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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We begin today with today's installment of our election series, 30 Issues in 30 Days. It's day 12 and issue 12. How would the New York City mayoral candidates try to improve the public schools? This is a vast topic with more moving parts than we can do justice to in one segment. That affects more than 900,000 kids and their families, tens of thousands of teachers plus other staffers, and is by far, in case you didn't know this, the biggest item in the city budget. By far, more than a third of the New York City budget every year goes to the schools. That's way more, for example, than the police and fire and sanitation departments co combined. We can't do it justice in one breath.

What we will do is break it up for today into three education questions and come back to education again later in the series. For today, we will ask, should the mayor give up mayoral control of schools? Mamdani is proposing to actually reduce his own power over the school system if elected. Should there be more charter schools and other kinds of options?

Cuomo and Sliwa are both proposing versions of that. Should gifted and talented programs be expanded, contracted or remain the same from kindergarten all the way up through the specialized high schools, Bronx Science, Stuyvesant? The others candidates disagree on that. Our guide for this is Alex Zimmerman, reporter for the education news site Chalkbeat New York. Alex, thanks for joining our 30 Issues in 30 days segment. Welcome back to WNYC.

Alex Zimmerman: It's good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners with a stake in this, we will invite your calls on each of these three questions as we go. Mayoral control of schools first, who thinks the mayor should have or give up the basically unilateral power to appoint the chancellor and sign off on all education policy decisions? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Parent or teacher, anybody else, pro or con, call or text, or if you just have a question to ask Alex about this, that of course is welcome to 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

Alex, give us a little background on this first. Mayoral control of schools came in with Mayor Bloomberg in 2002, approved by the state, which has authority over that after years of a more decentralized system. Why did power over the city schools consolidate at that time?

Alex Zimmerman: There had been an argument that the previous system of school governance, which basically delegated authority to these 32 local school boards was just too fragmented and too rife with patronage and corruption, and that by centralizing power, you could really enact a vision for what is an enormous system, an enormous bureaucracy, because you would have one person ultimately responsible for it and in control of it.

Many listeners will recall that Bloomberg really ran on a very sweeping education agenda. He had a lot of ideas about how the school system should change. I think he felt like in order to execute that, he needed to have control of it. He couldn't have all these different decision makers and veto points potentially coming up the works. He pushed really hard for the state legislature to give him control over the school system's budget, the power to appoint a chancellor, and like you said, policy control.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, this can be one way that you have input on this. Those of you who lives through this as a teacher, a student, a parent and anyone else did the Bloomberg reforms, which were very controversial at the time, some of you will remember, mostly work, mostly didn't work. De Blasio reforms were different, undid some of Bloomberg, tried some things of his own or things that Mayor Adams has done as in charge solely of the public schools.

We can talk about anything in that arc, but landing ultimately on the question who should control schools now? 212-433-WNYC. The Mamdani for Mayor website says he, "Supports an end to mayoral control and envisions a system instead in which parents, students, educators and administrators work together to create the school environments in which students and families will best thrive. Strengthening co governance through the PEP, SLTs, DLTs, and CECs in particular." Alex, without translating each of those acronyms, can you explain what shared decision making Mamdani is proposing there, and with the hopes of improving what on behalf of the students?

Alex Zimmerman: These are really, really key questions about what he's proposing. Unfortunately, he hasn't really spelled out a lot of details about what he has in mind. The groups you just mentioned are-- Like there's a advisory board called the Panel for Educational Policy that votes on lots of contracts, though it is majority appointed by the mayor.

We've seen over the years some efforts to tinker with the membership of the PEP by adding members, adding parent representatives. Mamdani seems to be hinting that he would be open to more tweaks to that board. Some of the other Alphabet soup groups you mentioned are really some of them are school level groups that help manage local decisions, in consultation with the principal and others.

You you could imagine that what Mamdani is gesturing at there is some system that consults those groups more intentionally in crafting citywide policy. I think the big question that hangs over this proposal is, does he imagine lobbying state lawmakers in Albany to really fundamentally change the structure of mayoral control, or is he more leaning toward, "I want more parent input in my policymaking, but the decision is still ultimately going to rest with me."

Brian Lehrer: Both the Cuomo and Sliwa sites say explicitly they would keep mayoral control of schools. What are some of their critiques of Mamdani's idea to end it or arguments against?

Alex Zimmerman: I think one of the main themes we've heard, not just from Sliwa and Cuomo, but from basically every mayor who has had mayoral control since Bloomberg, is that the advantage is it's really obvious who is making policy. It's the mayor. If you disagree with what the mayor is doing on education policy, then there's a really clear person to hold accountable.

You also hear from lots of people that there are big picture policy items that would be really hard to do if you didn't have mayoral control. A lot of people point to Universal Pre-K, which was implemented by Mayor Bill de Blasio, as something that would have been really hard if you, if you didn't have a lot of control over the bureaucracy to stand up all of these new classrooms and coordinate with all these community organizations that ended up providing a large percentage of the seats. I think when you hear from Cuomo and Sliwa, they have agendas and they want to be in charge of executing them.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here's Gail in Sunnyside who says she's a retired teacher. Gail, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Gail: Yes, I am. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I can.

