The People Who Wrecked N.Y. Schools Love Zohran Mamdani
Set aside for a moment the real estate price controls, the government groceries, even the growing stack of missed opportunities to forthrightly condemn antisemitic violence—New York mayoral Democratic Party nominee Zohran Mamdani this week reminded us anew about the awfulness of his candidacy by receiving the enthusiastic endorsement of (shudder) the local teachers union.
“[Mamdani] has clearly broken through to the people of this city,” United Federation of Teachers (UFT) President Michael Mulgrew said at a celebratory press conference on Wednesday. “The politics of old are no longer working…. It is time for the city to say to everyone across this country, that [it] is the workers, it’s the poor, it’s the middle class, who have been getting the shaft throughout, and we’re going to lead the way in this city.”
The “politics of old” is actually an apt descriptor of the UFT, New York City’s second-largest union, whose 200,000 members include around 60,000 pension-drawing retirees. As in so many other Democratic-run big cities, NYC politics and policies have for the past decade-plus been disproportionately misshapen by the parochial professional concerns of a monopoly-seeking guild.
In practice, this means not just the 3.5 percent annual raises locked in by the five-year contract signed in 2023 with Mayor Eric Adams (raising the starting salary for teachers with bachelor’s degrees from $61,070 to $72,349), but also a 2022 statewide classroom-size mandate, state and city caps on the number of allowable charter schools (whose teachers are generally nonunion), plus a proposal to roll back modest 2012 public-sector pension reforms enacted (and now opportunistically opposed) by Andrew Cuomo.
Such blatant featherbedding comes with obvious costs and dubious benefits. New York leads the nation in per-pupil K-12 spending at both the state ($36,300) and city ($39,300) levels, contributing to the Empire State’s dead-last ranking in overall tax burden. Has there been a measurable student-performance bang for all those bucks? No, there has not.
Zohran Mamdani favors the UFT’s already aggressive wish list but wants to go even further than his vote-grubbing competitors and endorsement-wielding predecessors by advocating the end of mayoral control over the Department of Education, replaced by an alphabet soup of “co-governance” entities that would inevitably be controlled or heavily influenced by—you guessed it!—the teachers union. Not even Bill de Blasio, the only UFT endorsee to win the city’s top slot during the past 35 years, went that far.
Befitting someone who is not just a Democrat, but a democratic socialist, sometimes Mamdani’s education policy positions land to the left of the Democratic Party–supporting union. The UFT, for example, wants to de-emphasize but still retain the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), which historically has determined which students are admitted to eight of the city’s nine elite public high schools. As my colleague Emma Camp noted last month, Mamdani, a graduate from one of those schools and a former SHSAT tutor, said in 2022 that he wants to abolish the test altogether, in the name of desegregation. (During the 2025 campaign, he softened that to supporting “an independent analysis of the Specialized HS exam for gender and racial bias.”)
In New York politics,
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