Mamdani can make significant reforms to amplify parental voices using existing powers.
With mayoral control of New York’s schools once again up for renewal by the State Legislature — the authority will expire this June 30 unless extended before then — there’s pressure on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to show that he can bring parents to the table in a meaningful way. A careful bottom-to-top analysis of parent powers in the school system reveals that there are multiple levers he can pull to accomplish this task, largely under the current law.
Let’s start with the lowest-hanging fruit: Every year parents are surveyed on their children’s schools. Yet there is little visible sign that those survey results go anywhere. Mamdani should insist upon a comprehensive review of every principal in the system, using parent survey results as a tool.
This is an appropriate time for such assessment. Our new chancellor, Kamar Samuels, and his new deputy chancellors for elementary/middle and high schools, need to get a handle on the system they’ve inherited, in which enrollment has been declining for years. Focusing on parent satisfaction is both good practice and good politics, especially in a competitive environment with charters and private schools. Assessing principals on their dedication to parent engagement should not be an inquisition, but rather an effort at bottom-up system improvement and a demonstration that grassroots attention will be the new chancellor’s governing paradigm.
The survey is just the beginning. Every public school is supposed to have an effective parent coordinator, a working School Leadership Team and other committees with parent representation. Principals need to be held accountable by district superintendents to ensure that the work of parent coordinators and committee representation are more than formalities. One way to exhibit respect for the role of School Leadership Teams — which are charged with development of educational policies and oversight for their schools — is for Mamdani and Samuels to give the teams the prerogative to choose which approved reading and math curricula should be adopted by the school. Ex-Chancellor David Banks gave that choice to his hand-picked superintendents when it should have been a school-based decision all along, with waivers made more freely available if schools demonstrate viable alternatives. Where school-based decisionmaking is possible, that should be the administration’s default.
There’s more. The administration should empower parents’ role in hiring school and community district leadership. No, parents shouldn’t be given veto power — but they should be carefully heard during searches. Now, under Chancellor’s Regulation C-30 (principals and assistant principals) and C-37 (community superintendents), parent consultation is too easily dismissed by superintendents or the chancellor, respectively, who have the final word.
To put teeth into a better process, a new statutory position, Parent Advocate, housed in either the Department of Education or the office of the citywide elected Public Advocate, should be created to monitor and support parent engagement. To ensure the role’s independence, the Parent Advocate appointment should be approved by a collective vote of Community Education Council presidents, a decisionmaking body already empowered to appoint one of a number of parent members of the central Panel for Education Policy.
Community Education Councils in each of our 32 community school districts — largely now treated as vestigial versions of the old Community School Board — and the citywide Panel on Education Policy are another potential source of parent power and decisionmaking. But these councils currently have little power. The Legislature is being pressed to give them a greater role over district governance. That could make sense, but only if the councils are rethought. As long as these bodies are constituted through low-turnout school-district-run elections, their governing role will rightly be questioned. Arising from the late 20th-century era of community control, their predecessor community school boards were elected by all eligible voters in the district, plus otherwise ineligible parent voters.
If the Legislature wishes to enhance the powers for the Community Education Councils, it would at a bare minimum make sense to restore the franchise to non-parents. Public schools are a public good. Besides the old saying against taxation without representation, it’s important as a matter of public support for education that the entire adult population (including eligible students) be given a voice in public school policies and operations. In any event, whether left to parent voters or the general public, administration of Community Education Council voting should be moved from the Department of Education to the Board of Elections, which is more expert at conducting elections.
Atop the parent power pyramid, our pre-mayoral control Board of Education had broad powers including appointment of the chancellor, with its seven members appointed by the borough presidents and mayor and no designated parent members. Today, its replacement, the 24-member Panel for Educational Policy, majority-controlled by the mayor, has a statutory minimum of 14 public school parents, including at least two who have children with disabilities and one with a child enrolled in a bilingual education program. While the Panel’s powers were originally limited to policy rather than operations, its authority now extends to certain contract and school utilization decisions, including closures, grade configurations and co-location of schools within a building.
An obscure power of the Panel for Educational Policy — to redraw community district lines — presents the possibility of solving daunting systemwide problems caused by uneven conditions of school under-enrollment, overcrowding and class-size limits, as well as racial and economic segregation. Current lines drawn 50 years ago now needlessly discourage mergers and restructured attendance zones that could better serve our students. A recent study demonstrates how schools near to one another but across district lines could be improved by erasing these artificial barriers.
The system of district-based superintendents and councils creates understandable proprietary interests in serving their own populations. But that means cross-district arrangements have rarely found footing. Current law gives drawing of elementary and middle school attendance zones within the district to community education councils, a closely-held super power we saw malfunctioning in the recent District 3 merger controversy. Community school district lines are determined by the PEP. Unless the legislature wants to step into this debate, new lines approved by the PEP that promote greater fluidity in school enrollments are the best, if unlikely, solution. But through the weight of the mayor’s appointed majority, informed by strong parent representation, this needed reform could become a reality.
Some suggest changing the composition of the PEP to wrest majority control from the mayor, but that’s not wise. And, though its current size is unwieldy, major changes might run into legal or political trouble. For example, an elected board favoring Chicago’s parent voters faced judicial rejection over one-person-one-vote concerns, and even a mayor as progressive as Michelle Wu in Boston appoints that city’s seven member School Committee, circumscribed only by the flimsy requirement that “the mayor shall strive to appoint individuals who reflect the ethnic, racial and socioeconomic diversity of the city of Boston and its public school population.”
Increasing parent/school partnership in public education is crucial in an era of decreasing enrollments and increased competition. While mayoral control provides the needed budgetary, operational and contractual structure, our schools are hollow without parents actively engaged in their educational mission. The way forward is clear. System leaders and legislators need to rise to the occasion.
David Bloomfield is a professor of education leadership, law and policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. He was general counsel to the New York City Board of Education prior to mayoral control.