A new group has entered the battle over charter schools in New York, seeded with at least $1 million from Michael R. Bloomberg, according to four people familiar with his political spending.
The group, Great Public Schools New York, was formed this week and will be led by Kevin Elkins, a former political director for the carpenters union based in New York City and an adviser to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo during his failed mayoral campaign last year.
The group will immediately work to lift the state’s cap on charter schools and to create funding parity with traditional public schools, Mr. Elkins said, and it will not “be shy about building a war chest and using it.”
He said that the group planned to “constructively engage” with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an ardent supporter of traditional public schools and the teachers’ union. The union vehemently opposes charter schools, which are largely non-unionized. Mr. Elkins said that the mayor’s focus on affordability aligned with the new organization’s 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,” Mr. Elkins said in an interview.
Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani, declined to comment on the group, which has an affiliated 501(c)(4), or nonprofit “social welfare organization,” that can engage in political activity and is sometimes called a dark-money group.
Mr. Bloomberg — a former mayor of New York City, a billionaire philanthropist and a political donor — already funds several other prominent and well-endowed organizations that back the expansion of charter schools in the city. A person familiar with his thinking said that was not expected to change.
A spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg declined to comment.
Nevertheless, Mr. Elkins’s new group points to a potential rift in the world of charter school advocacy. An organization called StudentsFirstNY has long dominated that space and continues to count Mr. Bloomberg as one of its top donors.
StudentsFirstNY successfully lobbied state lawmakers in 2023 to allow operators to open 14 charter schools by using licenses that were dormant or had been abandoned, after a four-year standstill on new charters in the city.
The group was closely aligned with former Mayor Eric Adams, paying for an ad campaign to support his bid to extend mayoral control of city schools. The group’s former leader, Jenny Sedlis, also helped raise several million dollars for a pro-Adams super PAC.
Great Public Schools New York has no such relationship with Mr. Mamdani, who remains opposed to increasing the number of charter schools.
The new group nonetheless views this as an ideal moment to push for charter school growth. New York City’s school system is losing children and is considering closing or merging hundreds of under-enrolled schools.
The charter school movement has historically been supported by wealthy donors, including Mr. Bloomberg, Daniel Loeb and Paul Singer, who oppose Mr. Mamdani on other matters like his effort to increase taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and his criticism of Israel.
The state-imposed cap on charter schools will be an immediate target for Mr. Elkins.
The first charter school law in 1998 allowed the creation of 100 charters, a ceiling that was lifted by the State Legislature to its current cap of 460 in 2010. Over the past decades, charter school enrollment statewide has grown to 190,000 students across about 355 schools, a small fraction of the state’s roughly 2.4 million public schoolchildren.
Most charter schools in the state are in New York City, where the growth has been concentrated in the Bronx and Brooklyn.
The drive for more charter schools may be aided by the continuing pressure on Mr. Mamdani to release a plan to desegregate schools. Black and Latino students make up 89 percent of charter school students.
Tresha Ward, chief executive of Prospect Schools in Brooklyn, a charter network with 3,100 students at nine schools, said that she supported the mayor’s affordability and school integration goals and that there were lessons from her schools that could be shared with the city.
The network intentionally seeks to mirror the diversity of the city and has 30 percent each of Black, Latino and white students. But because of a lack of parity in funding, the school has had trouble hiring special education teachers and cannot offer a prekindergarten program or provide free after-school care.
“I think people who voted for Mayor Mamdani and families who are choosing charters are not a divergent set of stakeholders with different interests,” Ms. Ward said. “New York is expensive. I think families are looking for a reason to stay here, and I think quality of schools is a big reason.”
Several Democratic lawmakers who supported charter schools said the landscape had changed because of efforts by StudentsFirstNY. The group’s spending strategy includes contributions to elected officials.
State Senator Kevin Parker, a Democrat, described himself as a “public school kid” who was wary of the encroachment of charter schools when he became a legislator.
“I originally had in mind the dichotomy we were being taught, that these charter schools were a threat to traditional public schools,” he said. “When I think about my support for charter schools, no longer do I think about it as a dichotomy.”
Matthew Haag contributed reporting.
