The New York City Department of Education has a subtle, startling quality that only becomes apparent when you compare the numbers. 1.1 million or more students. Five boroughs are home to more than 1,800 schools. a budget of about $38 billion per year. By nearly every metric, it is the biggest public school system in the US and among the biggest worldwide. You get a tiny but genuine sense of the sheer amount of machinery needed to keep this thing running when you walk past a neighborhood school in the Bronx on a Tuesday morning and watch kids pour through the doors in groups.
It hasn’t always been easy. The system’s formal beginnings can be traced back to 1842, when the New York State legislature established the city’s Board of Education, giving it the authority to construct schools and oversee public education funds, subject to one important restriction: funds could not be allocated to schools that taught religion. Decades of conflict with the city’s expanding Irish Catholic community were brought on by that clause, and despite their best efforts, they were unsuccessful. Approximately one in five children of school age had enrolled in Catholic schools by 1870. It turns out that the debate over public funding versus religious education is out of date.
Let’s go back to February 3, 1964. In protest of segregated conditions and what many families perceived as a system that had quietly given up on some neighborhoods, over 450,000 students boycotted classes. One of the biggest civil rights protests in New York City’s history, it made school systems nationwide confront the question of who public education really serves.
The structural response continued to change. In an effort to decentralize a system that seemed too distant from the people it was meant to assist, Mayor John Lindsay returned authority to local community boards in the late 1960s. The outcome was complicated, but it was a sensible instinct. By 2002, however, Mayor Bloomberg had completely reversed course, consolidating authority under the mayor’s office, renaming the Board of Education the Panel for Educational Policy, and moving the organization’s headquarters from Brooklyn’s 110 Livingston Street to Manhattan’s Tweed Courthouse, an elaborate structure a short distance from City Hall. That move has a symbolic meaning that is difficult to overlook.
Perhaps the most controversial chapter to date is this one. Early in 2025, President Trump issued an executive order threatening to withhold federal funding from any school that continued to implement diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives or anything the administration deemed to be endorsing “gender ideology.” The response from the New York City Department of Education was prompt and clear: they would not be altering their policies. The Trump administration then followed through in October, withdrawing $47 million from the department due to transgender student restroom regulations. In response, the NYCDOE filed a lawsuit. The outcome of that legal battle and the final costs to the students caught in the middle are still unknown.
Observing all of this, one gets the impression that the New York City Department of Education has always been more of a debate about what American public education ought to look like than a single organization. The same unresolved tension can be found in the curriculum debates, health initiatives, and changing governance structures. Currently at the center of that debate is Chancellor Kamar Samuels, who oversees a system that is massive, underfunded in some areas, politically exposed, and somehow manages to educate over a million children every day. It’s important to pay attention to that.
