Last year, the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America signed up tens of thousands of volunteers to go door-knocking for the then mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. One of the canvassers was Mary Simpson, an artist and a writer in Williamsburg who co-leads her building’s tenant union. “Mamdani’s focus on affordability was what pulled me into campaigning for him,” she told me, citing his promises of rent freezes, free buses, and free child care. Simpson often canvassed in and around her neighborhood with an N.Y.C.-D.S.A. faction called Gays for Zohran—“just lovely young humans in their early twenties, who had such excitement and abandon,” she said. “I would laugh with my husband about it, because there I was, the middle-aged married mom with a public-school kid.”

Simpson, whose daughter is in second grade, prepared extensively with her fellow-canvassers on how to discuss certain topics, such as Mamdani’s views on Israel and Palestine. “I knocked on more than seven hundred doors, and I was asked about Palestine once,” Simpson recalled. “I was asked about education every single canvassing session, probably five times per session.” The campaign provided volunteers with a “Persuasion FAQ” that listed three talking points on Mamdani’s K-12 agenda: to end top-down mayoral control of New York City public schools, to reduce class sizes, and to “fully fund schools” and related programs. “His education platform was quite weak,” Simpson said. “I realized that I needed to offer my own talking points.”

What made Simpson an outlier among the canvassers, as it turned out, also gave her a potent means of connection with some prospective voters. “To be able to say, ‘I’m a local mom, and I send my child to public school, and Zohran is running on a platform of making New York City more affordable, and anything that is good for us is good for our kids’—I just started speaking from that place,” she told me. “That seemed to resonate with a lot of people.”

After his inauguration, in January, Mamdani signalled that he was advancing his affordability agenda by launching the city’s new 2-K program and expanding existing 3-K and universal pre-K programs. But he hit pause on his promise on mayoral control of K-12 schools before he was inaugurated, and he has not yet made significant steps toward lowering class sizes, though, according to multiple studies, even modest reductions in the student-to-teacher ratio can boost reading and math scores and high-school and college graduation rates. (A representative from the Mayor’s office stated, in an e-mail, that “we are actively working with our State and labor partners” to lower class sizes “on an aggressive—yet realistic—timeline.”)

Among the D.S.A. members I spoke with for this article, all of whom were parents or educators (or both), none disputed that Mamdani has had relatively little to say thus far about New York City’s Department of Education, which serves nearly nine hundred thousand students and accounts for about thirty per cent of the municipal budget. N.Y.C.-D.S.A.—the largest D.S.A. chapter in the country, with more than fifteen thousand dues-paying members—has sixteen working groups, including one devoted to universal child care, but none that are focussed on K-12. Discussions around education-policy priorities are under way, organizers told me, but there is no formal platform that would be ready in time for N.Y.C.-D.S.A.’s biennial convention in November. In the upcoming midterms, D.S.A.-endorsed candidates in New York will likely pick up two seats in Congress and six in the state legislature. But their K-12-related proposals tend to be sparse—mostly limited to measures such as blocking charter-school expansion and restricting A.I. use in classrooms.

Educators were the top donors by profession to the Mamdani campaign, so it’s somewhat surprising that his education policy “was sort of a blank space,” as Kyle DeAngelis, who teaches third grade at a public school in Harlem, put it. “I think a lot of teachers got caught up in the thrill of it all and painted on that canvas all of the things we’d like to see change about our profession.” For DeAngelis, these changes would include more funding for social workers and reading specialists, and less classroom time devoted to tests—the city mandates three-times-a-year assessments in math and reading, and the many hours spent prepping for these and for district and statewide tests “eat away at instructional time,” he said.

