It’s another off-the-charts snub.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani blew off a written request to meet with 19 city charter school leaders who wanted to make the case they would work together to educate needy students.
The charter school operators told Mamdani in a Dec. 1 invite that they could help the democratic socialist implement his affordability agenda.
“Equity and affordability are inseparable,” the leaders wrote in the letter, which offered Dec. 12 as a possible date for a sitdown at Ember Charter School for Mindful Education.
“When a family can count on an excellent public school near home, life gets less expensive: fewer hours on buses, fewer tutoring bills, fewer impossible choices between rent and opportunity,” the letter added. “In short, when equity rises, fewer people, especially Black and Brown families, feel compelled to leave our great city.”
But Mamdani never even acknowledged the letter.
“So far there’s been radio silence,” said Eva Moskowitz, founder and head of the city’s largest charter school network, the 59-school Success Academy, a co-signer of the Mamdani letter.
But Moskowitz — a co-signer of the letter — said she remains “optimistic” she and other charter school operators can develop a relationship with the Mamdani administration.
She said it’s fair to cut Mamdani some slack, with the mayoral-elect running up against the holidays while assembling an administration. He has yet to name his schools chancellor.
“Let’s put petty politics aside,” Moskowitz said. “I’m patient.”
Charter leaders had a cooperative relationship with Mayor Eric Adams and his team but always remained at odds with lefty Mayor Bill de Blasio, who took an antagonistic stance with some in the sector.
They’re now vowing to be partners with the incoming Mamdani administration, and pledged in their letter to advocate for his proposed universal child care program.
“To be clear: our hands are raised sir, and we stand ready to do more. This includes helping to deliver on universal childcare AND more high-quality charter schools,” the charter school reps wrote in the letter — which was co-written and co-signed by Rafiq Kalam Id-Din II, the founder of Ember Charter.
There are now more than 150,000 students enrolled in 285 charter schools, or more than one in six of all students in publicly-funded schools in the five boroughs.
But Mamdani didn’t appoint any officials from the charter sector to his transition Committee on Youth & Education — one of 17 teams that include 400 people.
During his campaign, Mamdani opposed charter school expansion in the city, specifically objecting to raising the cap in state to allow more of them to open or to provide space in city school buildings.
Charter schools are publicly-funded but privately run by not-for-profit groups and most staffers don’t belong to a union. Students are chosen via lottery.
The alternative schools typically have a longer school day and school year, and its students outperform counterparts in traditional public schools on the state’s standardized math and English Language Arts exams.
In the prior school year, 56.3% of third through eighth graders were deemed “proficient” in ELA and 56.9% in math in 2024-25 in the city’s traditional public schools.
Charter schools in the city blew away their district counterparts out of the water – with 67.5% of students scoring proficient in ELA and 68.6% in math.
In The Bronx, the pass rates for Success Academy and Zeta charter schools on ELA and math were in some cases 25-percentage points higher than in neighboring traditional public schools.
In fact, Success Academy students ranked No. 1 in the state in Math, with 96% of students passing — exceeding affluent suburban school districts such as Scarsdale, Briarcliff Manor and Chappaqua.
The charter network also ranked No. 2 in ELA with a 92% pass rate, just a point behind the Scarsdale Union Free School District.
Mamdani’s transition team declined to comment.
In the letter, the charter educators said Mamdani is personally aware of the importance of choice in education for economically struggling families, noting he attended the private Banks Street school and the selective Bronx High School of Science.
“In that same spirit, charter schools throw open the door of possibility, offering a diverse set of high‑quality public options across neighborhoods and grade spans that require no tests or exams to enroll, defeating the statistics that assert that zip code must determine destiny,” they said.
Other signatories include:
- Rev. Susana Rivera-Leon of Family Life Academy Charter Schools in The Bronx
- Rev. Al Cockfield, Jr, Lamad Academy Charter Schools
- Emily Kim, head of Zeta Charter Schools
- Michelle Haynes, Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Harlem
- Charlene Reid of the Black Latinx Asian Charter Collaborative
- Kirsys Gomez and Veronica Almedina, Amber Charter Schools
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