Mamdani’s first education contract cut targets a widely used NYC school data portal

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After promising to eliminate wasteful Education Department contracts, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has so far publicly identified just one item in the agency’s $12 billion contract budget.

It’s an $8.9 million data portal developed by the nonprofit New Visions for Public Schools that merges reams of student data, including attendance and test scores, into a tidy dashboard.

The proposal is generating backlash from the City Council, even as local lawmakers have pushed to reign in contract spending. Many educators are also furious, and nearly every public school in the city uses the portal. Additionally, the data portal serves as a case management system for a program that pairs homeless students with “caring adults” — an initiative Mamdani wants to expand.

“There are very few things that the teachers and I say that we have to have,” said Sarah Scrogin, principal at East Bronx Academy for the Future. “It doesn’t make sense to take it away.”

City officials have not offered a detailed rationale for cutting the data portal, which allows staff to quickly identify trends in student test scores, flag students who are off track for graduation or frequently absent, and input qualitative notes so school teams can coordinate support.

Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels said at a City Council hearing this month that his agency proposed eliminating the New Visions data contract because similar information is available in other systems. But even Samuels acknowledged the tool is useful to schools and it would be “clunky” to pull data without it.

“I could see why it was viewed as potentially duplicative, but in terms of actually how the system works, I understand the value of the portal,” Samuels said.

An Education Department spokesperson said the city hopes to “extend core functions” of the tool next school year but did not say whether the contract would be extended. The city’s final budget is due July 1.

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The proposal has raised questions from local lawmakers about how city officials are vetting contracts for elimination as Mamdani seeks to reduce spending. City Council member Rita Joseph raised concerns about how the cut could affect the program for homeless students, called Every Child and Family is Known.

“How does the city plan on expanding Every Child and Family is Known … while simultaneously cutting the platform it depends on to do the work?” Joseph asked during a recent hearing. A group of state lawmakers have urged the city not to cut funding for the portal.

Scrogin, the Bronx principal, said the tool has helped guide decisions about how to support vulnerable students, noting that her school participates in Every Child and Family is Known.

Three years ago, she began providing students in temporary housing with laundry cards and detergent after noticing that school staff were repeatedly citing lack of access to clean clothes as a barrier to school attendance.

“I don’t have time to read handwritten logs about why students couldn’t come to school,” Scrogin said. The New Visions portal, which digitally aggregated the notes, made the pattern clear.

She has also used the tool to identify students who need additional math tutoring based on their Regents scores and math credits.

For their part, New Visions officials have pushed back against the argument that the portal is duplicative because schools already have access to the same data elsewhere.

“The challenge that administrators, teachers, counselors face across the system is not that the data exists somewhere, but that the data exists in too many different places,” New Visions President Mark Dunetz told the City Council.

He argued the department’s existing tools function as one-way reporting systems rather than collaborative planning tools. Without the portal, educators would have to manually download spreadsheets and compare data across multiple systems instead of accessing it in a single dashboard.

Dunetz said no current Education Department tool connects data from the department, other city agencies such as the Department of Homeless Services, the City University of New York, and a range of community organizations.

He added the contract is a good deal for the city because New Visions raises roughly $5 million annually in philanthropic funding for the portal on top of the city’s investment.

“A private for-profit vendor would probably charge at minimum $25 million for this level of personalized software development,” he said.

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.