In Boston’s mayoral primary, city councilors Michelle Wu and Annissa Essaibi George , respectively winning 33.3 percent and 22.5 percent of the vote. Acting Mayor Kim Janey, the first woman and first African American to serve as the city’s mayor, finished in fourth place. Wu and Essaibi George will proceed to the general election November 2.

On September 9, public schools in Boston will open for the 2021-22 academic year — the first since last March, locals hope, not to be irreversibly damaged by the COVID-19 pandemic. Five days later, the city will hold the first round of a two-step election process to decide its next mayor, whose time in office may come to be defined by the performance of a school district that has struggled in recent years.

Those two deadlines are clearly connected in the minds of the electorate. According to conducted by Suffolk University and the Boston Globe, schools were rated the most important issue by about 18 percent of likely voters across the city, ahead of the economy, crime, and police reform and practically identical to the top-ranking items of housing (20 percent) and racial justice (19 percent). In areas of the city that have historically posted some of the highest levels of voter turnout, K-12 was ranked the most important issue by far.

David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, observed that the public is drawing connections between the disparate K-12 issues, from police officers in schools to COVID remediation, in a way that could make education “the issue of the year.”

“You’ve got a constant thread where people are recognizing how important education is, and I think you’re going to see it continue to bubble up through the school reopening and even beyond,” Paleologos said.

Seven candidates have emerged to replace former Mayor Marty Walsh, who was appointed U.S. Secretary of Labor in March. That group, which will be winnowed to two finalists after the preliminary election on September 14, is striking for its representative diversity. Among the favorites to compete in November are three city councillors who would each be the first woman and first person of color elected to lead Boston. (A fourth, Acting Mayor Kim Janey, already set both precedents when she was elevated to the position this spring and is seeking her first elected term).

Whoever wins will face the significant challenge of turning around schools in the birthplace of American public education. Boston Public Schools, once considered something of an exemplar among major urban districts, was widely seen as regressing even before the emergence of the coronavirus. While local experts generally acknowledge the need for improvement, much of the public’s attention has been directed at an acrimonious debate over the admissions practices of the city’s three competitive-admissions schools. But the comprehensive improvements needed to lift the performance of the rest of the system, and arrest its persistent decline in enrollment, haven’t led the discussion.

Most of the bandwidth among parents is also consumed by concerns about the pandemic, says Paul Reville, Massachusetts’s former education secretary. The increased salience of K-12 schools measured in the Suffolk poll results from a desperate desire to return to the pre-COVID state of existence, when families, schools, and employers could take the school day for granted, he said; but the next mayor will need to accomplish a great deal more than negotiating a return to the status quo ante.

“We’re not debating strategy so much right now as we’re debating survival issues,” Reville said. “Are we going to open or not? Will we have enough room for all the students? Will they have to wear masks? What happens if the current spike in numbers keeps going? It’s hard to concentrate on the strategic when the day-to-day is so challenging.”

Critical audit

March 13, 2020, was the most significant day in the recent history of Boston Public Schools. That Friday, then-Mayor Walsh and Boston schools Superintendent Brenda Cassellius announced that the district would close all buildings to in-person learning for six weeks. In fact, the initial reopening date would come and go, with most students stuck at home for the better part of a year.

But another crucial development had been announced just hours earlier, when local officials signalled that the district would be entering a unique governing partnership with the state of Massachusetts to improve learning outcomes for students. The announcement followed the release of of Boston’s academic performance, which found that one-third of its students attended schools ranking in the bottom 10 percent statewide. State authorities would provide support to the system going forward, but also hold it responsible for meeting specific performance goals.

The new arrangement was especially startling given Boston’s reputation as a comparatively high-flying district among its large, urban peers. Beginning in the 1990s and early 2000s, national observers the steady growth in student test scores, which was widely attributed to then-Superintendent Tom Payzant’s efforts to restructure curricula and focus on literacy instruction. While large gaps still separated the city’s underprivileged children from their peers in nearby suburbs, the arrow was definitively pointing upwards.

The progress about a decade ago, according to a report by the research organization Bellwether Education Partners, as the district cycled rapidly through a sequence of short-lived and interim superintendents before landing on Cassellius in 2019. The 2020 “memorandum of understanding” — which created a substantial role for state oversight while stopping short of a takeover — might have offered an opportunity to reclaim momentum. But according to John Portz, a political scientist at Northeastern University, it was instantaneously overshadowed by COVID.

“That would have been a key jumping-off point, if you will, for where education was going to go,” Portz said. “But it just got totally swallowed up by the pandemic. Thinking back, no one has talked about it, and I wonder whether it’s simply a dead letter at this point.”

