Mike Mulgrew’s dirty game — blaming Mamdani for disastrous reading scores

We’re on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s side on this one: United Federation of Teachers chief Mike Mulgrew is trying to blame this year’s dismal public-school scores on state reading exams on how the Department of Education administered the literacy curriculum this past year.

The new NYC Reads started phasing in under Mayor Eric Adams, but Mulgrew now whines, “The DOE needs to make sure each school has a clear instructional plan,” including “streamlining what schools are doing” and “eliminating unnecessary paperwork and assessments.”

This is a blatant “not our fault” offensive by the union boss, after kids in grades 3-8 saw a 6% drop in their English scores from last year, with more than half in grades 3 to 5 rating not at all proficient.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Garden School in Jackson Heights, Queens, on Tuesday, May 19, 2026. Stephen Yang for NY Post

OK, we don’t think much of Mamdani’s plans for the public schools, but a significant part of that is his refusal to confront the mess the UFT has made of the system by protecting outright incompetents and opposing any form of teacher accountability.

Notice Mulgrew’s gripe about “unnecessary assessments”: Teachers unions (and the State Education Department bureaucracy they now effectively control) despise objective exams that reveal how little the kids have learned.

And the DOE bureaucracy plays along, too: In particular, it’s delaying the release of the data on how students at the city’s public charter schools did on those same exams.

The Success Academy network has revealed that 91% of its scholars rated proficient in English, 96% in math; few other charters will do that well, but it’s an extremely safe bet that they’ll put the DOE schools to shame.

This is why city charter enrollment rises year after year, while the DOE’s rolls shrink: The charter sector, with over 150,000 students, now accounts for 16% of the city public-school K-12 population.

United Teachers Federation president Mike Mulgrew speaks outside of the Mickey Mantle School PS 811 on the Upper West Side in New York on Monday, Sept. 21, 2020. Stephen Yang

But Mulgrew’s blame game requires him to pretend that DOE administrators are what stop his members from matching the charters’ results, so he says of the literacy curriculum, “We’re not going to support it if they want to implement it the way they did this past school year.”

First, the Mamdani DOE denies making any changes or adding new requirements on teachers.

Second, what does it even mean to say the UFT won’t “support” teaching children to read?

Actually, those test scores suggest the union’s already anti-literacy.

It’s so pathetic: DOE classes don’t even start until Sept. 10 this year because Mulgrew negotiated a contract that entitles teachers to two prep days after Labor Day before the kids show up; under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, educators had to return before Labor Day for that classroom prep.

Success schools are already back, as are several other charters: The largely non-union sector knows kids need every day of learning possible.

Mulgrew & Co. get paid good money — six figures, with the whole summer off — to produce good results.

He should shut up and teach.