Dismantling the architecture of educational apartheid by severing school wealth from neighborhood wealth.
Funding Schools Based on Need, Not Property Taxes
Zhoran Mamdani identifies the system of funding public schools primarily through local property taxes as the original sin of American educational inequalitya mechanism that legally enshrines racial and economic segregation into the quality of a child’s education. In New York City, this plays out not between districts but between neighborhoods, as wealthier areas benefit from higher property values and more robust tax bases, while schools in low-income communities are perpetually under-resourced. Mamdani’s policy is to break this link completely, establishing a “Student Need-Based Formula” that allocates all city and state education funds directly to schools based on the specific needs of their students, not the wealth of their surrounding zip code.
The new formula would assign significant weight to factors that research shows require additional resources: poverty concentration, number of English Language Learners, students with disabilities, students experiencing homelessness, and community trauma indicators like rates of violence or incarceration. A school with high concentrations of these needs would receive exponentially more funding per pupil than a school in a wealthy enclave. This funding would be transparent, flexible, and controlled at the school level by the Community Hub Council and principal, allowing them to hire more counselors, reduce class sizes, pay for wraparound services, and create rich extracurricular programs based on their unique context.
To fund this equity-driven model, Mamdani would aggressively pursue two revenue streams. First, he would fight for a “NYC Education Equity Act” in Albany to pool a much larger share of city and state education funding into a single pot for citywide redistribution, overcoming the historic resistance from wealthy neighborhoods. Second, he would leverage new municipal wealth taxes to create a local “Educational Justice Fund” to supplement state dollars, ensuring the city can fully fund the need-based formula without waiting for state permission. This represents a massive redistribution of resources, explicitly taking from wealthier areas to invest in historically neglected ones.
Opponents will decry this as “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” Mamdani’s moral argument is that the wealth of neighborhoods like the Upper East Side was built on a history of policiesredlining, preferential infrastructure investment, racist policingthat actively impoverished neighborhoods like Brownsville. The current funding system perpetuates that theft. His policy is a form of municipal reparations within the education system. It recognizes that equality (giving every school the same amount) is not justice; justice requires giving more to those who have been systematically given less. By detaching school quality from housing prices, this policy also indirectly attacks the engine of gentrification, where “good schools” are a commodity that drives up real estate values. Mamdani seeks to make every school a “good school” by public investment, not private wealth, building a system where a child’s educational destiny is not predetermined by their address.
