There are several different and overlapping hypotheses for Mamdani and N.Y.C.-D.S.A.’s seeming reluctance to engage on K-12 issues. In her Substack post, Berkshire speculates, with reason, that the Mayor is loath to consider education reforms that might risk alienating the United Federation of Teachers, the powerful union that represents most public-school teachers in New York City. But that didn’t stop Mamdani from suing the City Council, in August, over its U.F.T.-supported bill to give bonuses to the school system’s woefully underpaid paraprofessionals. (The Mayor believes that the bill violates existing labor law.) Berkshire also points out that D.S.A. membership skews young and child-free—but those demographics did not forestall Mamdani’s push for free child care and universal preschool.

Edgar Alfonseca is an N.Y.C.-D.S.A. organizer and the parent of a four-year-old. He’s currently involved in D.S.A.’s Tax the Rich campaign, which is advocating for new citywide and statewide tax legislation that would fund universal child care across New York State. “There are fourteen of us on the Tax the Rich organizing committee, and right now I’m the only parent,” he told me. He estimates that maybe one in ten D.S.A. organizers are parents of young children. “Nonetheless, every time I have brought up child care as a policy priority, there is a shared positive feeling about it.”

When it comes to the K-12 landscape, several D.S.A. members indicated that the organization and its candidates have to tread carefully in order to minimize any impression that they are politicizing the classroom or indoctrinating students. The media climate is “one of the factors that has tended to cool any education-related D.S.A. organizing,” DeAngelis said, citing Red-baiting outlets such as Fox News and the New York Post. DeAngelis is part of the U.F.T.’s social-justice caucus, the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE-U.F.T.), whose membership overlaps considerably with N.Y.C.-D.S.A.; last year, a Post article portrayed MORE members as “anti-Israel radical socialists” who are “plotting to take over” the U.F.T.

In July, another Post article kept up this refrain, with a headline warning, “DSA Targets NYC Public School Kids in Radical Takeover.” The article featured mysteriously sourced screenshots from a Zoom meeting in which D.S.A.-affiliated educators discussed agenda items such as “Helping students flourish,” “Healthy, up-to-date, physical spaces,” and “High-quality education, critical thinking, literacy, numeracy, democracy,” among other Marxist-Leninist slogans. One right-wing education activist quoted by the Post described the meeting in terms redolent of sexual exploitation. “Childless apparatchiks seeking access to other people’s children in order to convert them to their beliefs is the definition of grooming. Hands off the kids,” she said.

“Education justice is often used as a cudgel by the right,” Nina Bruckenthal, who teaches math at a Lower East Side high school, and whose name and photo appeared in the Post article, told me. “This is just one example of the dynamics that the administration will face as it begins to tackle education issues.” The episode also captured a persistent cultural appetite for shaming teachers. (“On one hand,” Peter Maas Taubman writes in his book “Teaching by Numbers,” from 2009, “we are held up as saviors, rescuers, saints, and angels, on the other cast as buffoons, sadists, milquetoasts, or incompetents.”)

David I. Backer is an associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University who advised the Mamdani campaign on education issues. “I understand why the campaign made a strategic decision to fight front and center on other planks, and not engage as much in this very fraught terrain,” Backer, a former high-school teacher, told me. Still, it’s not the case that Mamdani ignored K-12 policy altogether. In April, 2025, the candidate announced his Green Schools for a Healthier New York City plan (Backer helped write it), which would use union labor to refurbish some five hundred of the city’s dilapidated schools with new HVAC and renewable-energy systems; it also proposed transforming a similar number of asphalt schoolyards into green spaces for students and their communities.

Since Mamdani’s election, there’s been no public-facing follow-through on the Green Schools plan, as Jenille Scott of the New York-based nonprofit ALIGN recently noted in an essay for City Limits. “We want classrooms with clean, chemical-free airflow and comfortable temperatures, where kids can focus on their lessons instead of getting sick and missing classes,” Scott wrote. She cited research showing that proper classroom ventilation and climate control can have dramatic positive effects on student absenteeism, test scores, and disciplinary referrals. “Our schools are falling apart and our kids are falling behind,” Scott added. This sentiment is hardly limited to American cities—the recent student demonstrations in France, which have driven hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, originated as a protest over poor classroom conditions at a single high school in a Paris suburb. (“The work to build a more sustainable school system, while started on the campaign, has already begun and will continue,” a representative from the Mayor’s office stated in an e-mail.)