension is indefinite, but we’ll take Gov. Hochul’s proposal for a four-year extension, taking the issue at least through Mamdani’s current term. There’ll be plenty else to haggle over, from taxes — which Mamdani keeps pushing to raise as Hochul pushes back — to environmental standards to the city and state’s response to the hostile Trump administration. This should not be one of those issues; it shouldn’t have been since Albany first decided to move away from the flawed school board system.

© NY Daily News