Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has seeded a brand-new charter school advocacy group with at least $1 million, opening a fresh front against Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a staunch ally of the teachers’ union and opponent of charter school growth, The New York Times reported.

The group, Great Public Schools New York, was formed this week and will be led by Kevin Elkins, a former political director of the New York City carpenters union who advised Andrew Cuomo during his failed mayoral run last year. It also has an affiliated 501(c)(4) nonprofit that can engage in political activity.

Elkins said the group will immediately push to lift the state’s cap on charter schools and to win funding parity with traditional public schools, and that it will not “be shy about building a war chest and using it.” He said the group plans to “constructively engage” with Mamdani, arguing that the mayor’s focus on affordability fits with a push for more choice in education.

“The mayor has changed his positions on several matters since he’s come into City Hall, not because he’s giving up on his ideological convictions, but because he understands that governing is a complicated task,” Elkins said. A Mamdani spokeswoman declined to comment on the new group.

Bloomberg already funds several well-financed organizations that back charter school expansion in the city, including StudentsFirstNY, which in 2023 successfully lobbied Albany to allow 14 new charter schools in the city using dormant or abandoned licenses. A person familiar with his thinking said that support is not expected to change. Other major charter backers, including Daniel Loeb and Paul Singer, have also clashed with Mamdani over his push to raise taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and his harsh criticism of Israel.

New York’s first charter school law, passed in 1998, allowed 100 charters; the Legislature raised the cap to its current 460 in 2010. About 190,000 students now attend roughly 355 charter schools statewide, most of them in New York City, with growth concentrated in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The city’s traditional school system, meanwhile, is losing students and weighing the closure or merger of hundreds of under-enrolled schools.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)