New York City's teachers union chief is publicly challenging Mayor Zohran Mamdani over a 6% drop in student reading scores and a campaign promise on paraprofessional pay that City Hall now says should be handled differently.
United Federation of Teachers President Mike Mulgrew threatened to pull his union's support for the city's flagship literacy initiative, NYC Reads, after state exam results showed more than half of public school students in grades 3 through 5 failed their reading proficiency tests. The broadside, delivered in an interview with the Daily News and reported by the New York Post, marks a sharp public rupture between the mayor and the powerful union that endorsed his campaign.
Mulgrew's complaint is twofold. He wants the Department of Education to strip away supplemental programs he says cluttered the NYC Reads curriculum this past school year. And he wants Mamdani to sign a City Council bill that would raise paraprofessional base pay by $10,000, a bill the mayor championed on the campaign trail but now appears reluctant to approve.
State English Language Arts results released in recent weeks painted a grim picture. Students in grades 3 through 8 saw a 6% decline from the prior year. Roughly half of all students in that range scored proficient overall, and among the youngest readers, grades 3 through 5, more than half failed outright.
Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist roughly eight months into his first term, stood by the program at a press event last Thursday.
"I continue to be confident in NYC Reads. And it is developed with the real findings of what's been effective across the country in mind."
He added that he looked forward to working with the UFT "to not only build upon the successes of the last few years, but to go beyond that."
Mulgrew was not interested in that framing. In his Daily News interview, the union boss said the DOE had loaded the program with supplemental materials that amounted to a flop and buried teachers in paperwork.
"The DOE needs to make sure each school has a clear instructional plan. That means streamlining what schools are doing, making sure programs align, and eliminating unnecessary paperwork and assessments."
Then came the threat: "We're not going to support it if they want to implement it the way they did this past school year."
The DOE disputed Mulgrew's characterization of the supplemental programs, though no specific rebuttal from the department appeared in the reporting. Education insiders told the Post that Mulgrew's public criticism was partly an effort to deflect blame from unionized teachers for the poor results.
The literacy fight does not exist in a vacuum. Running alongside it is a dispute over Intro Bill 1261, a measure the City Council passed last month that would boost paraprofessional base pay from roughly $32,000 a year to $42,000.
Paraprofessionals, classroom aides who work with students, including many special-needs children, have struggled to fill open positions at current wages. Mulgrew argued the shortage has real fiscal consequences.
"The school system can't hire enough paraprofessionals; so our special needs students are not getting the services they are legally entitled to. This is costing city taxpayers more than a billion dollars a year in lawsuits. We need to fix this, and we can."
During his campaign, Mamdani stood at a press conference, accepted the UFT's endorsement, and made his position plain.
"I will be proud to continue to support the passage of [Intro Bill 1261].... that addresses the fact that there are too many open positions right now for paraprofessionals across the city because that job simply doesn't pay enough."
That was then. After winning office, Mamdani's position shifted. A City Hall spokesperson said the mayor now believes pay raises are best resolved through collective bargaining, not legislation. The spokesperson also contended the council's bill directly violated the state's collective bargaining law. As of publication, Mamdani had neither signed nor vetoed the measure.
Government watchdogs, cited but not named in the reporting, warned that signing the bill could set a bad precedent. Mulgrew, who previously rallied on the City Hall steps in support of the legislation, sees the reversal as a broken promise.
The UFT president's willingness to go public against a sitting mayor is not new. During the Omicron surge in early 2022, Mulgrew lobbied then-Mayor Eric Adams to close schools and shift to remote learning, even as a UFT member filed an emergency lawsuit to halt in-person instruction. More than 2,000 parents and educators signed on in support of that legal effort, National Review reported at the time. Adams refused, insisting that "the safest place for children is inside a school."
That episode showed the union's playbook: endorse a mayor, then use public pressure and media to extract concessions when the relationship sours. The pattern is repeating now, with Mamdani on the receiving end barely eight months into his term.
Former Mayor Adams launched the mandated NYC Reads program during his tenure. Mamdani and his Schools Chancellor, Kamar Samuels, chose to continue and expand it. That decision means the current administration owns the results, even if the program's origins lie elsewhere.
And those results are difficult to spin. A 6% year-over-year decline in reading scores across grades 3 through 8 is not a rounding error. More than half of the city's youngest students cannot read at grade level. For a program that Mamdani called "a critical thing that we equip our public school students with," the numbers suggest the equipping is not working.
Mulgrew wants the DOE to simplify the curriculum and ditch the add-on programs. The DOE says the union boss is mischaracterizing what happened. Mamdani says he is confident in the initiative. None of them are offering an explanation for why scores dropped.
The paraprofessional pay question may be the more consequential fight. At $32,000 a year, the city is asking classroom aides to live in one of the most expensive metro areas in the country on a salary that would qualify a single adult for various public assistance programs. The predictable result: the city cannot fill the positions.
When those positions go unfilled, special-needs students do not receive the services federal and state law requires. Families sue. Mulgrew puts the annual cost of those lawsuits at more than $1 billion, a figure that, if accurate, dwarfs the cost of the pay raise the council already approved.
Mamdani's stated reason for hesitating, that pay should be settled at the bargaining table, not by council legislation, is a defensible position in the abstract. But it sits awkwardly next to his own campaign promise to sign the very bill now on his desk. If collective bargaining was the proper channel, he could have said so before the election. He did not.
City Hall's secondary argument, that the bill violates state collective bargaining law, raises a separate question: if the mayor believed the bill was legally defective, why did he promise to sign it? Either the legal analysis changed or the political calculation did.
Several basic facts remain unclear. The city has not disclosed what specific supplemental programs were layered onto the NYC Reads curriculum or why they were added. The DOE has not offered year-over-year comparison data beyond the single 6% decline figure. And Mamdani has not set a public deadline for acting on the paraprofessional pay bill, leaving the council and the union in limbo.
Voters who backed a self-described democratic socialist expecting him to side with workers over bureaucratic process now find their mayor sounding like a management-side labor lawyer. The teachers union that helped elect him is discovering what every interest group eventually learns about politicians who make promises on the campaign trail: the signature is never guaranteed.
New York City's kids cannot read at grade level, the aides meant to help them cannot afford to take the job, and the adults in charge are arguing about process. The children, as usual, are the last ones anyone in this fight is actually talking about.