Gail: Thank you for taking what I want to say. I taught under de Blasio and I remember Cuomo treating him-- Cuomo was like the president. He doesn't really care about schools. He kept pushing the charter schools, and he held money back that belonged to the city. As he was running for the last time, he said, "Oh, look, I found money," and I could keep on talking. I'm very [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: That's a global critique of Cuomo with respect to this issue and his record as governor. The question on the table right now, and I see you did talk to our screener about this, is should the city continue with mayoral control of public schools? Or as Mamdani is proposing, should power be disaggregated? You have a thought about that?

Gail: Yes. I would go with Mamdani.

Brian Lehrer: Because?

Gail: Because the other doesn't work. Things that was slashed from special ed, I'm really angry so those words are not coming out. There needs to be more of an input, particularly with the parents. Absolutely. I am voting for Mamdani.

Brian Lehrer: If you're retired now, then you were probably around, correct me if I'm wrong, to some degree, pre-mayoral control of schools, were there things in that system that you thought worked better, ultimately in the interest of the students? Can you be specific at all about those?

Gail: Yes, I can. I was a special ed teacher for a while. The money that should have been there was being cut. Like they have a special ed school, the children go there, they have whatever it is that they need. I saw Bloomberg just cut it. Schools that were working, he just cut, cut, cut. The children and their parents they hurt. It was horrible. Like I said, I'm pretty angry so the words are not coming out as I would like. It was ugly, absolutely ugly running working with him.

Brian Lehrer: Gail, thank you for your memories and your input. Alex Zimmerman, reporter for the education news site Chalkbeat. You think a lot of teachers who were there in those days had a similar take on Bloomberg? Do you think the most specific charge maybe that she made there, that he cut money for special ed, is factually accurate?

Alex Zimmerman: It's a good question. I should put my cards on the table and that I was not. I did not cover the Bloomberg administration. That was before my time as an education reporter. I'm not sure exactly which funding fight that was referring to. I will say, like Bloomberg was quite known for doing battle with the teachers union and making lots of structural changes unilaterally.

I think that did rub a lot of teachers the wrong way. I think he sincerely felt like there were good reasons to make some structural changes to the system. He was in favor of expanding charter schools, which happened pretty rapidly on his watch. That's something also that the teachers union was resistant to. There were a lot of big fights about how the system should be structured and what kinds of schools should proliferate.

I think there were people who had real criticisms of that. There were a lot of school closures under Bloomberg's watch. He broke up a lot of big high schools and created new small schools, many of which still exist today. There is just a moment of lots of educational change in the city in general. I think people had really strong feelings about that.

Brian Lehrer: Here's another critique of Bloomberg that came in in a text, builds on what the caller Gail was saying. Listener writes, "I believe Bloomberg wanted control in order to bust the teachers union and create all those charter schools that began siphoning money out of public education." We should say charters, which are going to be our next topic explicitly are public schools, but there are differences, including that they're not unionized.

This says he wanted to bust the union and create all those charter schools that began siphoning money out of public education and unionized teaching jobs. It continues. "He was a businessman and he did not like to have to deal with unions, so weakening them was a big part of his agenda." Again, I don't know if you can just say true or false if you weren't a reporter at that time on education, but I think a lot of teachers believe that.

Alex Zimmerman: Yes. I think that is not without merit as an argument. I think Bloomberg again, felt like there were reforms that were really needed to improve the system that the union was resistant to. Again, I think different people will have different takes on the validity of that. Obviously, the vast majority of New York City teachers are in traditional public schools, not charter schools.

To the extent that those ideas were rankling the union and rank and file teachers, that pushback makes sense. I think a more contemporary issue that I often hear about in the context of Mayor Eric Adams is he really exerted mayoral control when he required that all elementary schools use a standard set of city approved reading curriculums.

I often hear from teachers that it was really unclear to them how that decision was made, how the city decided which three curriculums they were going to mandate. I think you see a strain of this in Mamdani's arguments about mayoral control that there just shouldn't be big policy moves that blindside teachers in schools, and where they feel uncertain about where these new curriculums are coming from. I think that's the thing that Mamdani is reacting to when he's proposing a system that, as he puts it, is more framed around co-governance.

Brian Lehrer: Some texts are coming in on the other side of the call we took. Listener writes, "I will support mom Donnie, but parents cannot be the ones controlling or co-controlling city schools. There's already cyclical uncertainty in schools when a new mayor comes to power, whole new curricula, expectations, et cetera. The best thing to me as a public school parent is to have a centralized structure with each school having some agency in decision making. We want to avoid trying to practice utopia with our city schools. They are a giant bureaucracy, one million kids and do need a steady hand at the wheel."

That from one public school parent. Another one writes, "Of course we need educators to provide the education and we need professional administrators to run the business of the department. We keep switching because each side messes up the other side." I guess meaning mayoral control or non mayoral control, or business and education messing each other up. "I don't have a solution," writes this very honest listener. Bob in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi Bob.

Bob: Hey, Brian. My call. I was a public school teacher during the Bloomberg administration, before the Bloomberg administration, and [inaudible 00:16:23] de Blasio administration. I could talk for a long time about Michael Bloomberg. Whether or not he thought he was doing the right thing isn't for me the point. The point for me is that there were no end balances. You are at the whim of one person, nd some people will agree with that person and some won't. Even if a lot don't agree with them, as in the case of billionaire Mike Bloomberg, nothing changes. It stays that way for three terms, three, 12 years.

I think that the old system was correctly rife with corruption, as was the new system. The way that they ordered books and supplies, centralizing was very difficult. My idea would be to try to set up something a little bit more streamlined that involved more than one person. I think that that is more of what's in order and I completely agree with the text about not making it part of the parental decisions.

