Testimony Against Mayoral Control
No single person should control NYC public schools
NYC public schools are governed by a system of mayoral control. This means that the mayor, currently Eric Adams, effectively makes unliteral decisions about how the Department of Education runs. Mayoral control was successfully implemented by Mayor Mike Bloomberg in 2002; however, every few years it must be renewed by Albany. Current Mayor Eric Adams was granted an extension of mayoral control in 2022, which is up for renewal this year. Last night I attended the public hearing on mayoral control in Manhattan, alongside families and fellow educators who overwhelmingly spoke against it. You can view recordings of this hearing (forthcoming) and past hearings here. In the meantime, I’ve posted the testimony I (mostly) gave below.
Good evening,
My name is Ronnie Almonte. I've been a NYC public school teacher for ten years, and I serve as an elected member of the Executive Board of the United Federation of Teachers. I'm here to speak against the renewal of mayoral control. I speak against it, not only because Mayor Eric Adams is an incompetent and obstructive school manager; but because a system built on the disenfranchisement of Black and brown families, that can allow a single person as inept and egotistical as Eric Adams–and de Blasio and Bloomberg before him–to cause such widespread harm, is a system that must end. School leaders advocate for students, they don’t cut their funds, fail to pay their providers, crowd their classrooms, deprive them of their services, throw them out of housing, and segregate them racially.
There are several things Mayor Adams has done that disqualify him as the manager of the largest school district in the country. For one, in his short tenure, he’s cut hundreds of millions, probably billions of dollars from the school budget. This is at a time when NYC’s economy is doing well. Every day on my way to work, as I exit the subway, I see four or five of Adams’ new private security guards standing at the turnstile gates, and while making my way out, I pass by another four or five NYPD cops playing on their phones. I see these adults and think about how much power Adams has to direct money toward such waste, about how all mayors have let the NYPD blow their overtime budget each year and get their multimillion misconduct cases covered by taxpayers. I think about these things as I commute to a school where Mayoral cuts had halted the funding of after-school clubs. And I think about how Mayor Adams is effectively plundering education to fund policing, and whatever pet projects he gets to pursue at his whim. Even when the money is there, the Mayor cannot manage to pay preschools on time, or bring himself to prepare to meet the legal obligation of reducing class sizes.
Some argue that Mayoral control ensures accountability. But ever since the billionaire Mayor Bloomberg steamrolled the Board of Ed, we’ve seen zero consequences for NYC mayors as students learning English go without enough bilingual educators; students with IEPs illegally have their services neglected; asylum-seeking students get their education disrupted, by getting evicted from shelters in the middle of cold stormy nights, and being forced to transfer to new schools every few weeks. All of this - and more - in a system where students of color bear the burden of a school segregation crisis that deepens. These injustices keep repeating, precisely because mayoral control prevents the mayor from being held accountable. We would see, not only actual accountability, but real improvements to our students' learning and safety under an elected school board made up of people, who as members of the community, would have an actual interest in not ransacking but nourishing the school system.