Democratic mayoral race didn’t even TOUCH on fixing the public schools

If there’s one thing the Democratic candidates for mayor don’t want to talk about, it’s getting better results out of the city’s public schools.

Even though the Department of Education, now burning more than $40 billion a year and over $33,000 per student, is easily the biggest item in the city budget and still growing even though enrollment is declining.

To be fair, one candidate did want to talk about the schools, but hedge-fund exec and philanthropist Whitney Tilson never got traction, perhaps because he alone refused to kow-tow to the United Federation of Teachers.

Otherwise, “I give the mayoral candidates a D or an F grade across the board,” said Ray Domanico, co-author of a damning Manhattan Institute report on education in the mayoral race.

Of course, most of the field are die-hard progressives who’ll never question the anti-excellence “equity” agenda, nor cross the self-serving UFT.  

The worst of them, Zohran Mamdani, actually calls for ending mayoral control of the DOE and so guaranteeing that voters can’t hold anyone accountable for failing schools.

This, when just 33% of the city’s fourth graders scored proficient in math last year and 28% in reading, numbers that don’t get any better in the higher grades.

Supposedly less-radical Andrew Cuomo did try to stand up to the teachers unions as governor, but got his hat handed to him.

He’s since publicly denounced his own past positions and even embraced a core priority of the mayor he once held in utter contempt, calling to ramp up Bill de Blasio’s “community schools” initiative.

In all, Cuomo’s education platform panders shamelessly to the UFT and its hatred of charter schools — the only part of the public-school system that offers real educational opportunity in most of the city.

No one in the race dares call for a return to Bloomberg-era  policies: expanding charters while opening more good regular public schools and doing top-down reorganization of failed ones.

Nor will they breathe a word about chronic absenteeism, a huge post-COVID problem.

More than a third, 34.8%, of Gotham students — about 300,000 public school kids —missed at least 10% of the 180-day school year in 2024, up from 26.5% in 2019.

That’s a disaster, but the candidates won’t even talk about it

Maybe the fall campaign will see candidates talking about doing better for New York’s kids, but it’s beyond damning that the topic is taboo in today’s Democratic Party.