Top Stories
Missing K-12 Voices on Mamdani’s Transition Team
Mamdani’s education transition committee: child care, higher ed, policy pros, but no K-12 teachers
NY Post, 11/24/2025
Of the nearly 40 people Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani tapped for his youth and education transition committee, notably absent were principals, teachers, and students who are currently in New York City’s K-12 system.
Mamdani, who announced the names to his transition teams Monday, centered his campaign on an affordability agenda, including free child care, but had little to say about improving the nation’s largest school system. Several advocates from the world of child care policy and school integration made the list, along with higher education leaders and some former high-level officials from Bill de Blasio’s administration.
The members of the 17 transition committees will work on helping Mamdani’s new administration make personnel decisions and provide policy guidance, so the 34-year-old Queens state assemblyman can hit the ground running when he takes office on Jan. 1.
ICYMI
NYC officials declare victory on class size caps after quietly exempting thousands of classes
Chalkbeat, 11/17/2025
New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced Monday that the city met a high-stakes test under the state’s class size reduction law: ensuring 60% of this year’s classrooms fell under the new limits.
But he failed to mention that the city only cleared that hurdle by quietly declaring thousands of classrooms exempt from the requirements. A Chalkbeat analysis of data released Monday found that without the exemptions the city would have fallen just short of compliance, potentially putting it at risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid.
Officials declared roughly 10,500 of the city’s more than 150,000 classes exempt. With those classrooms removed from the equation, 64% of classrooms citywide were in compliance — the rate city officials reported to the state. The city’s rate without the exemptions? 59.5%.
Did your school win an exemption from the class size mandate? Check out our searchable table to find out.
“Revolutionist” Chancellor Candidate
Zohran Mamdani’s options to lead NYC schools include fire-alarm pulling Dem Jamal Bowman, who wants ‘revolution’
NY Post, 11/8/2025
Jamaal Bowman, the disgraced fire alarm-pulling former congressman who illegally managed a middle school without a principal’s license, is “pushing hard” to be the city’s next schools chancellor and is vowing to lead a “revolution in our public schools,” The Post has learned.
The bombastic ex-“Squad” member sounded like he had already won the appointment from his socialist soulmate Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani Thursday night, when he addressed comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter on Zoom.
“I’m an educator, lifelong educator. When we get universal child care y’all it’s going to lead to a revolution in our public schools!” he thundered.
Other Headlines
The New Must-Have College Admissions Skill: Tolerating Other Viewpoints
Wall Street Journal, 11/25/2025
A Math Horror Show at UC San Diego
Wall Street Journal editorial, 11/25/2025
NYC schools chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos ‘in loving relationship’ with state senator’s son
NY Post, 11/23/2025
Flashing Warning Signs
The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore
Washington Post, op-ed by Megan McArdle, 11/23/2025
Some years ago, during a dinner party, our smoke detector started beeping while we were broiling steaks. I dashed into the hallway and poked at the detector with a broom, which paused, as if surprised, then resumed wailing. My husband came out of the kitchen and had a go. His more muscular attention bought us perhaps 30 seconds of relief, but the machine recovered and more aggressively assaulted our ears. Eventually we pulled the cursed thing out of its frame and ripped the batteries out.
That’s when one of our guests said, “Guys, that’s really a lot of smoke.” It sure was, because as it turned out, our bathroom was on fire (thanks to a candle).
Life is full of these messy signals. Prices are a signal. They tell us how much people want stuff, how much that stuff costs to produce and how much of it we have available. Standardized test scores are signs, telling us whether kids have mastered certain skills. Those warnings are, like my smoke alarm, highly imperfect. (We’ve had many alerts and exactly one fire.) But they contain vital information, and we ignore them at our peril.
One Approach High-Performing Public and Charter Schools Share – And How to Do It
The 74 Million, 11/23/2025
Is it really a good idea to assign homework?
NPR, 11/22/2025
School Control Debate
Cities are in a new cycle of changing who runs schools. Are they just running in place?
Chalkbeat, 11/22/2025
The election of a progressive mayor who has said he wants to end mayoral control of New York City schools might seem like a bellwether.
The next largest school systems, Los Angeles and Miami-Dade County, have been run by elected boards for years. Chicago is transitioning to a fully elected board after decades under mayoral control.
But don’t bury mayoral control just yet.
