Groundwork for Change

New York City’s History of Education Reform and Systems Change

Over the past 20 years, education reform in New York City has unfolded within a pre-K to Grade 12 system defined by centralized governance and a robust ecosystem of education organizations, leaders, and advocates in the community. Since mayoral control of the city’s schools was established in 2002, local narratives of education change often emphasize a top-down story centered on the agendas and priorities of specific mayors. In NYC, mayors have the power to appoint the schools chancellor and a majority of the citywide education panel, creating conditions for rapid action in pursuit of a particular education vision. At the same time, the definition, direction, implementation, and durability of reform have always been shaped by complex interactions among the city’s executive leaders, central office staff, school and network leaders, unions, advocacy organizations, and community groups. This structure has enabled ambitious changes to move quickly, while also making the system susceptible to shifts in priorities as political leadership changes. As a result, New York City’s reform trajectory over the past two decades has evolved across a few distinct eras reflecting shifts in mayoral priorities, evolving approaches to education improvement, and the changing influence of actors across the broader education system.¹

School Innovation and Accountability During the Michael Bloomberg Administration (2003-2014)

Today’s era of education reform and academic growth in New York City traces its roots to the establishment of mayoral control in 2002 and the “Children First” agenda advanced by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chancellors Joel Klein and Dennis Walcott, and community allies. The era was defined by a belief that improvement would come from devolving authority to school principals, expanding the city’s portfolio of options, closing failing schools, and experimenting with smaller school sites. This period also included major special education reforms that sought to move the system away from more exclusionary models and toward inclusive, high-quality instruction within universally designed classrooms.²

The most visible changes in this period were the rapid proliferation of charter schools, stronger learning standards, and an increasing drive toward performance accountability and school leader autonomy. During this era, city leaders aggressively closed or phased out low-performing schools, replaced many of them with new small schools and charter schools, and accelerated charter growth through co-locations that placed multiple schools (often district and charter schools) inside the same public school buildings. To promote public transparency about school performance and inform decisions about intervention, closure, and expansion, the city in 2007 began issuing annual progress reports that assigned A-F grades to schools based on student progress, performance, and school environment. In 2010, New York State lawmakers also raised the statewide charter school cap from 200 to 460, paving the way for further charter growth in the city. By school year (SY) 2013-14, the city had 183 charter schools serving students across all five boroughs — nearly double the number from just a few years earlier.

During this time, the city also embraced Race to the Top and the Common Core State Standards and reimagined its approach to teacher quality and accountability in an effort to raise academic expectations and ensure that students graduated college- and career-ready. This led to a focus on teacher quality, including the 2013 rollout of the Advance teacher evaluation system, which tied classroom observations to student learning metrics, such as student growth on assessments.

While some of the specific initiatives launched during this era were eventually dismantled by subsequent political leaders, 2003-2014 established the governance capabilities and talent pipelines that set up later systemic changes and systemwide mandates around curriculum and instruction, such as NYC Reads and NYC Solves. The era’s reforms were supported by a massive influx of new educator talent, including Teach For America (TFA) alumni who launched, led, and staffed many of the new schools in this era and have since gone on to become system leaders driving New York City’s educational progress today. Overall, many of the reforms from this period have been credited with driving improvements in student outcomes, with research showing that the reforms that expanded access to more effective schools, including charter school growth and small high schools, produced measurable gains in ELA and math performance as well as high school graduation rates.

Expanding Pre-K and Community Supports During the de Blasio Administration (2014-2021)

The election of Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2014 empowered new educational leaders in the city and created space for different educational priorities to take root. During this period, the city’s most prominent education goal was to provide high-quality, full-day pre-K to all 4-year-olds and expand access to after-school programs. Mayor de Blasio, Chancellor Carmen Fariña, and allies in the city walked back some of the reforms instituted in the previous years, including dissolving the district’s autonomous school support networks, ending the A-F school performance accountability system, and halting school closures. Instead of closing failing schools, the NYCDOE launched the Renewal Schools program, injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into 94 struggling schools to provide wraparound services and extended learning time as a turnaround approach. Though the program was ultimately shuttered in 2019 by subsequent Chancellor Richard Carranza due to mixed academic results, it signaled a broader citywide philosophical shift toward bolstering academics with health and social services. In 2014, the city also saw the launch of a major Community Schools Initiative, expanding schools’ roles as neighborhood hubs that connected students and families to mental healthcare, social services, family engagement, and expanded learning opportunities. This program was associated with improved academic outcomes, attendance, and school climate in many sites.

The most prominent and most durable achievement during this period was the rapid rollout of Universal Pre-K for All in 2014. The program guaranteed free, full-day pre-K for all 4-year-olds, expanding from roughly 20,000 seats to more than 70,000 in a remarkably short timeline (Figure B). This rapid expansion was made possible in part by the years-long efforts of systems leaders and community advocates to build support and capacity for reform. This was followed by the launch of 3-K for All in 2017, which sought to extend the promise of universal early childhood education to 3-year-olds. But 3-K proved harder to implement than Pre-K for All. 3-K began as a district-by-district expansion that depended more heavily on new space, community-based providers, sustained funding, and the city’s ability to match seats to where families actually needed care. The result was a program that expanded access but did not consistently guarantee a practical seat for every 3-year-old across the city.

