It's the Brian Laris Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We begin today with today's

installment of our election series, 30 issues and 30 days. It's day 12 and issue 12. How would the New York

City mayoral candidates try to improve the public schools? This is a vast topic with more moving

parts than we can do justice to in one segment, right? And that affects more than 900,000 kids in

their families, tens of thousands of teachers,

plus other staffers, and is by far, in case you didn't know this, the biggest item in the city

budget, by far, more than a third of the New York City budget every year goes to the schools.

That's way more, for example, than the police and fire and sanitation departments combined.

So we can't do it justice in one breath.

What we will do is break it up for today into three education questions and come back to

education again later in the series.

For today, we will ask, should the mayor give up mayoral control of schools?

Mombani is proposing to actually reduce his own power over the school system, if elected.

Should there be more charter schools and other kinds of options? Cuomo and Sliwa are both

proposing versions of that. And should gifted and talented programs be expanded, contracted,

or remain the same, from kindergarten, all the way up through the specialized high schools,

Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, the others, candidates disagree on that.

Our guide for this is Alex Zimmerman, reporter for the education news site, Chalk Beat, New York.

Alex, thanks for joining our 30 issues and 30-day segment. Welcome back to WNYC.

It's good to be here. And listeners with a stake in this, we will invite your calls on each of these three

questions as we go. Mayoral Control of Schools First. Who thinks the mayor should have or give up the

basically unilateral power to appoint the chancellor and sign off on all education policy decisions?

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