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani hasn’t laid out clear plans, and his references to “co-governance” could mean a lot of things, including an ongoing role for the mayor.
Columbia considers expanding undergraduate enrollment by up to 20 percent
Columbia Spectator, 11/21/2025
Parents Should Continue to File Disability Rights Complaints, Say Special Ed. Advocates
EdWeek, 11/21/2025
School Bus Contract Resolved…For Now
NYC Approves New Three-Year School Bus Contract: What To Know
Patch, 11/20/2025
New York City has approved a new three-year contract for its school bus companies, ensuring that roughly 150,000 public school students have a ride to and from school.
The new contract is shorter than the five-year contract that the companies agreed to with the Adams administration in the summer.
Queens schools receive record-breaking $43 million in capital funding secured by BP Richards
QNS, 11/20/2025
Queens Community Education Council 24 meets to discuss enrollment gap, funding and status of school repairs
QNS, 11/19/2025
Should We Still Label Children as ‘Gifted’?
NY Times, 11/19/2025
Beyond A Math Problem
When grades stop meaning anything
The Argument, 11/18/2025
UCSD, one of the country’s best public universities, has offered remedial math for nearly a decade — but lately, the share of students requiring it has skyrocketed. In the fall of 2020, 32 students took Math 2. In the fall of 2025, fully 1,000 students had math placement scores so low they would need it.1
In fact, many of the students didn’t just need remedial high school math — their scores indicated they needed remedial middle school or even elementary school math. Only 39% of the students in the remedial class knew how to “round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.”
Eighth graders want to take algebra. SF hasn’t honored a pledge to bring it back
The SF Standard, 11/18/2025
Colleges ease the dreaded admissions process as the supply of applicants declines
Hechinger Report, 11/18/2025
Erosion of Mayoral Control
Zohran Mamdani wants to end mayor control of NYC schools. It has eroded under Eric Adams.
Chalkbeat, 11/18/2025
Zohran Mamdani campaigned on ending mayoral control of New York City’s public school system — by far his most significant education promise.
As debate intensifies over whether the mayor-elect should follow through on that pledge, a significant shift has flown under the radar: Under Mayor Eric Adams, the chief executive’s power over the school system has weakened.
75 NYC schools will get after-school programs next year, Adams announces
Chalkbeat, 11/18/2025
Colleges ease the dreaded admissions process as the supply of applicants declines
The Hechinger Report, 11/18/2025
The Low Bar
A Theory of Dumb It’s not just screens or COVID or too-strong weed. Maybe the culprit of our cognitive decline is unfettered access to each other.
NY Magazine, 11/17/2025
Experts were sure that the 20th century would make us stupid. Never before had culture and technology reshaped daily life so quickly, and every new invention brought with it a panic over the damage it was surely causing to our fragile, defenseless brains. Lightbulbs, radio, comic books, movies, TV, rock and roll, video games, calculators, pornography on demand, dial-up internet, the Joel Schumacher Batmans — all of these things, we were plausibly warned, would turn us into drooling idiots.
The test results told a different story.
For Decades, Students of Color Denied Dyslexia Diagnosis and Intervention
The 74 Million, 11/17/2025
Evolving Math Standards
For Too Many American Kids, Math Isn’t Adding Up
Bloomberg, editorial, 11/17/2025
Math scores in the US have been so bad for so long that teachers could be forgiven for trying anything to improve them. Unfortunately, many of the strategies they’re using could be making things worse.
It’s a crisis decades in the making. In the early 20th century, education reformers including John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick developed a theory — drawing from the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau — that came to be known as constructivism. The idea was that learning happens best when students immerse themselves in a problem and find their own solution. By the late 1980s, math standards had embraced “discovery-based learning.”
Unfortunately, a robust body of research has since found that such approaches often fail early math learners (and readers, for that matter). Math rules and facts such as multiplication tables must be taught explicitly, memorized and mastered through practice. Only when this foundation is established can students progress to more complex concepts. Math, it’s often said, is cumulative.
The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education
NY Times, op-ed by Jean M. Twenge, 11/16/2025
Boy, 16, jumps to his death from window at private Manhattan high school: cops
NY Post, 11/13/2025
Florida is running a radical experiment in education
The Economist, 11/13/2025
“Pause the Class Size Law, please”
Advocates call for pause on NYC class size mandate to give Mamdani time to address equity concerns
Chalkbeat, 11/13/2025
Just two days before the deadline, a group of education advocates on Thursday urged city officials to request a pause to state law that requires New York City to sharply reduce class sizes.
