Shortly after Zohran Mamdani was elected as the new mayor of New York City, he appointed Kamar H. Samuels as the Chancellor of New York City Public Schools to oversee the day-to-day operations of one of the largest school systems in the country. Samuels is a veteran New York City educator with experience as a teacher, principal, and superintendent across the Bronx, Brooklyn’s District 13, and Manhattan’s District 3. His 20-year career has unfolded within some of the city’s most racially and economically stratified school communities. He has led initiatives to promote racial integration by merging schools and reforming admissions programs, and helped boost literacy through the NYC Reads program. These actions have been in line with Samuels characterization as a consensus-oriented, student-centered leader who is committed to equity, inclusion, culturally responsive pedagogy, and parental engagement.
I didn’t know how to feel about Samuels’ nomination. On paper, the appointment checked many of the boxes that are often celebrated in conversations about education leadership: a career educator, a product of the New York City school system, and someone who has spent decades working in the very districts that have placed him at the center of both the promise and the persistent fault lines of urban public education. There was a sense that I should feel excited, and yet, the optimism felt abstract and difficult to name. It was not tied to a single policy or promise, but rather to a quieter idea: that someone who has lived inside the system might understand its contradictions.
As someone who moved through New York City’s public school system from a Gifted and Talented program in East Harlem to a far more socioeconomically diverse high school at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, I experienced firsthand how stratification operates within the same system. I saw how segregation, shaped by zip codes and local tax funding, determined opportunity long before students ever entered the classroom. I experienced, alongside my other classmates, overcrowded classrooms, lowered expectations, and over-policing—while many classmates were also quietly balancing homelessness, taking care of siblings, or working more than one job to support their families.
During the pandemic, the inequities of the NYC public school system became all the more present. When learning moved online, access to education suddenly depended on devices, broadband, stable housing, and family resources that were already unevenly distributed. Schools were finally recognized as a vital part of local communities. School buildings are spaces where students can access three meals a day, get access to mental health support, build community, obtain valuable technological and educational resources, and, for some, discover a place to truly express their authentic selves. Carrying that layered reality, it felt difficult to immediately embrace the language of renewal that accompanies every new administration.
The arrival of a new New York City schools chancellor is neither a reset nor a guarantee of transformation, but a moment suspended between hope and realism—an opportunity to confront the entrenched inequities that outlast leadership and imagine how they might finally be addressed differently.
“Most of the problems that we have within the DOE or within our educational system are systemic. They go beyond just education. So when an administration changes, it’s easy to bash the mayor or the superintendent, but it’s not that simple. You’re dealing with a variety of different people and agendas. The system isn’t perfect, but there are people trying to do the best they can,” a teacher with the New York City Department of Education emphasized.
The NYC school system serves more than 1.1 million students across more than 1,700 schools. Although it is centrally governed under mayoral control—meaning the mayor and chancellor set systemwide policies, budgets, and accountability measures—the day-to-day experience is decided by actors with vastly different resources and agendas. Families navigate a mix of district public schools, charter schools, private & independent schools, Alternative High Schools, Career & Technical Education (CTE) schools, and Specialized High Schools at key transition points of kindergarten, middle school, and high school.
While many students attend zoned schools, other families choose to apply to screened and specialized programs that use grades, auditions, or high-stakes entrance exams. Funding is generally based on how many students a school enrolls and the needs of those students—such as special education or language services—but resources, course offerings, and extracurricular opportunities still vary widely across neighborhoods. Meaning that where a child lives—and what information or support their family has to navigate the system—often shapes their educational trajectory.
My father, William James Manning, grew up in the New York City public school system in the 1960s and 70s, a period when the structure of the city’s schools was being reshaped by intense struggles over segregation, governance, and public investment. Civil rights activism during the early 1960s exposed the persistence of de facto racial segregation, culminating in the 1964 school boycott—one of the largest civil rights protests in U.S. history—as Black and Puerto Rican families demanded equitable resources and integration.
Debates over who should control schools intensified during this decade, especially during the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict, when community activists pushed for local decision-making power and teachers’ unions defended centralized authority, leading to a citywide teachers’ strike. In response, New York decentralized the system into 32 community school districts in an effort to expand community voice, but further entrenched uneven resources and political fragmentation. White flight—the large-scale migration of white families from diverse urban areas to more racially homogenous suburban areas driven by racial prejudice, fear of crime, and school desegregation—drained the city’s tax base, as well as the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, which triggered deep cuts to staffing and programming.
Finally, there was the “600 schools” initiative, where a network of special public schools in New York City was created to serve students labeled “emotionally disturbed” or “behaviorally difficult.” In practice, however, these schools often became a segregated disciplinary track that disproportionately enrolled Black, Puerto Rican, and low-income students, frequently offering fewer academic resources and limited opportunities to return to mainstream schools. As a result, the legacy of the “600 schools” foreshadowed many of today’s debates over alternative disciplinary schools, special-education over-placement, and the school-to-prison pipeline—reminding us that policies framed as supportive interventions can quietly reproduce the very stratifications they claim to solve.