Brian Lehrer: Bob, thank you very much for your input. We're going to do one more here before we switch to our other two education mayoral campaign issues, at least for today. There are so many, as I said in the intro to the segment, there are so many education issues. We're going to do a few today and we're going to come back to education later in the series.

We're going to go on to charter schools explicitly soon and gifted and talented programs. Recent Mamdani proposal to undo those, at least for kindergarten. We'll take that conversation all the way up through the Bronx Science, Stuyvesant Specialized, High School Tech and all of that. Those are coming up. One more now on the explicit question of mayoral control, which Mamdani says he would end, Sliwa and Cuomo say they would keep. Brock on the Lower East Side. You're on WNYC. Hello, Brock.

Brock: Oh, hi, Brian. Love your show. I've called it a few times before. I'm 66, but I've got two teenagers in the system and have been a part of the whole education thing. Mayoral control was by far the best thing. One of the things people are not talking about is that Bloomberg doubled the teacher's salary and [inaudible 00:18:55] performance. Instead he got pushback. He did an end game around the union, low performing schools, he closed and opened another school in its place. You cannot fire a teacher in New York City system. You had the rubber room. As a result, you could close the school.

Brian Lehrer: The rubber room, for people who don't know that reference, forgive me for jumping in, is basically a place where, at least at one time, I don't know if they still have it, maybe, Alex, you'll tell us, teachers who are considered to not be doing a good job but were not fireable were sent to spend their days, the so called rubber room. Brock, go ahead.

Brock: That's one thing. The other thing I want to talk about was parental influence and control. Bloomberg established something called the SLT by removing PTA parents as presidents and stuff like that. You do have input. It's an elected position by other parents. I was on the SLT at [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: School SLT?

Brock: Yes. I'm sorry, I should thank you. There is input. If you want to see what parental control looks like, we'll take a look at schools in Long island rife with corruption. The president's hiring their friends for the school lunch program and things like this. No, no way. Again, that's basically my feeling.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. There's a supporter of what Bloomberg did, who liked closing schools that were deemed as failing, basically based on test scores, I think is fair to say, and opening new schools in their place, and trying to trying to have accountability really, for the performance of schools. This also related at that time, Alex, as to what was going on at the federal level.

The first year of the George W. Bush presidency, there was that big national education bipartisan bill that he negotiated with Ted Kennedy, known as No Child Left Behind. That was very much what Bloomberg was trying to implement at the local level. There was a lot of pushback on that over the years because of too much reliance on standardized tests to evaluate both teachers and students.

There are those, like Brock, who think that that was effective. Are there metrics that you can look back on even if you didn't report in the Bloomberg days and say, "He really did increase the number of kids reading at grade level and doing math at grade level," or any other way they were trying to measure that?

Alex Zimmerman: I think you can point to some of the overall metrics of the school system's health, like graduation rates and test scores, and see increases over the time that we've had mayoral control. Now, does that mean that mayoral control is the causal factor there? I think that's a harder case to make. I think one thing that's tricky about this debate is there just isn't a clear answer from a student performance perspective about, is one method of governance just obviously better than the other?

They both obviously have some trade offs. We see in school districts that have school board elections, there are often critiques of that model. In New York City, we have elections on these local parent councils that are often quite low turnout. There have been critiques of the education department for not doing more to promote turnout in those races, and they're not very high salience.

These local school boards don't have a lot of power right now. That might explain some of the low turnout. I think there would also be concerns about who would have influence if we moved to an elected school board. We're seeing some experiments with that now across the country. Like, Chicago is in the process of transitioning from mayoral control to an elected school board.

We will have at least one case study in the works about how that shakes out and how parents feel about it. One last point I just wanted to make is, Mamdani has a really interesting test of this coming up. Mayoral control is authorized by the state legislature, and it expires in the middle of next year. Mamdani is going to have to decide pretty quickly after taking office if he wins--

Any of the candidates would, if they win, will have to decide in January how they want to approach the state legislature. Would Mamdani actually go to Albany and say, "Strip me of marital control. Here's the system I want you to come in with?" Or would he advocate for a renewal for now while he figures out what he wants the governance model to look like? I think these are really important questions that he's going to have to answer pretty quickly.

Brian Lehrer: One more text since just about everybody has trashed, no matter which side of the question they're on, has trashed the corruption of the old pre Bloomberg local school districts, at least some of them, enough for it to be a reason for reform. Listener writes, "The talking points about corrupt local school boards are well worn because they were used to shut down local control, but they eclipse the majority of work done by local school boards. Good faith efforts to make positive changes in neighborhood schools," writes that one listener.

It's our 30 Issues in 30 Days election series day 12 issue 12 how Mamdani, Cuomo and Sliwa would try to improve the New York City public schools. We're taking on three questions within that vast topic. Up next, should there be more charter schools and other kinds of options? Cuomo and Sliwa are both proposing versions of that. With Alex Zimmerman from the education news website Chalkbeat and your calls and texts on that now. No more calls and texts on mayoral control of schools as we move on to charters and other kinds of options with your experiences, comments and questions. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our 30 Issues in 30 Days election series day 12 issue 12, how Mamdani, Cuomo and Sliwa would try to improve the public schools. Our next question within that today, should there be more charter schools and other kinds of options? Cuomo and Sliwa are both proposing versions of that. Again, our guest is Alex Zimmerman from the education news website Chalkbeat, and our phones and texts are open. 212-433-WNYC.