During a recent episode of WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show,” in a segment called “Ask the Mayor,” the host pressed Mamdani on issues that were raised in a viral essay by the Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones about her daughter’s experience in two of the city’s predominantly Black and low-income elementary and middle schools, which Hannah-Jones portrayed as de-facto segregated, badly under-resourced, and rife with indifferent teachers, disruptive student behavior, chronic absenteeism, and grade inflation. Mamdani told Lehrer that members of his administration, including his chancellor, Kamar Samuels, were working on “a plan to deliver a rigorous and high-quality education to every single child” in K-12 schools. But he attached few specifics and no deadline to this pledge. On Wednesday, Samuels and Hannah-Jones appeared together at a town-hall-style event in Manhattan, where Samuels likewise demurred on providing details or a timeline for the plan.

Even some ardent supporters of the Mayor are troubled by what they see as his inaction on K-12 education, especially at a moment when reading and math scores, graduation rates, and public-school enrollment numbers are falling or stagnant. “I am a huge Zohran Mamdani fan,” the education journalist Jennifer Berkshire recently wrote on Substack. “But I have been deeply frustrated by his administration’s lack of a vision for what is not only the nation’s largest school district, but the largest entity, by cost and headcount, under the mayor’s control.”

There are several different and overlapping hypotheses for Mamdani and N.Y.C.-D.S.A.’s seeming reluctance to engage on K-12 issues. In her Substack post, Berkshire speculates, with reason, that the Mayor is loath to consider education reforms that might risk alienating the United Federation of Teachers, the powerful union that represents most public-school teachers in New York City. But that didn’t stop Mamdani from suing the City Council, in August, over its U.F.T.-supported bill to give bonuses to the school system’s woefully underpaid paraprofessionals. (The Mayor believes that the bill violates existing labor law.) Berkshire also points out that D.S.A. membership skews young and child-free—but those demographics did not forestall Mamdani’s push for free child care and universal preschool.

Edgar Alfonseca is an N.Y.C.-D.S.A. organizer and the parent of a four-year-old. He’s currently involved in D.S.A.’s Tax the Rich campaign, which is advocating for new citywide and statewide tax legislation that would fund universal child care across New York State. “There are fourteen of us on the Tax the Rich organizing committee, and right now I’m the only parent,” he told me. He estimates that maybe one in ten D.S.A. organizers are parents of young children. “Nonetheless, every time I have brought up child care as a policy priority, there is a shared positive feeling about it.”

When it comes to the K-12 landscape, several D.S.A. members indicated that the organization and its candidates have to tread carefully in order to minimize any impression that they are politicizing the classroom or indoctrinating students. The media climate is “one of the factors that has tended to cool any education-related D.S.A. organizing,” DeAngelis said, citing Red-baiting outlets such as Fox News and the New York Post. DeAngelis is part of the U.F.T.’s social-justice caucus, the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE-U.F.T.), whose membership overlaps considerably with N.Y.C.-D.S.A.; last year, a Post article portrayed MORE members as “anti-Israel radical socialists” who are “plotting to take over” the U.F.T.

In July, another Post article kept up this refrain, with a headline warning, “DSA Targets NYC Public School Kids in Radical Takeover.” The article featured mysteriously sourced screenshots from a Zoom meeting in which D.S.A.-affiliated educators discussed agenda items such as “Helping students flourish,” “Healthy, up-to-date, physical spaces,” and “High-quality education, critical thinking, literacy, numeracy, democracy,” among other Marxist-Leninist slogans. One right-wing education activist quoted by the Post described the meeting in terms redolent of sexual exploitation. “Childless apparatchiks seeking access to other people’s children in order to convert them to their beliefs is the definition of grooming. Hands off the kids,” she said.

“Education justice is often used as a cudgel by the right,” Nina Bruckenthal, who teaches math at a Lower East Side high school, and whose name and photo appeared in the Post article, told me. “This is just one example of the dynamics that the administration will face as it begins to tackle education issues.” The episode also captured a persistent cultural appetite for shaming teachers. (“On one hand,” Peter Maas Taubman writes in his book “Teaching by Numbers,” from 2009, “we are held up as saviors, rescuers, saints, and angels, on the other cast as buffoons, sadists, milquetoasts, or incompetents.”)

