Mamdani’s New School Board Has 24 Seats. He Just Filled a Majority With Appointees Tied to Anti-Zionist Groups.
- 13 members Mayor Mamdani named to the Panel for Educational Policy on July 28, 2026 — hitting the state-law cap on how many of the board's 24 seats a mayor can fill outright — NYC Mayor's Office, July 28, 2026
- 900,000+ students across roughly 1,600 schools whose citywide school board just came under outright mayoral control — NYC DOE, PEP authority page
- $38,600,000,000 the DOE's adopted FY2027 budget, within a $125,800,000,000 total city budget — both now subject to the panel's oversight — Chalkbeat; NYC Mayor's Office
- 20% the share of Mamdani's broader transition-team appointees an ADL analysis found have ties to anti-Zionist groups — not a PEP-specific figure — Times of Israel (ADL analysis)
- $700,000,000 / $29,000,000 added to NYC public schools and cut from the NYPD, respectively, in the same FY2027 budget Mamdani signed June 30, 2026 — NYC FY2027 adopted budget
On July 28, 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D-NYC) named 13 people to the Panel for Educational Policy — New York City’s citywide school board, which oversees more than 900,000 students across roughly 1,600 schools, votes on Department of Education contracts over $1 million, and sets policy on school closures, co-locations, and Gifted & Talented admissions. State law caps how many of the panel’s 24 seats a mayor can fill outright. Mamdani hit that ceiling in a single announcement.
The new majority includes Madeline “Maddy” Fox, a Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center associate professor who signed a July 2025 open letter arguing there is no “rampant crisis of antisemitism” on American campuses — a letter multiple outlets describe as accusing Congress of “weaponizing” antisemitism claims. A separate Anti-Defamation League analysis, reported by the Times of Israel, found at least one in five of Mamdani’s broader transition-team appointees have ties to anti-Zionist organizations.
None of the 13 new panel members has a documented anti-police statement on the record. The mayor who appointed them does. In November 2020, Mamdani wrote on X that “queer liberation means defund the police,” and his first city budget, adopted June 30, 2026, added $700 million to public schools while cutting $29 million from the NYPD. On August 6, he was booed off a Staten Island stage in under a minute — the one openly hostile stop on an otherwise friendly citywide police tour.
The Panel for Educational Policy is New York City’s version of a school board, created under mayoral control of the schools. Per the DOE’s own authority page, the panel votes on DOE contracts above $1 million, weighs in on school co-locations and closures, sets citywide Gifted & Talented policy, and votes on the citywide school budget — the $38,600,000,000 DOE spending plan inside New York’s $125,800,000,000 total FY2027 city budget. Of its 24 seats, state law lets the mayor appoint a majority outright; the rest are named by the five borough presidents.
Mamdani used every one of his available appointments. Ten of the 13 are new faces: Karla Cordero, Tariq Khan, Mehrain Mahdi, Courtney Rajwani, Crystal Vera-Montalvo, Lucas Koehler, Primo Lasana, Kristin Jefferson, Maddy Fox, and Raysa Rodriguez. The other three — Alan Ong, Amy Fair, and Marjorie Dienstag — are reappointments from the prior administration. Chalkbeat and amNY both confirmed the full roster on July 28; neither outlet reported any of the ten new appointees, aside from Fox, having a documented public record on antisemitism or policing specifically. Watch: “Gutfeld!: Why is Mamdani so into IDs?” (Fox News).
Fox’s appointment is the one with a documented paper trail. In July 2025, she was among the signatories of “An Urgent Message from CUNY, Berkeley and Georgetown Jewish Faculty,” which stated flatly: “We write to affirm that there is no rampant crisis of antisemitism on our campuses, despite prolonged attempts by the current administration to persuade the public that there is one.” JNS and other outlets characterized the letter as accusing Congress of “weaponizing” antisemitism claims — a position now sitting on the body that sets Gifted & Talented and school-closure policy for a system serving one of the largest Jewish student populations in the country.
Fox’s letter isn’t an isolated data point. The Times of Israel reported that an ADL analysis of Mamdani’s broader transition operation — not the school board specifically — found at least 20% of his appointees have ties to anti-Zionist groups. Scott Richman, the ADL’s New York/New Jersey regional director, put the concern directly:
“[Mamdani] needs to take a hard look at the actions that he's taking and engage in something tangible to address the very real and legitimate concerns being raised by members of the Jewish community.”
Scott Richman, ADL New York/New Jersey Regional Director
The Washington Free Beacon separately reported that another appointee elsewhere in Mamdani’s transition operation — surnamed Silkowski, and unconnected to the school board — had deleted old social-media posts calling to defund the police after being named to a different post. That appointment isn’t the school board’s, but it fits a pattern reporters keep finding across Mamdani’s broader personnel choices. Watch: “ADL accuses Mamdani's transition team of antisemitism ahead of inauguration” (Fox News).
It’s worth being precise about what the record actually shows: none of the 13 PEP appointees, Fox included, has a documented public statement calling to defund or otherwise curtail the NYPD. The “anti-cop” half of this story belongs to the mayor who built the board, not to the people he put on it.
Queer liberation means defund the police.
The same year, Mamdani posted about his own activist history:
I co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at my alma mater... Solidarity with @FordhamSJP.
Those 2020 posts predate the mayoralty by years, and Mamdani has since said on Fox News he’s “looking to work with these officers.” But his first budget as mayor put dollars behind the earlier rhetoric: the FY2027 spending plan he signed on June 30, 2026 added $700,000,000 to New York City public schools while cutting $29,000,000 from the NYPD. And on August 6, the tension surfaced in public. Mamdani was booed off a Staten Island stage in under a minute at the NYPD’s National Night Out event — the one hostile stop on an otherwise friendly citywide police tour, according to Fox News’s coverage. Watch: “Mamdani BOOED OFF STAGE at NYC pro-police celebration” (Fox News).
The practical stakes are not abstract. With a mayoral majority seated, the Panel for Educational Policy can approve or block DOE contracts above $1 million, decide which school buildings get co-located or closed, set citywide Gifted & Talented policy, and sign off on the $38,600,000,000 DOE budget line by line — all without needing a single vote from the borough-president appointees who make up the rest of the panel. That is precisely what the mayoral-control law was designed to allow: a mayor who wins the appointments wins the board.
What makes this appointment round notable isn’t that a mayor exercised that power — every mayor since 2002 has. It’s who sits in the seats now, and what those individual records, combined with the mayor’s own, suggest about how the panel will use its leverage on contracts, school closures, and admissions policy over the next several years covering nearly a million students.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D-NYC) used every mayoral appointment available under state law to seat a majority on the Panel for Educational Policy, the board that controls DOE contracts over $1 million, school closures, Gifted & Talented policy, and a $38,600,000,000 budget. One of his 13 appointees, Maddy Fox, has a documented July 2025 letter downplaying campus antisemitism, and an ADL analysis found at least 20% of Mamdani’s broader transition appointees have ties to anti-Zionist groups — though that figure describes the transition team as a whole, not the school board specifically. No PEP appointee has a documented anti-police statement; that record belongs to Mamdani himself, from his 2020 “defund the police” post to a FY2027 budget that added $700,000,000 to schools while cutting $29,000,000 from the NYPD, to being booed off a Staten Island stage on August 6.