Alex, the Mamdani website education page does not mention charter schools one way or another. The Sliwa site says, "End the charter schools cap and expand high performing charters, especially in underserved neighborhoods." The Cuomo site says, "Support diverse high impact school models," which I'm guessing is an oblique reference to charter schools.

I don't think one of his 25 points that are on a site for improving the public schools says charters specifically, but I'm reading that as meaning charters. I Wonder if you would remind everybody first, what are charter schools? They are public schools. What makes them different from regular public schools, or what they call district schools?

Alex Zimmerman: Charter schools are public in the sense that they are publicly funded, but they are privately managed. They're managed separate from the traditional district school bureaucracy. They're not supervised by the education department. They're private organizations that have their own boards of directors. They are also typically not unionized, and are therefore free from a lot of the rules in the teachers union contract. They often have longer school years or longer school days.

The original promise of charter schools was that they would be this model that would allow for a lot of experimentation in different types of school model. In the broader education policy context, charter schools are also seen as a compromise between-- Something more along the lines of private school vouchers, so public money to send kids to private schools. This was a way of creating a private organization managing a public school that wasn't fully a voucher, but would still have this public funding component to it.

They've really proliferated in New York City over the past more than 20 years. There are now about 150,000 kids enrolled in charter schools. That's about 15% of all public school students. Not a majority of the schools, but have grown in recent years.

Brian Lehrer: Why do organizations start charter schools if they're not businesses, they're part of the public system. They presumably tell me if this is too generous, are not in it for the profit of the founders. What's the range of organizations that have started charter schools, and for what purposes?

Alex Zimmerman: There's a real range. There are a number of what are often referred to as mom and pop charters, which are smaller organizations that are often connected to the communities that they're operating in, and might have themes, might have a specific focus or a specific focus on STEM, like science and technology, or might have just an experimental model.

We've seen some attempts in charter schools to try personalized learning and other models like that. Then you have other charters that are operated by these larger networks. The most prominent in New York City is Success Academy, but you also have KIPP and Achievement first and Uncommon Schools operating in New York.

These are efforts to scale a brand of charter schools that might have where like if you go to one Success Academy elementary school in Harlem, that's going to look a lot like a Success Academy school in the Bronx. They're operating on the same curriculum and the same model, and it's an effort to take one, they would argue, successful model and scale that across the city. You have both these like one off charters that are all different in various ways, and then these larger networks that are trying to scale like one model in a broader way.

Brian Lehrer: Do CEOs, let's say, of some of the big charter school networks-- Eva Moskowitz is always in the news as big advocate of charters. She runs Success Academy. I'm not trying to single her out, but she's become a symbol of this. What do the CEOs of these bigger charter school networks get out of it? Are they getting healthy? Can we see these as business investments for some of the people, or is that too critical? Because they are nonprofits and presumably people who start, and organizations that start charter schools do it out of a nonprofit mission as they see it.

Alex Zimmerman: Yes. That is an important feature of New York's charter landscape, which is that in virtually all cases, the schools are run as nonprofits. There are some other states that operate for profit charters. That's a little bit of a different model. I think people like Eva Moskowitz, who's the CEO of Success Academy, are really trying to scale up schools that they think can outperform the city's traditional public schools and get results for kids that, in many cases are, at least if you measure by test scores higher than traditional district schools. That's not true across the entire charter sector.

There's actually some variability between schools. If you ask people like you, Moskowitz why they're doing this, I think they would tell you that parents deserve to have a large variety of school choices, and we think we can offer a model that is both different from the traditional public school system and can get better results for a student body that is predominantly families of color and families who, in many neighborhoods have said that they don't feel like their traditional public schools are quality options.

Brian Lehrer: What's the argument against choice?

Alex Zimmerman: I think in the current context, the debate is often about enrollment. The traditional public school system is losing students, enrollment is going down. If you have a proliferation of charters, at the same time, you have these two competing systems all trying to enroll a shrinking number of students. I think there is a question right now about how sustainable is it to keep increasing the number of charter schools?

Absent the enrollment conversation part of the debate is, do these schools come at the expense of traditional public schools? Schools get funding based on the number of students they enroll. There is in some sense a zero sum quality to it. Like if a charter school opens near a traditional public school and some of those students leave, or that school's enrollment suffers, that also means fewer dollars for that school. I think in New York City, we've seen a lot of tension around that.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text, for example, but I'm going to ask you to fact-check the premise here. Text says, "What are the supposed benefits of charter schools besides being that teachers don't belong to a union and they can choose their students? Do they choose their students, or in what way? Because this is not the way you get into a charter school. It's not like the next conversation that we're going to have, which is about screening for gifted and talented programs. Right?

Alex Zimmerman: Right. Charters generally don't screen in the sense of looking at a student's academic record and deciding like, "Oh, you're not a strong enough student to be at this school." In structure, anyone can apply to a charter school. Then if there are more applications than there are actual seats, then there's a lottery.

Now, I do want to complicate that a little bit in the sense that we have seen some charter networks like Success Academy be pretty unapologetic about their model, and have in some cases explicitly said to parents like, "Here's what our school is like. It has a really strict discipline framework. We also expect a lot of parent involvement at home in addition to what your child is getting at school. If you don't feel that that is right for your family, then you should go elsewhere."

Brian Lehrer: Also they kick kids out more, which the public schools can, except in the rarest instances. That's a way in which they actually do select their students. Or is that overstated?