David I. Backer is an associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University who advised the Mamdani campaign on education issues. “I understand why the campaign made a strategic decision to fight front and center on other planks, and not engage as much in this very fraught terrain,” Backer, a former high-school teacher, told me. Still, it’s not the case that Mamdani ignored K-12 policy altogether. In April, 2025, the candidate announced his Green Schools for a Healthier New York City plan (Backer helped write it), which would use union labor to refurbish some five hundred of the city’s dilapidated schools with new HVAC and renewable-energy systems; it also proposed transforming a similar number of asphalt schoolyards into green spaces for students and their communities.

Since Mamdani’s election, there’s been no public-facing follow-through on the Green Schools plan, as Jenille Scott of the New York-based nonprofit ALIGN recently noted in an essay for City Limits. “We want classrooms with clean, chemical-free airflow and comfortable temperatures, where kids can focus on their lessons instead of getting sick and missing classes,” Scott wrote. She cited research showing that proper classroom ventilation and climate control can have dramatic positive effects on student absenteeism, test scores, and disciplinary referrals. “Our schools are falling apart and our kids are falling behind,” Scott added. This sentiment is hardly limited to American cities—the recent student demonstrations in France, which have driven hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, originated as a protest over poor classroom conditions at a single high school in a Paris suburb. (“The work to build a more sustainable school system, while started on the campaign, has already begun and will continue,” a representative from the Mayor’s office stated in an e-mail.)

If the Green Schools plan ever does come to fruition in New York, it might serve as an exemplum of what Mamdani calls “pothole politics”—his homage to the “sewer socialism” that flourished in Milwaukee for roughly half of the twentieth century—by which a municipal government can maintain the citizenry’s trust by diligently maintaining the city itself: filling potholes, shovelling snow, tearing down scaffolding, repairing public rest rooms. “As Democratic Socialists, we have to demonstrate that we can solve the small but very tangible problems of the city,” DeAngelis told me. He looks forward to the arrival of pothole politics in his Harlem classroom, where one of the windows is broken and has been covered in duct tape for more than a year, in a system with an annual budget of around forty-five billion dollars. “There’s a fundamental dissonance between a figure like that and the everyday reality of being a New York public-school teacher,” he told me.

The biggest splash Mamdani has made in the K-12 public pool came last month, when he declared a one-year moratorium on students’ use of generative A.I. through eighth grade. The announcement marked a breakthrough for the AIM Coalition, an umbrella organization of predominantly left-leaning groups, including N.Y.C.-D.S.A. and MORE-U.F.T., that oppose most A.I. in education. But the D.O.E. is pressing on with five A.I. pilot programs for high-school students, which AIM is vehemently protesting, and teachers are still generally free to use A.I. tools. In short, a wildly reviled and starkly unnecessary techno-corporatist intrusion on public classrooms is the most conspicuous place where New York’s first avowedly socialist mayor has intervened in the city’s schools, and even that intervention has been rather mild.

In the mid-nineteen-sixties, the sociologist James Coleman led a survey of public-school students and teachers, under the auspices of the Civil Rights Act, on the topic of equal educational opportunity. After sorting through hundreds of thousands of responses, Coleman and his team came to the conclusion that family environment—the size and stability of one’s family, the educational and economic status of one’s parents—was the “most important variable” in predicting how a student would fare in school. The report also found that children benefit from attending school with peers who come from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds, and observed the most positive effects of diversity in children from low-income and minoritized families.

The Coleman report’s conclusions have been corroborated by generations of studies analyzing the effects of poverty and demographic isolation on children’s health, behavior, cognitive development, and academic achievement. This body of research forms some of the latticework of a social-reproduction theory of education, in which public schools are largely perceived as reflecting and reinforcing the socioeconomic structures of their surrounding community.

This way of seeing is both embedded and rejected in Hannah-Jones’s wrenching Times essay, which dominated conversations among parents and teachers for weeks after its publication. The article describes Hannah-Jones’s daughter and her peers “languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach.” Their predominantly Black and low-income elementary school, contra Coleman, “exposed the fallacy that caring families are more important than competent teachers”; Hannah-Jones felt “wholly defeated by a system of inequality that may begin outside the school walls but is magnified within them.” Society, Hannah-Jones goes on, has abandoned its duties to children in racially and socioeconomically segregated schools, unfairly blaming “their academic limitations on the dysfunctional culture and poor choices of their marginalized families.”

