NYC Mayor-Elect Mamdani Stuns Supporters With Charter School Decision

Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani ignored a written request from 19 city charter school leaders seeking a meeting to discuss collaboration on educating disadvantaged students. In a Dec. 1 invitation, the charter school operators told Mamdani they were eager to work with him and argued they could support his affordability agenda—an offer the democratic socialist chose to brush aside rather than engage, the New York Post reported.

“Equity and affordability are inseparable,” the leaders wrote in the letter, according to The Post. The letter offered Dec. 12 as a possible date for a meet-and-greet at Ember Charter School for Mindful Education.

“When a family can count on an excellent public school near home, life gets less expensive: fewer hours on buses, fewer tutoring bills, fewer impossible choices between rent and opportunity,” the letter added, per The Post. “In short, when equity rises, fewer people, especially black and brown families, feel compelled to leave our great city.”

However, the New York City mayor-elect never even responded, the outlet said.

“So far there’s been radio silence,” Eva Moskowitz, founder and head of the city’s largest charter school network, the 59-school Success Academy and a co-signer of the letter, told The Post.

However, Moskowitz said she remained “optimistic” that she and other charter school operators can build a positive relationship with the Mamdani administration. She said Mamdani deserves some leeway, noting the mayor-elect is navigating the holiday season while trying to assemble his administration. Mamdani has not yet named a school’s chancellor.

“Let’s put petty politics aside,” Moskowitz told The Post. “I’m patient.”

Charter school leaders said they maintained a cooperative relationship with Mayor Eric Adams and his administration but frequently clashed with former left-wing Mayor Bill de Blasio, who adopted an adversarial approach toward parts of the sector.

They are now pledging to work with the incoming Mamdani administration and said in their letter that they would advocate for his proposed universal child care program.

“To be clear: our hands are raised sir, and we stand ready to do more. This includes helping to deliver on universal childcare AND more high-quality charter schools,” the charter school reps wrote in the letter — which was co-written and co-signed by Rafiq Kalam Id-Din II, the founder of Ember Charter, The Post reported.

More than 150,000 students are enrolled in 285 charter schools across the city, accounting for more than one in six students attending publicly funded schools in the five boroughs.

Despite that footprint, Mamdani did not appoint a single charter school official to his transition Committee on Youth and Education, one of 17 transition teams comprising about 400 members, the outlet reported.

During the campaign, Mamdani opposed charter school expansion, objecting to raising the state cap to allow additional schools to open or to providing charter schools space in city-owned school buildings.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated by nonprofit organizations, with most staff not represented by unions. Students are admitted through a lottery system, said The Post.

The schools typically operate with longer school days and school years, and their students generally outperform peers in traditional public schools on state standardized math and English language arts exams.

The Post’s editorial board, however, was not so understanding of Mamdani’s charter school snub.

“You’d expect Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, to want all kids to have access to high-quality schools that facilitate upward mobility,” the board wrote this week. “Yet he just dissed leaders from 19 city charter-school networks who offered to help provide just that access.

“Clearly, he’d rather side with ideologues and special interests that oppose charters,” the board continued.

“Truth is, charters — which are free, privately run and publicly funded — can contribute enormously to Mamdani’s goal of ‘affordability,’” it continued. “[B]lowing off these excellent schools would not only hurt kids; it would be a missed opportunity to advance his own ‘affordability’ agenda.”