Exam school admissions

The prolonged closure of the city’s 125 schools pushed systemic recovery far down the agenda, with a proposed as Walsh and Cassellius attempted to chart a course to safe reopening. The process became bitterly political at times, as when the Boston Teachers Union passed in Cassellius last December, citing unequal access to ventilation, testing, and protective gear.

Once K-8 schools returned, attention shifted again to the city’s public “exam schools”; of the three, the best known is Boston Latin, whose lofty alumni roll extends from Ben Franklin and John Hancock to many present-day elites in media, politics, and business. A decades-old debate over the school’s rigorous admissions test was first reignited in 2017, when that just one-quarter of Latin’s students were African American or Hispanic — compared with roughly three-quarters of Boston students overall.

Hearings held on the subject last fall by the Boston School Committee — a seven-member body appointed by the mayor — quickly became heated, with many parents arguing in favor of the existing admissions requirements and others calling for the introduction of criteria that might increase the odds of disadvantaged students winning seats. The debate grew so charged that three members after it was discovered that they had mocked and insulted Asian American parents and those living in the predominantly white neighborhood of West Roxbury. Still, the committee to approve a new admissions system that will decrease the importance of exam scores relative to school grades and reserve more seats for students living in low-income areas of Boston.

The controversy has attracted enormous coverage in local media. The changes are supported by three leading candidates in the September preliminary, including Acting Mayor Janey, Councilor Michelle Wu, and Councilor Andrea Campbell. Only Annissa Essaibi George, another city council member who previously worked as a teacher in East Boston, the new system and the process that led to its adoption.

That position may position her favorably with families living in the largely middle-class West Roxbury and Hyde Park neighborhoods, who typically make up as much of a quarter of the city’s electorate. Attorney Larry DiCara, a former city councillor and longtime observer of city politics, said that the issue’s outsized importance could swing more votes than one might expect.

“In some neighborhoods, the Latin issue is the most important issue,” DiCara said. “There are parents who, if their kids don’t get into Latin, they move.”

But Will Austin, a former teacher who founded the nonprofit , said he was dismayed by the race’s persistent focus on what he called “click-bait-y” issues at the expense of a more substantive conversation of the district’s stagnant academic results.

“You can’t lead systematic reform by changing which kids go to three of your 125 schools, which is essentially what we spent a couple of months doing,” Austin argued.

No ‘education candidate’?

There is still little clarity on which two candidates will advance in the preliminary election round. The most recent polls, conducted in and , put Wu in the lead, with Janey, Essaibi George, and several lower-ranked candidates further behind. But around one-fifth of respondents were undecided, and any configuration of the top-four candidates is generally viewed as plausible.

All four can broadly be defined as progressive, with Essaibi George venturing somewhat toward the center in her attitudes on exam schools and public safety. But Northeastern’s Portz said that the lack of more ideological differentiation made it difficult for the candidates to build more distinct brands.

“It’s tough to some degree because they’re driven by events in the news, the exam schools or the school committee resignations,” he said. “Those things are capturing more attention, and it’s hard for them to strike out and distinguish themselves.”

The race is notably different in this respect from the recent primary held in New York City, in which leading candidates sorted into camps of progressives and moderates. The moderates — including the eventual Democratic nominee, Eric Adams — generally supported the city’s charter school sector and advocated for more modest changes to admissions criteria for the city’s own exam schools.

DiCara served on the city council in the 1970s, when the district still enrolled over 100,000 students and a robust network of parochial schools served tens of thousands more. In , he argued that runaway housing costs had made Boston less friendly to families and the working class, while the disappearance of children rendered public education a less relevant concern to the city’s newer, more affluent residents.

“The dramatic changes to the population, where we have so many single people in Boston or married people without children, make Boston very different from New York City,” DiCara said. “Once you get out of Manhattan, [New York is] really a city with a lot of families.”

The city’s thought leaders have taken note of the short shrift given to schools during the campaign, with an August op-ed in the Boston Globe why no “education candidate” had yet emerged. and (a former BPS teacher) have each released lengthy proposals concerning education and childcare; Janey, the acting mayor, can even boast of as an advocate for children and families. But so far, none of it has produced a sustained conversation about what it would take to put Boston schools on the road to improvement.

Austin said that Boston municipal races are often dominated less by policy debates than personal experience.

“Every candidate in Boston is going to talk about how housing is unaffordable. Every single candidate will talk about how we need to reform the police. Every one will say that racial equity is core to their work. They don’t have really significant policy differences, so they differentiate themselves through how they campaign and their biographies.”

Reville said that the lack of greater variation within the field has held back the kind of boundary-breaking proposals that would address the key issue plaguing education in Boston: “too many longstanding, ongoing, chronically underperforming schools.”

“Nobody’s coming along to propose radical change,” he said. “You’re not hearing someone saying, for instance, ‘Let’s make summer learning an entitlement for every child in the Boston Public Schools.’ Or, ‘Should we be doing something radically different, given the changing population within the Boston Public Schools?’ We don’t have a lot of outlier proposals to make a radical shift in the status quo. It’s hard to change, and there’s an enormous amount of inertia.”

After multiple rounds of vote tabulation triggered by New York’s new ranked-choice voting system, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams was declared the winner of the Democratic primary on Tuesday. With all other candidates eliminated, Adams edged past former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by a margin of roughly one percent. He is now seen as a heavy favorite in the November election against Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.

With early voting already underway in the New York City mayoral primary, a question hangs over the nation’s largest school district: How will the next administration help schools get back to business after multiple academic years have been profoundly jolted by COVID-19?

Whoever emerges as the party’s nominee will face a multifaceted challenge in leading New York’s school system. After a lengthy period of serving as mayor-presumptive (Democrats massively outnumber Republicans across the city, making November’s general election a likely rout) he or she will need to complete the transition back to in-person schooling, carefully steward billions of dollars of federal relief money, and help students recover from nearly two years of learning interrupted by the pandemic.

And there’s a further plot twist: Charter schools, perhaps the most controversial force in citywide education politics, have won the backing of most of the field’s leading candidates. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, entrepreneur Andrew Yang, and former city sanitation chief Kathryn Garcia have all signalled for the public schools of choice, which have seen their allies dwindle both in City Hall and Albany over the past few years. At the same time, one of the most strident charter critics, Comptroller Scott Stringer, struggled to build momentum even before his campaign was rocked by of sexual harassment.

It’s a situation that upends the political logic of much of the last decade, when Democrats across the country have increasingly broadcast their skepticism of the sector, even to the point of proposing full-on moratoriums on new charters. Now, in a city almost synonymous with liberal politics, most of the party’s top mayoral contenders appear to be taking the opposite tack. The causes for the shift are multiple, including the relative popularity of charters among minority voters, a traffic jam in the primary’s progressive lane, and families’ dissatisfaction with the district throughout the travails of the pandemic.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in an interview that charter schools and their allies are exploiting a hectic post-COVID environment in which K-12 education has taken a backseat to issues of public safety and economic hardship.

“Crime is on the rise, we’re coming out of the pandemic, homelessness is exploding,” Mulgrew argued. “There are so many other issues that are facing people. If this election was last year, when education was at the forefront…this phenomenon would not have happened.”

But according to Richard Buery — a former deputy to incumbent Mayor Bill de Blasio who served briefly as the CEO of the Achievement First charter network before that he would leave to head the Robin Hood Foundation — it’s entirely unsurprising to see Democrats talking openly about supporting and expanding charters.

“Charter schools are incredibly popular among the Democratic electorate,” he said. “The distinction between a charter school and a district school does not fundamentally matter to most people. What people are interested in is whether they have access to quality schools for their children.”

De Blasio backlash

The 2013 election of Bill de Blasio marked a turning point on school choice in New York. After years of enthusiastic support from Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, both Republicans at the time they were elected, charter schools faced a Democratic mayor who openly vented his frustrations with them.

It began in de Blasio’s first few months in office, when he three schools in the high-performing Success Academy network from co-locating in district-owned facilities. He was outmaneuvered by the schools’ allies in Albany, including Gov. Andrew Cuomo, guaranteeing charters the right to use space in public buildings. But the new mayor’s position was clear, and he has largely stuck to it throughout the remainder of his two terms in office — including at the National Education Association’s annual assembly that his fellow Democrats needed to be held accountable for being “cozy with the charter schools.”

It was a stance that caught on throughout the party and only gained steam after President Donald Trump appointed longtime school choice advocate Betsy DeVos to lead the Department of Education. Though he had previously served in the Obama White House during a rapid surge in charter growth, then-candidate Joe Biden had about charters while winning the Democratic presidential nomination last year.

All of which makes the current configuration of mayoral candidates somewhat surprising, at least from the perspective of K-12 schools. Yang, who polled in first place during earlier portions of the race before fading somewhat — has to a charter organization in the past. While he reportedly favors unionizing charters, Adams also that he would support the duplication of successful charter models. And Garcia has even on charters in New York, currently set at 290, dismissing the debate around them as a “political football.”

Those positions haven’t gone unnoticed. Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, said she was “incredibly disappointed” with Garcia’s proposal. And Scott Stringer, who has sought to during his time as city comptroller and of the UFT in April, has several charter-friendly financiers for making huge donations to political action committees that support Yang and Adams.

But the criticism hasn’t paid off so far. A familiar face in New York politics who many when the race began, Stringer has failed to gain much altitude. Of the field’s top tier, only Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney who worked in the de Blasio administration, seems to be generally running to the left on K-12 issues; even she is focused more on racial segregation and lowering class sizes than school choice.

No single candidacy of the progressive anti-charter movement than that of Dianne Morales. The experienced nonprofit executive had long before pivoting leftward during the primary; her includes proposals to end co-locations and prevent charters from accessing student recruitment data. But just as her campaign was gaining attention, amid allegations of mismanagement and discrimination. And as the primary is in its last gasp, Adams, Garcia, and Yang make up three of the top four candidates.

The UFT’s Mulgrew said plainly that he believed the turn on charters was the product of campaign contributions. A persistent critic of former Mayor Bloomberg, who worked energetically to spread more school options throughout the five boroughs, he argued that Wall Street donors who played an outsized role in charter expansion a decade ago were now hoping to control the debate again.

Bloomberg “had partners who financed so much of this, and we see these same people emerging again and being part of our political process right now in the mayor’s race through various IEs [independent expenditures] and different relationships,” Mulgrew said. “We feel very strongly that a small number of people who have a lot of money should not be influencing us.”

‘A huge disrespect to parents’

But support for charters doesn’t merely come from the financial and philanthropic realms. showed that a strong majority of New York City Democrats approved of lifting the charter cap. And while it was commissioned by StudentsFirstNY, a pro-charter advocacy group, its findings are mostly consistent with existing survey evidence demonstrating the popularity of schools of choice, particularly among who will play a role in choosing the Democrats’ nominee.

Families have already during the COVID era, with public data showing that charter school enrollment grew by roughly 10,000 students — about 7 percent — over the 2020-21 school year. While charter and traditional schools both spent long periods closed to in-person learning while the pandemic raged, the reopening process led by the district left many with its performance and the quality of virtual learning. In May, against both the mayor and Chancellor Meisha Ross-Porter to try to force an immediate full-time return to physical classrooms.

Dan Weisberg, CEO of the reform-oriented nonprofit TNTP and a Bloomberg-era executive at the New York City Department of Education, called the unpredictable pace of reopenings “a huge black mark on Mayor de Blasio’s record.”

“One of the guiding principles should have been respect for parents and students and families,” Weisberg said. “If that’s one of the guiding principles, then you don’t repeatedly change schedules and plans the night before, or with 24 hours notice. …And that was done again and again and again, and there is still significant anger about that, as there should be. It’s a huge disrespect to parents.”

Yiatin Chu is a New York parent and co-president of the group , which advocates in favor of strengthening gifted education programs and has recently co-endorsed both Adams and Yang. Much of her work focuses on fighting back the increasingly controversial admissions test to the city’s specialized high schools, but she has said that many of her fellow parent advocates also look favorably on the alternatives offered by well-regarded charter networks like Success Academy. After an “eye-opening” year of closures and remote instruction, she added, the respective stances of Adams, Garcia, and Yang held great appeal.

“While they’re not saying, ‘I believe in the single test,’ or ‘I believe in charters,’ you don’t get the sense that they’ll expend their political capital or energy to take down these schools,” she said. “We’ll see where things land, but at least in the campaign season, they’re saying things I think many parents want to hear.”

But according to Joseph Vitoritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College and an experienced chronicler of the city’s education politics, if charter backers are aiming to resurrect the Bloomberg-era disposition toward big, high-performing networks, they’ll have to do more than win a mayor’s race.

“I would think they’re encouraged by the fact that three out of the four top candidates are pro-charter — I mean, that’s a start,” Vitoriti said. “But the bottom line is that the decisions are going to be made in Albany, not City Hall….And I think that’s going to be a tough sell — tougher than ever.”

An end to the charter school cap can only come at the state level, where mayoral influence has often proved weak. The New York Senate, which was formerly held by a complex coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, flipped in 2018, and its newly liberal majorities haven’t shown a willingness to greenlight further expansions of school choice. Even more important, Andrew Cuomo, one of the charter sector’s most steadfast friends during the de Blasio mayoralty, could be in danger of in the next few months; even if he survives, it’s an open question whether he will seek a fourth term next year.

Robin Hood’s Buery said that, regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination next Tuesday, the place of charters in New York is now too firmly entrenched for either city or state leaders to dislodge. A combination of factors — more representative leadership at the school level, successful lobbying from political allies, and the consistent support of African American and Latino voters — have created a “fundamentally different world” for charters, he observed.

“There’ll still be debates about how the sector should grow, and I don’t want to discount the challenges involved. I just think it’s a different kind of debate; we’re past the point of people asking, ‘Should there be charters?’”