My dad recalls how Black and Brown people during this time were never in positions of authority or mentorship, as most of his teachers were white. School and education come in two ways: either you are going into a school building, or you are learning it on the street. He further explained, “If kids want to learn, they can progress, but in many cases it’s only if parents fight for them.”
When I asked my father what he expected from Samuels, he paused before offering a lesson he’s carried for decades: leadership is chess. You move within constraints, anticipate resistance, and weigh every decision against forces you cannot fully control. Whatever system you enter, he told me, you have to learn how to deal with it.
As someone completing the Education Studies Intensive certificate program, I understand that tension differently now. Leadership matters—but it operates within constraints that are deeply embedded. I do believe change is possible, even the smallest initiative or reform can be impactful for many children in the system. But we have to be realistic! Even well-intentioned efforts at improvement must contend with the historical rules, incentives, and inequalities that continue to shape how schools function and who benefits from them.
If leadership is chess and the board is already in motion, then what actually shifts when a new chancellor arrives? The classrooms do not instantly change. The funding formulas do not reorganize overnight. Segregation does not quietly dissolve. What changes first is the emotional climate of the system—the degree of trust, skepticism, coalition-building, or fragmentation that shapes how people interpret what comes next. As Kelly Bare, a parent and member of the NYC Citywide Council on High Schools, told me, “Between hope and realism… the word that is coming to mind is trust—who do I trust? Who are my people? Who has my back?”
In moments of transition, the material conditions of classrooms may remain steady, but the relationships among educational stakeholders—and their trust in the school system itself—begin to shift. Parents reconsider alliances. Advocates assess whether this administration will listen differently. Educators measure whether new rhetoric will translate into meaningful support.
As education scholar Dr. Adriana Villavicencio argues, community and parental engagement are dynamic and can encompass far more than attending a few events or showing up for parent-teacher conferences. It requires parents and students to be “… at the table talking to leaders… to think about policy and practice on the ground.” Without those voices—including the voices of students—she warned that “our assumptions about what the problems are might be misguided…and our proposed solutions will be missing the mark.” However, as Bare pointed out, behind the scenes, enormous resources are devoted to parent engagement, yet the system continues to struggle to build collective political will—a reminder that reform is not only about policy design but about whether communities see themselves as part of a shared project.
In New York City, this relational work is especially difficult because decades of entrenched inequality have produced a political environment where many stakeholders experience educational change as a zero-sum game rather than a collective investment. I remember when Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to eliminate the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) as the sole admissions criterion for specialized high schools. For many families, these schools are seen as a “golden ticket” to high-quality public education and expanded opportunity.
Many students often begin preparing for the single high-stakes entrance exam as early as fifth grade, aware that the school they attend can shape the courses available to them, the peer networks they build, and the pathways they can pursue afterwards. In this context, removing the influence of the SHSAT was not a simple policy adjustment; it felt like a rupture in the rules of access—an “educational purge” —especially for communities that had long relied on the exam to secure opportunity. It became a battleground between wanting equal opportunity and all children having access to high-quality education, while also feeling the need to urgently reposition, compete, and protect what many NYC families see as one of the few reliable pathways to high-quality public education.
As Deborah Edwards-Anderson, former Program Manager and Advisor, Undergraduate Program in Early Childhood Education at the City College of New York, reflected, “I have always been interested in who is invested and what systems they are invested in. If your own children are not attending the schools that these teachers are going to be teaching in, you may not care.”
And yet, in these moments of tension—when trust is fragile, and stakes feel highest— I don’t believe in the reality that New Yorkers stand still, that they have no hope, and that we embrace a reality where nothing better is possible. Leadership transitions, however constrained, disrupt routine; they create pauses in which long-standing assumptions can be reconsidered, and conversations reopened. Flora Huang, a public school parent, described Samuels as someone who “is taking equity seriously,” aligning his leadership with prior efforts to center social-emotional learning and trauma-informed approaches. However, the hope that parents and other educational stakeholders may feel from press conferences and interviews is more thoroughly tested in meetings, paperwork, and the everyday negotiations families have with schools.
For Huang, equity is not an abstract commitment; it is something that must materialize in specific rooms, at specific tables. She described sitting in an Individual Education Plan (IEP) meeting for her son, where procedural rules and staffing limitations shaped what services he could access. It was only after she requested a reevaluation that she secured the support he needed. The experience did not negate her hope, but instead clarified it: equity is not simply declared by leadership; it is enacted—or constrained—in the overlooked details of policy design and everyday exchanges within the system.
As parents, families, and community members like Huang continue to push for change—even when the system continues to maintain so many barriers—the next question is whether the system is designed to carry the momentum forward. Leadership transitions inevitably reshape priorities, and too often the initiatives that once felt urgent quietly stall as new agendas take their place. The challenge, then, is not simply whether a chancellor can introduce promising reforms, but whether the city is willing to build the institutional protections—stable funding, long-term policy commitments, and sustained community oversight—that allow those reforms to endure beyond any single administration.
Samuels will not be the first leader to arrive with a vision for equity, nor will he be the last. What will determine whether this moment matters is not the promise of change alone, but whether New York chooses to treat educational progress as a long-term civic commitment rather than a series of leadership cycles—an approach that asks the city not only to hope for transformation, but to design systems capable of preserving it.