Alex Zimmerman: I think there have been some documented cases of charter schools suspending a student many times and a parent interpreting that as getting counseled out. Pretty famously, there's a charter school in the Success Academy network that was maintaining a got to go list, which at the time the network basically said was an anomaly, that that wasn't a practice that was being used across the network.

I think it has led to this impression that people have, that there are charter schools that are aggressive in terms of what students feel like they're set up to serve. I would say the other thing that gives people the impression that charter schools are selective is that in order to go to a charter school, you have to participate in a separate application.

When you apply to a traditional public school, you're typically ranking a set of options on education department application. If you want to go to a charter school, you have to navigate this separate system of schools and apply to them. Some people point out that that in itself is a self selecting thing. You might get families who have more access to information, or resources who are choosing those schools.

Brian Lehrer: Mike, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mike.

Mike: Hi. There's so much misinformation out there. There are pros and cons of charters and there's pros and cons of regular district schools.

Brian Lehrer: Let me just say that you told our screener that you have worked in both charter and regular public schools. Is that correct?

Mike: Yes. I was a high school teacher in public schools. I was a principal of an elementary school in the regular public school district. I worked in two different charter schools.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Go ahead.

Mike: People start talking about selection in charter schools. For the most part they're just done by lottery. Yes, there's some self selection and there's some telling parents this is what you're signing up for, so really be careful about your choice, and people can say that selecting out. I saw what went on in District 2 and District 3 in Manhattan.

The way they selected kids in regular public schools. I'm not talking about charters now, regular public schools for middle school was criminal. Kids had to apply from elementary school to middle school. The middle school administrators were able to hand-- I saw this with my own eyes. They hand-selected the students they wanted. That's why you would have these really high performing middle schools in District 2 and District 3. The students folders who they didn't want to--

Brian Lehrer: That's basically lower Manhattan and the West Side. Right?

Mike: Right. West Side of Manhattan. This was just a normal standard operating procedure. If you were a principal of a middle school, you would get files of 5th graders that you would select for your 6th grade. They would hand pick the kids they wanted, and then the kids they didn't want, they would send to the next group of middle schools. Then those schools would hand select the kids they wanted. By time you got to that third round, you would have middle schools that were full of kids that none of the other higher performing middle schools wanted. I saw this firsthand.

Brian Lehrer: In your opinion, is the proliferation of charter schools a good corrective to that?

Mike: Nothing's perfect, but here's the basic idea. Brian, you asked the question before of like, why would someone open a charter school? People I met basically said, in some districts, there are some abysmally failing public elementary schools. If you were a parent that lived in that zone, that was your only choice was to send your kid to a school that was doing a terrible job, and there were some schools that had huge challenges. I don't blame the teachers, I don't blame the administrators. It's a larger social problem.

There are certain districts and certain schools that were really struggling. If you were a parent and that's where you lived, that's where you had to send your kid. You had no choice. Somebody, a charter person, and I've met these people, they come in and they basically say, "I can run a better school than that, so give me a chance, give me this charter to open a school and let me try and do a better job."

Now if that parent wants to come to my school, that parent can come to my school and said, "I worked in those buildings." I've talked, Brian, I've talked to so many people who criticize charter schools, and then I say to them, "Have you ever stepped foot in a charter school?" They'll admit to me they've never actually spent time in a charter school.

Brian Lehrer: Mike, I'm going to leave it there. Thank you for putting all of that on the table. One more call on this before we go to chapter three of this 30 Issues in 30 Days segment on how Mamdani, Sliwa, and Cuomo say they would improve the public schools. That'll be on the gifted and talented programs per se. Bill, in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bill.

Bill: Yes. Hello. My question is, is there any program in New York City to incentivize teachers by remunerating them for their college expenses? In other words, do we have any incentives for flooding the zones with teachers and other school resources?

Brian Lehrer: Bill, thank you. Do you understand his question there, Alex? I think the premise is there's a shortage of teachers and we don't have enough to go around for all the charter schools and the district schools. Is that a real problem?

Alex Zimmerman: I think especially in the context of the class size law that is being phased in on the district schools, which are going to have to hire thousands of new teachers to staff these smaller class sizes, teacher recruitment is a really big issue right now. It's interesting, I've started talking to some charter leaders about whether they're worried about finding teachers in the context of all of this hiring that has to happen. It seems like it hasn't quite hit the charter sector yet, at least in terms of that class size law and how it could affect them just in terms of the broader labor market.

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in on that because despite what we've been discussing as one of the biggest differences between charters and other public schools, which is that most of the union rules don't apply in the charters, is it possible to say, as an education reporter, do teachers generally find it a worse experience for them to be employed there?

Alex Zimmerman: I think it's hard to characterize across all charters. I think part of the point of the sector is that these schools are all different. I think similar to district schools, you have teachers who have a pretty wide range of experiences at these different schools.

Brian Lehrer: Is the pay the same?

Alex Zimmerman: That's a good question. I haven't seen a really careful analysis of that lately, so I'm a little reluctant to say definitively. There are benefits in the traditional school system that charter schools don't have. For example, there's a really strong pension system in DOE schools that charter school teachers don't get [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Now you're not in the pension system?

Alex Zimmerman: Sorry?

Brian Lehrer: The teachers in the charter schools are not in the pension system, you're saying? That's big.

Alex Zimmerman: Right. I think some charter schools do have higher base salaries to try to compensate for that a little bit. The compensation structures are not identical.

