Mamdani’s Big Challenge

A recent report from New York City’s Department of Education presents Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani with one of his administration’s first challenges. Public school enrollment for the 2025–2026 school year declined by 2.3 percent from last year and is down 10 percent since 2020. A total of 112 schools now enroll fewer than 150 students, up from 80 just two years ago.

Yet the schools budget keeps climbing year after year, causing per-pupil spending to rocket upward and putting the city on an unsustainable fiscal path.

“Given these realities, Mayor-elect Mamdani should plan to reduce the number of public schools,” writes Danyela Souza Egorov. She suggests two categories of schools for closure and recommends rezoning the city’s 32 school districts.

Read here for the full details.

In Britain, free speech has been under attack for years—the government now prosecutes its own citizens for saying the wrong things. “The ideology and culture of human rights, whether by design or not,” Theodore Dalrymple writes, “have served to make the country safer for criminals, increase mass illegal immigration, curtail freedom of speech, and entrench a sprawling ideological bureaucracy.”

Read his analysis in our Autumn issue.

In 2021, Ohio State University’s then-president announced a plan to hire 50 faculty whose scholarship addressed “social equity and racial disparities” and to recruit “100 underrepresented and BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] hires.” Some of these roles were highly ideological, including a professor in “indigenous knowledges,” an archaeologist who emphasized “feminist theory,” and a philosopher who examined the “metaphysics of race.”

John Sailer, Manhattan Institute’s director of higher education policy, obtained a trove of records and internal communications from OSU, which provide an inside look at the university’s hiring process and commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Sailer claims the records reveal the extent to which DEI “ideology was embedded at Ohio State,” and underscore the need for “vigilance” from the university’s new leadership if it wants to turn the tide.

Analysis published by the Data Collaborative for Justice at the City University of New York’s John Jay College confirms what critics of New York’s bail reforms have been saying all along, argues Rafael A. Mangual. “[B]ail reform has released more high-risk defendants onto the street, where they have gone on to commit more crimes than they otherwise would have been able to if a judge had been permitted to consider their criminal histories.”

Now that the evidence is in, there’s only one important question remaining, notes Mangual. “Will the politicians in Albany considering changes to bail policy be guided by evidence—or ideology?”

“I keep getting the impression that this will likely end up looking like a Bill de Blasio term. New York City is resilient, with quite a history. If Germany recovered from two world wars in one century, I suspect New York City will survive Mamdani.”

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