One of the few education issues that got some attention during the long mayoral race has little practical relevance to most public-school students and families: how fewer than 3,000 kindergarten students can join a gifted and talented program.
Now, Mayor-elect Mamdani will have significant influence over the nation’s largest school system, on which almost 800,000 students and their families rely. The Mayor-elect effectively made the race about affordability and enabling all New Yorkers to live a dignified life. This vision can permeate his education agenda as well.
The city considers more than half of its students economically disadvantaged. More than 100,000 children do not have permanent housing. Many of these children — and many Black and Latino children — attend segregated schools where many of their peers’ families face similar challenges.
The school system and city government do a great job providing supplemental resources — social workers and even washing machines — to these students and their schools. But there are no serious targeted strategies to improve academic outcomes in the highest need communities. This is short-sighted for two reasons: There is a wealth of evidence that experiencing poverty, living in a high-poverty neighborhood, and attending a school where most students are poor affects a child’s development and academic performance. Children who finish high school and some sort of post-secondary credential can earn higher incomes than those who do not, and are less likely to be poor as adults. Mayor-elect Mamdani’s administration should follow the evidence and embrace targeted strategies to improve academic outcomes, particularly for New York’s children experiencing the greatest challenges.
The two school chancellors, Mayor Eric Adams appointed, made great strides by giving teachers at all schools better materials to teach reading and math. While this work was well-executed, it also illustrates the limitations of universal strategies in addressing inequities.
Test scores for all racial, ethnic, and gender groups increased, but the gaps between the different groups’ scores have not narrowed. This is likely not only due to the out-of-school circumstances some students face, but also the fact that city schools remain doubly segregated by race and class. Most students from poor families and neighborhoods attend schools with other poor students. More than half of Black and Latino students attend schools with poverty rates higher than 75 percent, but just 20 percent of white students do. The 154,000 students without permanent housing are not equally distributed throughout the system: upwards of one in five students are homeless in the South Bronx, East Harlem, Bushwick, and Brownsville school districts but fewer than ten percent are in Manhattan, Staten Island, Southern Brooklyn, and Eastern Queens.
Schools that enroll lots of students who experience poverty face additional challenges. Teachers tend to have less experience. Children from low-income families enter school less ready than those from more affluent families in terms of cognitive and noncognitive skills, and schools do not have enough time with them to seriously narrow these gaps. Children in low-income families are more likely to have adverse childhood experiences. NYCPS has not broken down the latest state test scores by schools’ concentrations of disadvantaged students, but older analyses found both of these metrics are correlated with students’ achievement.
Nonacademic programs like Bridge the Gap Social Workers and Community Schools can help alleviate the stressors students’ families face and create a welcoming environment but helping kids perform better academically and graduate requires improving teaching in their schools and engaging them in productive activities beyond the traditional school day. Existing programs provide a framework for improving students’ educational experiences. For example, the Departments of Education and Youth and Community Development already fund nonprofit organizations to provide after-school and summer programming. Under a Mamdani administration, these agencies can redesign contracts and oversight to strengthen quality and efficiency in providers’ work and their collaboration with school leaders.
The Mamdani administration could also learn from the place-based cradle-to-career field and use agencies and the school district to do a better job coordinating nonacademic resources. Support services and programs ideally work together to create a supportive developmental context for young people. When support programs are arranged haphazardly, the impacts of more limited and point-in-time interventions gradually fade out when the resource is removed. Programs like 3-K, afterschool and summer programs, and Community Schools are generally in schools in low-income neighborhoods. City agencies could work with nonprofit organizations funded to work deeply with schools or district superintendents’ teams to better track whether specific students have sufficient support over time.
Between the government and the nonprofit sector, someone should make sure students in temporary housing are enrolled in quality 3-K programs and productive afterschool and summer learning opportunities through elementary school, for example. Again, neighborhood and school segregation make coordination across areas and over time a little less daunting because it would be feasible to just pick schools in specific districts or neighborhoods and more intentionally coordinate a continuum of services for all or a targeted proportion of students there.
Affordability may be the most significant issue facing students and their families right now. In the long run and especially for children from working-class and low-income families, education can inform the ability to exercise opportunity and agency. In the past, New York City has led the nation in making bold efforts to give working-class children a better education. Incoming city and educational leadership should continue this legacy.
Abel McDaniels works as an independent consultant in the community schools and place-based cradle-to-career fields. He served in the Biden-Harris administration at the U.S. Department of Education.
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Editor’s Note: Due to an editing error in an earlier version, this op-ed has been corrected.