ALBANY SNUBBING ERIC ON SCHOOLS
No mayoral extension in budget
Albany lawmakers are killing Mayor Adams’ hopes of extending his control of New York City public schools included in the state budget, The Post has learned.
Adams will instead have to hope the Legislature passes an extension outside of the budget before June 30, when mayoral control expires.
“There are certainly going to be protracted discussions. Might it go down the wire in June? It could,” Assembly Education Committee Chairman Michael Benedetto said, noting that one of Adams’ most sought-after asks of Albany this year will definitely not be included in the spending bill.
“It’s not really a budget issue. It’s a legislative policy issue,” Benedetto (D-Bronx), who favor granting Adams the extension, told The Post on Wednesday.
All eyes are now turning to a report from the state Education Department on the effectiveness of mayoral control that is set to be released by the end of the month. The study was requested by lawmakers the last time mayoral control was extended in 2022, and will be based, in part,
on a series of public hearings held over the last few months.
Several lawmakers told The Post they will be considering the findings of the report when weighing the issue. If the study is unfavorable, it could give opponents ammo to curtail the mayor’s power or scrap the measure entirely.
‘Alternative models’
“We’ll see what the report does to impact the public discourse, but . . . I would love to see alternative models where faculty, teachers and student and parent voices are included,” said state Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Queens), a frequent critic of the mayor.
“I don’t know how many are in each camp, but I think there are many of us who are willing to have that conversation,” she told The Post.
Adams — whose predecessors, including Mike Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio also faced opposition over mayoral control — has touted his successes handling the largest school system in the country. He brought up his administration’s efforts to better teach reading skills to students and its job managing the influx of nearly 30,000 migrant families into city schools during a panel discussion in Albany last weekend.
On Monday, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which along with other teachers unions is opposed to mayoral control, was in Albany to campaign against the measure. “The teachers know best how to educate. It’s not one guy at City Hall who knows best, it’s the teachers!” state Sen. John Liu (D-Queens) told a crowd of educators.
Liu and UFT President Mike Mulgrew are among those also raising concerns about the state’s class-size reduction law — which has a lack of funding to implement even though it would likely lead to hiring more teachers.
Except for a minor bump due to the influx of migrant children, enrollment in city schools has plummeted in recent years, meaning that adding more classes would at minimum maintain the current teaching staff.
The UFT and other unions regularly pump big money into Democrats’ political machines.
The Post reported last year that Liu, the chair of the state Senate Education Committee, was one of the unions’ biggest benefactors, receiving over $30,000 to his campaign since his 2018 election. Lawmakers including Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie have said mayoral control doesn’t belong in the spending bill because it doesn’t have direct fiscal implications — although Gov. Hochul proposed a four-year extension in her January budget plan. Neither chamber of the Democrat-controlled Legislature included an extension in their individual budget proposals released this week. Most previous extensions of mayoral control have been granted by the Legislature outside the state budget. But lawmakers’ concerns over Adams’ control of city schools goes deeper than whether or not it should be in the budget.
“It is very hard — and I say this more as a parent than a state senator — to see educational standards change, just simply depending on who’s the mayor,” said Ramos. “And in this particular case, when, as a state senator, when you’re sending New York City money, and yet there are still cuts to our kids’ schools.”