They contend a pause could allow incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani to address a central inequity: The city’s highest-need schools stand to benefit the least from mandatory class size caps.
…A provision of the law gives city officials an opportunity to “recommend a pause of the class size reduction plan” — a request that must be made as part of a financial impact statement due Nov. 15. State officials can withhold funding if the city Education Department fails to comply with the law.
Many science teachers still say climate change might not be our fault. State Ed is demanding a different lesson.
Times Union, 11/13/2025
NYC’s digital SHSAT debut goes smoothly for most test takers
Chalkbeat, 11/13/2025
Lesson on Enrollment
Straight Talk on Gifted Education for Mayor Mamdani – and Everyone Else
Center for Education Progress, 11/12/2025
When Zohran Mamdani came out in favor of eliminating New York City’s gifted and talented program in the earliest grades, it represented the latest chapter in an ongoing debate about gifted and selective schooling options in our nation’s largest district.
One might have thought this was political suicide. Advanced academics are super-popular, as Josh Dwyer noted in his recent overview of public polls. Eliminating tracking was the sixth-least-popular Democrat policy in a recent review of national polls, scoring almost as low as “defund the police.” Going to the dentist is more popular than detracking.
…To get leaders to take school quality seriously, we should probably focus less on caucusing and more on costs. Because declining school quality is hitting district bottom lines via enrollment declines.
Building Bridges for Twice-Exceptional Students: A Case Study in a Secondary School
Alexandra Pauline Lawson, 11/12/2025
It’s Too Early to Write Off College Degrees
Wall Street Journal, 11/12/2025
Math Meltdown Exposed
The College Kids Who Can’t Do Basic Math
The Free Press, 11/11/2025
Sarah had 9 pennies and 9 dimes. How many coins did she have in all?
Solve (10 − 2)(4 − 6x) = 0
California officials expect math students in public school to know the first answer by the end of second grade—and the second answer by the end of eighth grade. But when some incoming college students were asked these questions, about 20 percent could not correctly count the number of coins, and over 80 percent were unable to solve the equation.
A report released last week by the University of California San Diego, which has about 45,000 students and is one of America’s highest-ranked public universities, said that the number of entering first-year students whose math skills fall below middle-school level “increased nearly thirtyfold” from 2020 to 2025—to roughly one out of every eight new students.
Jewish students ‘scared’ after Mamdani wins NYC mayoral election, calling it ‘huge blow’
NY Post, 11/11/2025
Harvard Says It’s Handing Out Too Many A’s. Students Are Fighting Back.
Wall Street Journal, 11/11/2025
Carranza’s Algebra Experiment Revisited
Uncovering More Math Hijinks at SFUSD
Beyond Chron, 11/10/2025
Every once in a while I come across a math article which references San Francisco’s attempt to address the opportunity gaps. A full account has never been told.
The San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) Algebra I story is quite simple. They lied about their success.
…The district under the leadership of Richard Carranza and his irresponsible Board of Education was starstruck by Dr. Jo Boaler’s math philosophy. They believed people would be more successful if they waited until ninth grade to take Algebra I.
Another Challenge for Mamdani: Plummeting Enrollment in the City’s Public Schools
City Journal, 11/10/2025
After much lobbying, NY agrees to require personal finance classes in school
Times Union, 11/10/2025
Randi Weingarten’s Revisionist Narrative
City Journal, op-ed by Daniela Souza-Egorov, 11/7/2025
More Enrollment Declines
‘Bleeding kids:’ NYC public schools face biggest enrollment drop in four years
NY Post, 11/8/2025
New York City public schools shed another 22,000 students this year, with enrollment plunging 2.4%, the steepest decline in four years, according to preliminary Department of Education data — and experts say this trend will only get worse under incoming Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
The startling new numbers follow a post-Covid trend that has seen families hit the exits over the past five years, adding up to a 12.2% decline.
Among Mamdani’s Many Upcoming Challenges: Fixing New York City’s Schools
NY Times, 11/8/2025
NYC schools’ enrollment is in free fall yet spending only goes up and up
NY Post, Editorial, 11/7/2025
A New York School Finds a Way Around AI: To prevent students from cheating, it requires them to handwrite essays.
Wall Street Journal, 11/4/2025