Mayoral control of New York City’s public schools will come under review this spring, as lawmakers now turn their attention to the issue of overseeing the schools and their one million students after it was left out of the recently passed state budget. 

Governor Hochul is promising to renew mayoral control.  “We will get mayoral control done by the end of the session, when it expires,” the governor said  yesterday in an interview with PIX11. “No doubt about it.”

Her partners in the legislature, whose support she would need for such a measure, are less certain that will be the case.

The chairman of the New York City Education Committee in the state senate, John Liu, says mayoral control is not a “foregone conclusion.”

“Everything is and should be on the table,” Senator Liu said. He told the Sun that the legislature is considering a number of options — including mayoral control in its current form, mayoral control “with significant changes,” and oversight by a democratically elected school board, as in Chicago. 

Mr. Liu sees mayoral control as a barrier to parental involvement in school oversight — an issue he sees as driving declines in enrollment.

“Public schools work best when parents are maximally engaged. And when they want to be engaged and aren’t and have no opportunity to do so, they may very well find a place where their input would matter. And we have seen a clear decline in the population of New York City public school kids.”

Mr. Liu says he is prioritizing options that would “formalize” parental input: “What we’re looking for are specific suggestions for better parental engagement because that’s been the number one complaint and criticism of school governance in New York City.” 

One such an option would be an amended form of mayoral control, by adding “two or three” seats — reserved for public school parents — to the Panel for Educational Policy, New York City’s school board. Currently, the mayor appoints nine of the 15 PEP members, usually guaranteeing his agenda at panel meetings. Adding non-mayoral appointees could significantly shift the balance of power. 

Mayor Adams has said on the record that he opposes such changes. “If you lose power of the PEP, you lose power of mayoral accountability,” he said, and risk “going back to the days of really not being clear and on a direction.” 

Mr. Liu has not ruled out mayoral control in its current form but has indicated  that procedural changes would be preferable to his constituents.

“We’re open to hearing what the mayor thinks can be done to strengthen parental input,” he said. “But continuing the same system with a verbal pledge they’re going to listen to parents — that’s not going to cut it for parents who feel they’ve been left out of the process.”

When asked whether increasing the charter school cap could help resolve some of these issues, Mr. Liu was firm that the solution was to increase parent involvement in public schools — not providing engagement platforms through charter schools. “Some measure of school choice is a good thing,” he said, “but public education is a public good … not a free market commodity.”

Mr. Liu says he plans to continue holding stakeholder meetings, particularly with parents, now that the budget deliberations have concluded.

“Generally, this law has been renewed towards the end of the time period,” the director of education policy at the Manhattan Institute, Ray Domanico, says. The current mayoral control mandate is slated to expire on June 30, but the legislative session ends June 2 — giving lawmakers about a month and a half. 

Mr. Domanico believes that mayoral control is the most effective way to administer New York City’s public schools. “The record is clear,” he says. “If you compare the past 20 years of mayoral control to the previous 40 years, it’s like night and day. Schools have improved measurably.”

The mandate has lapsed only once in the previous 20 years of mayoral control — for a little more than a month in 2009. The mandate expired on June 30 and was renewed in August, just in time to set policy for the school year.

The PEP reverted to its pre-mayoral control form for a month — with two mayoral appointees and one seat appointed by each borough president. Mayor Bloomberg campaigned for the borough presidents to appoint members sympathetic to his agenda and was able to reinstall his chancellor for the month before Albany officially renewed the mandate. 

Mr. Adams wouldn’t likely be able to wield the same influence as Mr. Bloomberg did. The billionaire had been in office for seven years at that point. 

“That would be terrible this year because the school systems have a deep crisis because of the last three years of Covid,” Mr. Domanico says. Mr. Adams, he says, “deserves unfettered control of the school system” to set policy for the schools as they recover.

In his first term so far, Mr. Adams has hardly been able to exercise any power over the schools, because the policies for this academic year were set by his predecessor, Mayor de Blasio.

On Friday, Mr. Adams questioned the optics of the legislature’s holdup of mayoral control. “This is the first time we have an African American mayor, an African American chancellor.  Both are public school educated,” he said in a WBLS interview. “If we can’t have the control to fix our educational system, that just sends the wrong message.”

The extension of mayoral control has only been included in the budget once, under Governor Cuomo. Ms. Hochul included a four-year extension of mayoral control in her proposed budget, but the legislature omitted the provision in its own proposed budget. She chose instead to focus on rolling back bail reform in her negotiations with the legislature, a measure Mr. Adams has also supported.