Brian Lehrer: To bring it back to the mayoral race, I mentioned at the beginning of this section that the Mamdani website education page does not mention charter schools one way or another. The Sliwa site says, "End the charter schools cap, and expand high performing charters." The Cuomo site says, "Support diverse high impact school models," which I take to be euphemism for charters. Tell me if I'm wrong.

Is there really an active debate here? Is Mamdani lining up with the union or some of the others who may see themselves as in a "progressive camp" in opposing the expanded charter school caps, as I say, it's not on his education page on the website. Is Mamdani out there fighting charter schools, or is it really even an issue in the campaign?

Alex Zimmerman: The answer is Mamdani has staked out a fairly anti-charter position in the sense that he has publicly said that he thinks that charters divert resources away from traditional public schools, and that he thinks they shouldn't be granted space in city buildings. About 43% of charters are co-located in in education department buildings.

He's also said that he would launch audits of charter schools if he's elected. He has really staked out a more critical posture toward the charter sector. Now, his power over the charter schools is somewhat limited. There are these space sharing arrangements, but there's a state law that actually former Governor Andrew Cuomo helped pass, that requires the city to either find space in public buildings or else subsidize their rent in private space.

I think people are worried that Mamdani would be an opponent in Albany, which has a lot of power over whether new charter schools can open. Maybe he'll lobby the state legislature to keep the current cap in place. Right now, new charter schools can't open. I do think there is a debate here, but I think the mayor's power to directly fundamentally alter the charter landscape is also somewhat limited.

Brian Lehrer: You're also saying Cuomo as governor was an advocate for expanding the reach of charter schools, so there's a contrast there.

Alex Zimmerman: Yes. I should also say that Cuomo recently unveiled a plan to close the city's lowest performing schools and replace them with other models, including charter schools. He has, I think since the primary been more vocal in his pro charter stances.

Brian Lehrer: More like the Bloomberg model we were talking about before, closing low performing schools rather than trying to improve them in place, which is I think what the de Blasio approach was.

Alex Zimmerman: Yes. It's been interesting. In the primary, Cuomo was talking more about community schools and hiring more paraprofessionals, which are union supported ideas. Since the primary and his loss, and the teachers union endorsement of Mamdani, he has come out and been more of a critic of the teachers union, some of their priorities. He's been more critical of the class size mandate, for instance, and he's been more vocally supportive of charter schools. It's been a interesting turn for him.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, Cuomo is critical of the class size mandate. For those of you who don't know, that's a recent state law requiring smaller class sizes because the Cuomo website has a line, let's see if I can pull it up real quick. I think I can't pull it up quick enough, but I think in the 25 points on education that his website lists, one of them is fully implement the class size law.

Alex Zimmerman: Yes, it's interesting. I think there has been a change in rhetoric on his part on this. I was listening to a town hall he did last week with a group called PLACE, which is also quite critical of the class size law. He described it as a reckless law. I think he was basically making the point that, in order to implement it you need a lot of money, and the state hasn't promised to fully fund it. He was basically like, "We can't implement this without an influx of money," and that he disagreed with that mandate.

Brian Lehrer: From his site, here we go, "Reduce class size. Secure state funding to implement the reduced class size law so it is not an unfunded mandate. Ensure the reduced class size law does not reduce the capacity of selective schools." That's a good segue to part three, which is going to be about selective schools right after this.

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Alison Stewart: In the play Art, the relationship between three old friends gets heated after one of them drops six figures on an all white painting. Actor Bobby Cannavale stars. On the next All Of It, he joins us to discuss along with director Scott Ellis. Plus singer songwriter Yazmin Lacey joins us for a listening party. I'm Alison Stewart. Join us for All Of It, weekdays at noon on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer: Listeners, a reminder that you can sign up for free if you're interested for the Brian Lehrer Show newsletter. It includes a weekly column from me, often about the mayoral race these days, a reader question for you to answer if you choose, and some other features. To sign up, just go to wnyc.org/blnewsletter, wnyc.org/blnewsletter. It'll come to your inbox every Thursday afternoon.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our 30 Issues in 30 Days election series. Listeners, I hope this has been useful for you. So far we're on day 12, issue 12 about public education as an issue in the New York City mayoral race. We're going back and forth between mayoral race issues and New Jersey gubernatorial race issues, and trying to do something that we think makes public radio unique, which is to focus so much on the issues and less on the politics and the polls and the personalities, though we do that, too.

Politics matters when you're talking about politics. Our main focus is the issues. We've done 30 Issues in 30 Days series for many elections for many years, and we're doing it again this year. We just hope it's a useful service. Just saying that out loud. Day 12, issue 12, how Mamdani, Cuomo and Sliwa would try to improve the public schools.

We're taking on three questions within that vast topic. We will come back to education for at least one more that we have planned later in the series. Finally, for today, should gifted and talented programs be expanded, contracted or remain the same from kindergarten all the way up through the specialized high schools? Now, candidates do disagree on this. Mamdani just recently proposed ending gifted and talented kindergarten programs.

We'll talk about that and more as we continue with Alex Zimmerman from the education news website Chalkbeat and your calls and texts with your experiences, your comments or your questions. Thank you for those of you so far who have called in with most of your experiences as teachers and some as parents. 212-433-WNYC, call or text. 212-433-9692 on gifted and talented and specialized high schools. Alex, what's the Mamdani kindergarten proposal?

Alex Zimmerman: Mamdani has said that he wants to phase out the kindergarten entry point for gifted and talented programs. Gifted and talented programs have been a lightning rod in education politics. For many years, these are classrooms that are often separate. They can be in traditional public schools, but in a separate classroom.

