Zohran Mamdani

Danyela Souza Egorov | From the February/March 2026 issue

In the February/March 2026 issue of Reason, we explore Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani's policy goals and what they mean for New York City. Click here to read the other entries.

New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is inheriting a public school system that has made some progress in student learning but is completely dysfunctional in terms of financial stability and operations. And his campaign promises are likely to worsen the system's flaws.

New York City's public schools once educated more than a million students, but the system's enrollment has been steadily declining. Since 2020, it has lost 10 percent of its K-12 students. Even with the expansion of pre-K and 3-K programs for young children, the schools are serving 115,000 fewer students than they did seven years ago.

Yet the budget for the city Department of Education (NYC DOE) has greatly increased, rising from $33 billion in 2019 to over $40 billion this year. This disconnect between enrollment and budget has led to the highest per-pupil spending in the nation, which the Citizens Budget Commission estimates will reach $42,000 this year.

The shrinking number of students seems set to continue. Pre-kindergarten applications decreased by 8 percent this school year. In 2020, the New York school system had 59,143 kindergarteners; last year, that number was 55,461.

Because of this loss of students, the number of schools that are too small to remain financially viable has increased. In the 2023–24 school year, there were 80 schools with fewer than 150 students; that number has risen to 112 this year. Mayor Eric Adams closed or merged 16 schools, but he also opened or planned to open 28 new ones. Closing schools is unpopular and requires political will, and Adams showed no appetite for that.

Unfortunately for Mamdani, the schools' fiscal situation is about to worsen. The class size law passed in Albany in 2022, which Mamdani voted for as a State Assembly member, mandates that New York City schools limit classes to no more than 20 students in kindergarten through third grade, 23 students for grades four through eight, and 25 students for high school classes. To comply with this law, the city will likely need an additional 7,000 to 9,000 teachers. The Independent Budget Office estimates that will cost an additional $1.6 billion to $1.9 billion annually. Mamdani, who was endorsed by the teachers union, has pledged to comply with this mandate regardless of cost.

Adams' administration did get some good results revamping the city's early literacy program. In 2023, David Banks, then chancellor of the NYC DOE, launched NYC Reads, a program to ensure that all schools adopt curricula and practices that follow the science of reading. It includes phonics instruction and content-rich lessons to build vocabulary and background knowledge.

Across the nation, states and districts have been rapidly changing how they teach students to read, and some (mostly in the South) are 

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