It’s true that findings such as Coleman’s have been weaponized by conservative forces against more generous funding for socioeconomically disadvantaged schools. But leftists, working off the same evidence, have long argued for precisely the opposite. In a 2005 paper titled “What ‘Counts’ as Educational Policy?,” the late CUNY professor and Marxist theorist Jean Anyon examined how poverty-level wages, substandard housing, spotty public transportation, and unequal property-tax structures “create environments that overwhelm the potential of educational policy to create systemic, sustained improvements in the schools.” She argued for a more holistic response, one in which labor, housing, and taxation policies—the kinds of proposals that are championed by the D.S.A. candidates of today—were also understood as education policy. A trove of research has shown, for example, that SNAP benefits and child-related tax credits can have significant impact on children’s test scores and graduation rates.

“It might sound like a bit of a dodge,” Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, told me, “but when you push for better housing, when you push for health care, those are education interventions.” Universal high-quality child care and preschool, too, can be seen as K-12 policy, offering benefits for kids’ social-emotional regulation and executive-function skills that they can carry with them to primary school and beyond. Preschool teachers can also spot cognitive delays and other learning differences that might otherwise go unaddressed until much later. “Then it’s not a first-grade or third-grade teacher who’s suddenly trying to play catch-up on things that upper-middle-class families have been throwing resources at from the get-go,” Robin said.

This is a wraparound approach to K-12 policy, evocative of the line that Mary Simpson used while canvassing with Gays for Zohran: “Anything that is good for us is good for our kids.” It has gained relatively little traction in mainstream education discourse, perhaps because it is premised on systemic and structural change to a degree that strikes more centrist temperaments as naïvely optimistic at best, implicitly fatalistic at worst. In her Substack piece, Berkshire argued that class-based analyses such as Anyon’s have rendered the left avoidant and “visionless” on education. Berkshire approvingly quoted the billionaire philanthropist John D. Arnold, who posted to X, “We can’t wait to solve all societal issues before demanding higher performing schools.”

Arnold, who made his money trading energy at Enron and who has donated millions to charter schools, listed alternative solutions for better public education, including school choice, standardized testing, consolidation of underperforming schools, reëxamination of tenure, and “greater accountability at the district, school, principal, and teacher levels.” In other words, we can rescue schools in 2026 if only we adopt the bold reforms of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and the mayoral administration of Michael Bloomberg, both of which débuted a quarter century ago. It’s a moribund formulation, as stale as the air in a poorly ventilated classroom.

Education debates in the United States are undoubtedly warped by pressures from the right, whether it’s the neo-HUAC inquisitions of the New York Post or the billionaire-driven voucher program in Texas that has become central to the state’s current gubernatorial race. (New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, recently opted into President Trump’s private-school voucher program, which siphons students and funding from public schools; Hochul’s decision drew immediate condemnation from the U.F.T. and the D.S.A.) But this discourse is also misshapen by forces of the neoliberal center, which tends to see education outcomes not as products of their environment but as self-contained, quantifiable, ripe for privatization, and measurable largely in terms of teacher performance and test results. A whole-system framework for education reform in New York—of the kind that Democratic Socialists could conceivably articulate, package, sloganize, and turn into buttons and protest signs—may seem utopian or unrealistic. But one advantage it would have over competing proposals is that it’s never really been attempted before.

“Something that the Mamdani administration could say is, Let’s try an affordability agenda that gives everyone the basics of what they need, and then we’ll see if kids do better in school,” Backer said. “If kids and their parents could get to school and work on time, if they had good food, if they had good health care, good child care, solid housing, if they had a school that wasn’t making them sick—we’re ready to try it. Are you?” ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of an N.Y.C.-D.S.A. canvassing faction.