FIGURE 1: PRE-K AND 3-K ENROLLMENT OVER TIME

Note: 3-K For All launched in September 2017. Sources: Estimates derived from New York City Independent Budget Office analyses and reports. See: New York City Independent Budget Office, Drifting From the Plan: Changes to Early Childhood Budgets, February 2024; New York City Independent Budget Office, Utilization Up, Capacity Down: A Look at 3-K and Pre-K Trends in NYC, May 2025; New York City Independent Budget Office, “How Has Universal Preschool Changed the Shares of City Children Enrolled in Public Preschool, Private Preschool, and Not Enrolled at All?” August 2021. 

The arrival of COVID-19 in March 2020 hit New York City especially hard. It exposed stark inequities across the city, including a massive digital divide and food insecurity that disproportionately burdened historically marginalized groups. The disruptions severely impacted student outcomes, causing steep academic declines in reading and math proficiency and leading chronic absenteeism rates to jump to 40%. Furthermore, the pandemic accelerated a sharp drop in student enrollment, with city schools losing over 95,000 students between SY19-20 and SY22-23. In response, New York City’s public school system shifted to remote and hybrid learning, distributed devices to narrow the digital divide, and launched an Academic Recovery Plan that sought to connect the city’s return to in-person instruction with broader efforts to address learning loss, student well-being, and inequitable access to technology.

Instruction Reform During the Adams Administration (2022-2025)

Following the pandemic, a renewed focus on strengthening classroom instruction in reading and mathematics took root in the city. These efforts had been building across the local education ecosystem for years and found policy expression in NYC Reads, announced by Mayor Eric Adams and Chancellor David Banks in 2023. The initiative required all K-5 schools to adopt from a set of approved, phonics-based reading curricula, substantially reshaping the city’s approach to literacy instruction over the next two years. It also reflected a broader lesson from earlier reform efforts: improving classroom practice requires not only accountability, but also high-quality instructional materials and aligned professional learning. NYC Reads has drawn on a strong empirical evidence base, broad local support, and a robust ecosystem of providers to support implementation.

As the work on this initiative progressed, the Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) has worked to build a coalition bringing together the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE), funders like the Robertson Foundation, the New York Public Library, and 38 charter networks to align around a shared 2035 literacy goal. Building on this momentum, the city launched NYC Solves in 2024 to apply the same evidence-based curriculum and coaching model to mathematics. Announced in June 2024, NYC Solves standardizes math instruction through high-quality, research-based curricula, beginning with 93 middle schools across eight districts and all 420 high schools, while pairing implementation with intensive educator training and coaching. While it is too early for research to have identified a clear connection between these literacy and math initiatives and improved student outcomes, early evidence suggests that students are improving in both subjects.

A Possible New Era of Education Reform in the Mamdani Administration (2026+)

January 2026 marked the potential start of yet another new era as new political leaders, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Chancellor Kamar Samuels, took office. The education agenda of these new city leaders is still coming into focus, but early priorities (such as expanding NYC Reads and NYC Solves and pursuing class-size reductions) suggest another shift in the city’s education landscape — one likely to elevate new leaders and ideas while also building on initiatives that took root and gained institutional support in previous years.

TFA Alumni Impact in New York City

In the nation’s largest school district, TFA alumni have never been more than a small share of the workforce, but over the past 20 years, they have rooted themselves in the city’s education ecosystem as a network of highly impactful leaders in schools, central office, and advocacy organizations. During periods of major change, alumni provided an influx of leadership talent into the city that advanced and sustained key citywide education reforms, including the innovation and accountability reforms of the Bloomberg administration, the pre-K expansion of the de Blasio administration, and the instructional reforms of the Adams administration. During each period of education change, TFA alumni contributed substantively by:

• Setting a clear vision and strategy through superintendent leadership.
• Providing the leadership capacity to implement and sustain reforms.
• Expanding educational opportunity through high-quality school options.

FIGURE 2: ALUMNI IN JOB SECTORS OVER TIME

Note: Notes, if any, should come before Sources. Source: Organization, “Source Title With Hyperlink,” Date.

FIGURE 3: ALUMNI IN JOB SECTORS, 2002 TO 2025

Note: Notes, if any, should come before Sources. Source: Organization, “Source Title With Hyperlink,” Date.

Shaping the Design and Implementation of Citywide Priorities as Central Office Lieutenants

Across eras and mayoral administrations, TFA alumni served as senior leaders and key operators inside NYCDOE, turning ambitious citywide priorities into concrete policies and systems.