There are a handful of citywide GMT programs that are schools that only serve students who have been labeled as gifted. Mamdani's proposal is to end the kindergarten pathway into those programs, basically arguing that it is inappropriate to try to sort four-year-olds by their ability either on the basis of a test, or right now, the process works through teacher nominations.

Brian Lehrer: This relates to two larger questions that maybe we should put this in the context of tracking viability in general, and which kids that's good for and bad for, and also integration versus segregation in the public schools, which remain very segregated. How much do you think the G&T debate is mostly the leading edge of those larger topics?

Alex Zimmerman: I think that's exactly right. New York City has an unusual amount of screening, not just in gifted programs, but also in middle and high schools, where schools and programs can admit students based on their prior academic record. There's a lot of debate about whether that is something that public schools should do.

Should these programs really be open to all students, or is it appropriate to say that there are students who can handle a more accelerated curriculum or who are ahead of their peers and need some specialized instruction? This has been a debate that's been pretty hot in the past. Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed phasing out gifted programs in his last months in office. He wasn't around to execute on that.

Mayor Eric Adams basically disagreed and said, "No, I want to expand gifted programs in neighborhoods that have historically lacked access to them." Crucially, Adams also proposed adding more gifted programs that begin in third grade. The idea behind that is once you've had a couple years of schooling, then it's easier to figure out which students might really benefit from more accelerated learning, and you're not just picking up on differences in students home lives that they're bringing when they're just starting in school.

Brian Lehrer: Which raises the question, what does gifted or talented even mean? It suggests that you're born with some innate ability that should lead to the privilege of being separated from other school kids so that you can really lean into those gifts that you were born with. Otherwise, we are talking about what children's actual early childhood before school experience is, based on what resources their parents had, what kind of attention to giving them reading and math instruction when they were two years old was being done in the home., english language skills, things like that, right?

Alex Zimmerman: Yes. One critique you often hear of the gifted programs is that they're generally not using curriculums that are very different from what regular classrooms are using. You also see that these programs are not at all representative of the broader school system. Black and Latino students are 62% of the school system, but less than 25% of the students enrolled in G&T programs. About 70% of G&T students are white or Asian compared to about 35% of the total student body.

There's a lot of argument that these classes are mostly about keeping more middle class or more affluent families in the system. There's also a non trivial number of Asian American families and even Black and Latino families who see these as ways of getting into more selective middle schools and being a launchpad for the rest of your educational career. It's a complicated debate, and it's interesting that Mamdani has decided to stake out a position on it so close to the election.

Brian Lehrer: This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are a New York and New Jersey Public Radio and live streaming at wnyc.org, at a minute before eleven o' clock as we continue in 30 Issues in 30 Days, education as an issue in the mayoral race. Katherine in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Katherine.

Katherine: Hi, Brian. Longtime listener. Hi Alex, longtime reader, recovering teacher over here calling in to talk about G&T. I've heard words like segregated and integrated used. I'm sure you're both familiar with the word inclusion and also the model of inclusion classroom teaching, which we use for a diversity of needs in our classrooms.

I think that we ought to think about that more when we're talking about gifted and talented students, because overall it is just a differentiated need that a student has. I, in particular want to point out about not including four and five-year-olds into a general classroom with diverse kids is something that we don't do in our general population. We don't segregate people out by their specialties of knowledge, on a bus or in our restaurants [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Just to say to bring our listeners along that you're specifically endorsing the Mamdani proposal in that respect because that is his specific proposal, no G&T separation for four and five-year-olds in kindergarten, right?

Katherine: Yes, and I'd like to take it a step further and say that kindergarten is not a mandatory grade in the United States of America, as it is in Scandinavian countries and many other countries across the globe. Kindergarten is a developmentary grade where we're introducing many students, especially this kindergarten classroom, which is considered the pandemic [inaudible 00:59:47]. They're just getting initiated.

Brian Lehrer: Kids who were born in 2020, yes.

Katherine: Yes. In order to "qualify" for what we consider G&T, you have to be two standard grade levels ahead of something in some content area. Your ELA may be on grade level, but your math may be two years advanced or vice versa, or some other determination. To try and evaluate that for a four and five-year-old, as we all know, zip codes shouldn't determine the quality of education you're getting.

You alluded to that a little bit about whether or not in the home environment, you are introduced into ELA, into math. You can see the confounding effect happen as you get to third grade, and that's where maybe resources really should be dumped in. Again, I think that we should be thinking about Gifted and Talented students as having perhaps an individualized education plan, because all students deserve specialized education. Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, no, I was just going to say thank you. I need to move on to some other calls, but I really appreciate those points from a recovering teacher's perspective, as you described yourself. We're going to go next to Leslie in Brooklyn. You're on WNYC. Hi, Leslie.

Leslie: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for taking my call. I really think I have a little bit of a unique perspective, because I am a longtime mom in New York City public schools. I have two daughters, and they are 11 years apart. My first daughter was in New York City public school in the Talented and Gifted Program in the '90s. Then my younger daughter, when she came up of age to go to school, we thought about putting her in the Talented and Gifted Program or going through the process and seeing if she qualified.

I'll tell you, I have such a distinct personal experience with this because my older daughter, who was in the TAG Program in the '90s, the way they used to build those community of learners was you would take your child to an assimilated classroom situation on a given day. This was the testing, but it wasn't a standardized test score they were looking for. They would be in an assimilated classroom situation with four or five other students. There's a designated number of teachers there observing the student, and they looked for qualities of these children.

It's not about knowledge. Einstein said, "Imagination is way more important than knowledge." You can evaluate a four or five-year-old by social maturity, and that has to do with how curious they are with each other. How do they interact with each other? Are they able to get along together? There's a certain level of maturity they would look for. They would look for things like task commitment. Could a child sit down and stick with a task for three or four minutes, which at that age was a really big deal if a child could do that?

Some children can't, and that's okay. They have other things that they're going on to explore, but those specific qualities was how they built the community of learners in the TAG program in the '90s, and it was amazing. It didn't, statistically, I'm sure, compared with the general population. However, it was economically diverse. My children's class was made up of kids from every aspect of the economic spectrum of New York City. By the time my younger daughter came up, it was all based on a standardized test score.

You can imagine the kids that have been getting into the TAG programs the last 15 years in New York City are parents who can afford to have their children tutored for those tests. I opted to just not even participate because I knew that that was so far from what my first daughter's experience had been, which was amazing, to this standardized test score, which, already mentioned earlier in the program, was already taken over in the curriculum. Also, it took over the TAG program.

Brian Lehrer: So interesting, Leslie. It sounds like you're a one-family, natural, controlled experiment.

Leslie: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: I really appreciate you sharing that story. Alex Zimmerman from Chalkbeat, from what I've read, it's not just the standardized test now for kindergarten. It's kindergarten teachers, somehow nominating kids with parent input. What is the actual screen for kindergarten "Gifted and Talented?"

Alex Zimmerman: When you apply for elementary schools for kindergarten, you rank your options, and if you have selected gifted programs, then it is up to your pre-K teacher to decide whether to nominate you, whether to sign off on that. If they do, then you are then eligible for a lottery. If there are more students who have applied and who have been nominated than seats, then it's just a straight lottery. That replaced a system that existed before the pandemic, where there was an exam, like there was just one test that four-year-olds would have [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: If Leslie had had a third child a few years later than her second child, she would have encountered even a third system, the one you're describing as the present one.

Alex Zimmerman: Right. One thing I wanted to go back to that both callers alluded to is this kind of notion of inclusion, and to what extent tracking is appropriate for students this young. When former Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed phasing out gifted programs at elementary schools, one thing the city was talking a lot about were these school-wide enrichment models, where instead of tracking students out into different classrooms, you would maybe have one or two periods a day of accelerated work for some kids, or you could have small groups. If you have older kids and you have students who are into a specific subject or are strong in photography or something, you could have electives, this sort of approach, where you're not fully funneling students into separate classrooms.

It's been interesting because Mamdani has said that he wants to phase out these kindergarten tracks into Gifted and Talented, but we haven't heard a lot from him yet about whether he imagines some kind of enrichment model replacing that. It'll be interesting to see how that develops. Obviously, we're hearing a debate right now between him and Cuomo and Sliwa about whether these programs should be phased out at the kindergarten level or expanded, and those are obviously really different competing visions.

Brian Lehrer: One more thing before we go on the specialized high schools, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and the handful of others. There are so few Black and Latino kids this year in Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. That was a news story. I'm not sure about the others, but so few that it calls into question whether the admissions test called the SHSAT, what it's really measuring, and whether the test should be the sole criteria for admission to those schools, which it is. This is a debate that's been going on for years.

Many of our listeners know Mamdani went to Bronx Science, and I've seen it reported that he used to be for scrapping the test, but is no longer for that. It's not on his website either way. What can you tell us about the Mamdani position, and if it's any different from the Cuomo or Sliwa position?

Alex Zimmerman: It's been an interesting evolution for him. In 2022, he answered a questionnaire and said that he favors getting rid of the sole admissions test, the Specialized High School Admissions Test. Then during the campaign, he staked out a slightly different position, which is that he wanted to do a study of the test to see if it was racially biased or had gender bias, and has now since said that he supports keeping the test. He's seemingly closed the door--

Brian Lehrer: As the sole criteria?

Alex Zimmerman: Yes, at least that's my interpretation of what he's signaling.

Brian Lehrer: You're an education reporter, not a political reporter, but do you have reason to believe that this is to some degree because the base of his support in the primary included a lot of votes from East Asian and South Asian parents who are well represented in the specialized high schools whose kids perform well on those tests, and he didn't want to challenge his potential base, part of it, on something that they're very interested in, or is that too cynical?

Alex Zimmerman: No, I think that could definitely be part of it. I don't think his base of voters has one view of this. I think we saw under Mayor Bill de Blasio, when he proposed getting rid of the exam and trying to go to Albany to get the change in state law, you would need to make that happen, but there was an enormous amount of pushback and controversy. I don't know, it's kind of interesting because Mamdani has talked about wanting to foster school integration without going into a lot of specifics about that.

It's interesting that on the one hand, he's saying, "I don't want this kind of assessment at the kindergarten level to track students, but I'm comfortable with it at the high school level for these eight schools." It would be really interesting to hear from him about how he reconciles those positions.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Maybe in the debates coming up later this month, one of which I'll be a questioner on October 22nd. That ends our 30 Issues in 30 Days election series for today, day 12, issue 12, how Mamdani, Cuomo, and Sliwa would try to improve the public schools, at least several of the debates within that vast topic. We thank Alex Zimmerman from the education news website, Chalkbeat. Alex, thank you so much.

Alex Zimmerman: Thanks for having me, Brian.

 

 

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