Don’t expect Zohran Mamdani — or any other mayoral candidate — to fix New York City’s troubled schools

Our city’s school system is in deep trouble: Enrollment is down, and chronic absenteeism is at record highs.

One-party rule in Albany and City Hall has caused much of this, with legislators throwing money at the system with no guardrails in place to hold schools accountable for student performance.

It’s hard to see any meaningful change coming from this year’s mayoral election.

Zohran Mamdani has the simplest education platform of the remaining candidates.

The Democrat intends to push “an end to mayoral control,” envisioning “a system instead in which parents, students, educators and administrators work together to create the school environments in which students and families will best thrive.”

This lacks understanding of the complexity of the nation’s largest school system and any grasp of what has and hasn’t worked over the last 50 years.

Albany lawmakers have tried and failed to create a system in which families, educators and administrators could work together for children’s betterment since the onset of so-called decentralization in 1969.

City and state consensus by 2002 was that strong mayoral control bested a reliance on ineffective boards a ridiculously small number of voters elected.

The system’s budget is huge, more than $41 billion, with per-pupil spending twice the national average.

The employees and contractors who live off that largesse have amassed political power to keep the money flowing while avoiding accountability for outcomes.

The Legislature and City Council often rely on campaign contributions, reinforcing their willingness to spend without any clear accountability agenda.

Only the mayor has the power and influence to put children first, but he must use it forcefully as Mayor Mike Bloomberg did and Mayor Bill de Blasio failed to do.

Mamdani is not the only problem here; he’s just more direct in stating he’ll try to free himself from responsibility for the school system.

In many ways, his opponents have already adopted the agenda of education employees and contractors, promising to spend more on a system that’s losing enrollment and producing poor and stagnant results for children.

They propose programs that’ve been tried and failed, ignoring the critical elements that led to improvement in educational opportunity during the Bloomberg years.

Curtis Sliwa wants to end waste and move money from the bureaucracy to the classroom.

The Republican also wants to protect selective-high-school entrance exams and expand gifted-and-talented middle-school programs, arts education and vocational instruction.

These are all good things, but he doesn’t offer a vision for assessing if the expanded programs are working.

Sliwa also pledges to increase teacher salaries but doesn’t indicate what would be the return on investment.

Long-shot candidate Jim Walden proposes to raise teacher salaries and introduce merit pay in the city’s neediest schools.

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposes to transform a “fragmented and siloed system” into a unified continuum from early childhood through career prep or college — with little talk of accountability attached.

He talks about “evidence-based models” but points to community schools and class-size reductions as examples.

De Blasio wasted $700 million on a community-school approach to improving low-performing schools that failed completely.

The evidence on reducing class sizes is limited to select grades and hasn’t translated well to large-scale adoption.

Mayor Adams rightly takes credit for his NYC Reads initiative and preserving the specialized high schools.

His administration has taken slight steps to consolidate some small schools but hasn’t forcefully used all the power of mayoral control to bring about change on a larger scale.

It’s a shame none of the candidates accepts that the “more-money approach” hasn’t worked.

Professional competence is critical, and the system needs reorganization to bring that into practice.

After steep enrollment declines, the system has too many schools and too many local districts.

Strategic consolidation at both levels could strengthen efficiency and managerial competence and allow the mayor to do more to improve school practice.

It is guaranteed the Legislature and council would oppose this, as it would derail the gravy train.

The federal government has thrown a life raft to the forces of education reform through the enactment of a federal tax credit for contributions to organizations offering scholarships or educational-savings accounts that can be used in public, private and charter schools.

Unfortunately, states must volunteer to participate in this program, and opposition to meaningful school choice is fierce in New York.

State elections in 2026 loom as the only opportunity to fix the politics that put spending over performance and have crippled our school system.

Ray Domanico is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow.