But rhetoric alone does not produce impact. Progressive intent is not the same as progressive design or progressive results.

After years inside the nation’s largest school system, helping build improvement strategies and working with families who have rarely experienced the benefits of reform, I believe the mayor’s education plan is strong on aspiration but thin in two areas that determine whether equity becomes reality: a clear framework for communities to shape policy and the system’s capacity to move reforms into practice.

Mamdani is right to speak urgently about expanding opportunity and addressing racial disparities in achievement and discipline. But without a design process rooted in Black and brown students’ experiences, and without the operational strength to turn vision into daily action, New York risks repeating a familiar cycle. The city has produced many equity plans – some I’ve helped craft – that were bold on paper but failed to change the lived realities of the children they targeted.

For decades, New York City has produced reforms for communities rather than with them. Mamdani wants to change that. He describes a future where families, students and educators help shape the policies that govern their lives. But valuing co-creation and building the infrastructure for it are two different tasks. That gap is where his plan is most hazy.

His platform does not yet outline a concrete process for shared design. What does engagement beyond listening sessions look like in a system this large? How will students and families, especially those most affected by inequities, help shape solutions, not just identify problems? These questions remain unanswered.

This absence of structure is not hypothetical. In 2019, the city attempted a more collaborative model through the Imagine NYC Schools initiative, a call for students, families and educators to redesign existing schools and imagine new ones. I was deeply involved in its creation and implementation. It demonstrated that meaningful community design is possible.

But Covid-19 and institutional challenges stalled progress, and the city lacked the long-term supports needed to sustain it across crises and leadership transitions. The lesson was clear: Co-design succeeds only with sustained investment, careful scaffolding and continuity that outlasts political cycles.

Mamdani’s plan does not yet include those commitments. It references student voice but does not require schools to establish student design teams with real authority. It encourages family engagement but does not build mechanisms that allow families, particularly Black and brown families historically marginalized, to shape how equity efforts unfold at the school level. Nor does it commit to updating initiatives based on continuous community feedback.

When communities are excluded from design, schools often reproduce the very conditions they aim to change. Interventions miss cultural complexities. Strategies misread disengagement. Metrics track what is convenient instead of what matters. Designing with the community, not for it, creates structured partnership with those who understand inequity from lived experience. Mamdani has named this value, but he has not yet built the durable process to realize it.

The Implementation Gap Leaders Overlook

Even if Mamdani’s plan were perfectly designed, another challenge remains: What happens when bold vision meets operational reality?

Many reforms fail not because they are misguided but because they lack viable implementation. School systems are complex ecosystems; change in one area creates ripple effects everywhere else. Black and brown students — already navigating inconsistent instruction, resource instability and high staff turnover – are the first to feel the consequences when reforms move faster than the system can absorb them.

Mamdani speaks extensively about vision. He rarely addresses capacity.

Who will train more than 1,600 principals and tens of thousands of teachers to implement these shifts? Who will modernize data systems so inequities are tracked accurately? Who will prevent new initiatives from piling onto unfinished ones, creating reform fatigue that destabilizes schools already under pressure?

An equity agenda without an implementation strategy remains aspirational. The cost of weak execution is not symbolic. It appears in teacher turnover (an issue Mamdani has pledged to address), inconsistent instructional quality and widening trust gaps between schools and families. These conditions disproportionately harm Black and Brown students regardless of ideology.

New York needs more than bold leadership. It needs leadership grounded in proximity to the students and families who live with policy consequences. Trust is earned when leaders treat communities as partners and designers rather than recipients of reform.

Mamdani can move in that direction by requiring major reforms to undergo equity audits led by students, families and educators from the communities most affected. He can also invest in developing more Black and Brown school leaders, who are essential to translating policy into the daily rhythms of classrooms.

None of this work is glamorous. It will not generate headline-ready accomplishments in the first hundred days. But it is the only path to lasting change.

The election of a progressive mayor has raised expectations. But New Yorkers should not assume that the right values automatically produce the right outcomes.

If Mamdani wants his legacy to be more than moral clarity, he must pair vision with structure. That might include:

• Establishing permanent, school-based community design councils with real decision-making authority, not just advisory status.
• Piloting major reforms with a small group of schools before scaling citywide, allowing communities to shape implementation in real time.
• Expanding funding for neighborhood-based partnerships with trusted community organizations to anchor reforms beyond political cycles and sustain accountability.

His selection of New York City Public Schools veteran Kamar Samuels as chancellor is a promising step. Samuels brings credibility and lived experience that could help bridge the gap between City Hall and school communities. But even strong leadership must be supported by systems that distribute power, build capacity and institutionalize feedback.

Black and brown students have waited long enough for promises to become practice. In this climate, the city cannot afford to get this wrong again.

For decades, too many of our children were taught to read using methods that research has shown to be ineffective. The result was predictable. Year after year, nearly half of city students left elementary school unable to read proficiently, with the deepest harm falling on low-income communities, English language learners, and children with dyslexia and language-based learning disabilities.

NYC Reads, launched just two years ago, is the city’s first serious attempt to change that trajectory. It replaces “balanced literacy” with instruction grounded in the science of reading, a body of research showing how children actually learn to decode, comprehend and enjoy written language. Teachers are receiving new training, curricula are being aligned to evidence and families are beginning to see the benefits.

The early results are promising. This year, reading proficiency among New York City students in grades 3 to 8 rose more than 7 percentage points — one of the largest single-year gains in recent memory. An evaluation of over 1,000 teachers who completed The Reading Institute’s Science of Reading Intro Course found a 34% increase in knowledge of reading science concepts, which they are now applying in classrooms across the city. Behind these numbers are children who are not only able to read books, but also tackle word problems in math, understand passages in science texts and see themselves as successful learners.

Educators themselves are telling us this shift matters. Teachers who once felt ill-prepared to help struggling readers now report “aha” moments as they change daily instructional practices, replacing outdated strategies like guessing at words with evidence-based methods that build fluency and confidence. For students who had begun to fall behind, the difference is life changing. That is the kind of momentum New York cannot afford to lose.

National research shows that third-grade reading proficiency is a . Children who cannot read fluently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school. They are less likely to pursue higher education, more likely to face unemployment and more likely to be entangled in the criminal justice system. The stakes could not be clearer. Literacy is not just an academic issue; it is an economic and social justice issue.

That is why the city cannot afford to let this progress stall. The new mayoral administration will face pressure to put its own stamp on education policy. But abandoning NYC Reads, or even watering it down, would mean turning back the clock to the failed practices of the past and leaving another generation of students behind.

I was encouraged to see Mayor-elect Mamdani speak positively about NYC Reads during the campaign. Now I urge him to make an early, public commitment to sustain and strengthen NYC Reads. This means fully funding the initiative, ensuring that teachers receive the ongoing training they need, and reporting progress transparently. 

It also means having a schools chancellor with a proven record of championing literacy programs grounded in reading science. If Chancellor Melissa Avilés-Ramos remains in her post, or if another literacy-focused chancellor is appointed, that could be a strong signal that the city is serious about preserving reforms already underway, including reading curriculum changes under NYC Reads.

New York City already has elected officials pushing in the same direction — from Assemblymember Robert Carroll’s legislation expanding dyslexia screening and early intervention to Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon’s efforts to ensure that teacher preparation programs use evidence-based methods in their literacy courses. The next mayor must match that commitment.

As a reading scientist, Brooklyn College professor and founder of The Reading Institute, I have seen firsthand how quickly children can grow when teachers are equipped with the knowledge and tools that research supports. When schools align instruction with how the brain actually learns to read, students who once struggled begin to thrive, and educators regain a sense of confidence in supporting all students.

Literacy is the gateway to opportunity. It is the foundation for every subject, every grade, and every pathway into the workforce. New York has begun to show what’s possible when we finally take reading science seriously. For the sake of our children, our city and our future, NYC Reads must stay.