Innovation and Accountability Reforms

During the Bloomberg administration, TFA alumni provided an infusion of high-level strategic leadership in NYCDOE that shaped and advanced this era’s system changes in innovation and accountability. Alumni held senior roles in the offices responsible for talent, innovation, portfolio planning, accountability, early childhood, alternative schools, special education, and services for English language learners, among others, giving them influence across many of the administration’s core reform priorities. TFA alum John White, for example, served as deputy chancellor for talent, labor, and innovation, where he drove major human capital and accountability reforms, including Race to the Top implementation, tenure reform, and the city’s innovation zone focused on technology-embedded personalized learning. White was also credited with hiring and mentoring a number of other TFA alumni during this period, and NYCDOE in this era eventually became known as a training ground for systems leaders who would go on to leadership roles around the country, including roles as state chief school officers, superintendents of major urban school districts, and leaders of major foundations.

TFA alumni were also central to the work of redesigning the district’s school portfolio and supporting specialized student populations. Mark Sternberg, a TFA alum, served as deputy chancellor for portfolio planning, where he helped execute the administration’s strategy of closing low-performing schools and opening new small, theme-based schools. That work was supported by the Office of New Schools, which recruited, vetted, and supported the principals who launched many of these new schools and included TFA alumni who provided technical assistance and policy support. TFA alum Paymon Rouhanifard also supported this work, moving into the Portfolio Planning Office after a stint as White’s chief of staff. Other TFA alumni led or helped shape major district functions with regard to special populations of students: Amy Jones was brought in to support the citywide rollout of special education reform; Sophia Pappas was recruited by Sternberg to run the Office of Early Childhood; Cami Anderson led District 79, which oversaw alternative schools and programs for highly marginalized students; and Angelica Infante led the city’s English Language Learner office. During the peak year of 2013, over 80 individual alumni worked in NYCDOE, and their leadership proved central to the Bloomberg-era reforms.

FIGURE 4: NUMBER OF CONFIRMED ALUMNI WORKING IN NYCDOE OVER TIME

Note: Notes, if any, should come before Sources. Source: Organization, “Source Title With Hyperlink,” Date.

TABLE: SELECT NYCDOE LEADERSHIP ROLES OF TFA ALUMNI ACROSS MAYORAL ADMINISTRATIONS

Implementing Universal Pre-K

One of the most visible and coherent expressions of alumni central office impact was in the design and rollout of Pre-K for All, the signature reform of the de Blasio administration. A central purpose of the policy was to address disparities in access to high-quality early education in the city. As Josh Wallack, who was de Blasio’s legislative director in the City Council and later served as deputy chancellor for early childhood education, explained in a 2026 interview: “The premise of [de Blasio’s campaign] was that New York was a ‘tale of two cities,’ and free pre-kindergarten was critical for the education and development of our youngest learners, but also key to addressing the profound inequalities of our city, where some families could afford high-quality pre-kindergarten and others were left out.” 

Turning that commitment into a citywide program required coordinated leadership across the Mayor’s Office, NYCDOE, other city agencies, and community-based providers. TFA alumna Sophia Pappas played a key leadership role in that work. She served as executive director of the Office of Early Childhood Education in the Bloomberg administration and became chief executive officer of the Division of Early Childhood Education in the de Blasio administration. In that role, she led key parts of the NYCDOE’s design and implementation efforts as part of a broader citywide team accountable to the mayor.

Before Pre-K for All became a central policy priority of the mayor’s office, Pappas had led work that expanded access to high-quality, full-day pre-K in low-income neighborhoods in prior years. Under Chancellor Dennis Walcott, the city also began strengthening its early childhood infrastructure and putting more consistent quality expectations in place across programs within the NYCDOE. Pappas described that work as important preparation for the later scale-up: “Putting in place quality measures and implementing targeted full-day expansion under Chancellor Walcott were formative experiences shaping my understanding of complex rollouts.”

When de Blasio made high-quality, full-day pre-K for all 4-year-olds a mayoral priority, Pappas remained at the NYCDOE and played a key leadership role in translating that goal into implementation. As she described the scale of the undertaking, “We basically added a whole year of school for all of the city.” The rollout depended on close collaboration among existing NYCDOE staff, the Mayor’s Office, other city agencies, community-based organizations, and additional partners. TFA alumni played important roles in the ramp-up, both on the Division of Early Childhood Education’s team and in other capacities across the initiative. Xanthe Jory, another TFA alumna, served as executive director of policy and planning for the Office of Early Childhood Education and helped families learn about and access new pre-K options. Pappas reflected that the TFA alumni brought a shared sense of purpose, mission orientation, and focus on results rather than ideology, which made them strong contributors to the city’s work.

Designing Instructional Systems for NYC Reads and NYC Solves

In more recent years, TFA alumni have also served as key architects and implementers of NYC Reads and NYC Solves, two of the most transformative instructional reforms in the city’s history. While the policy mandates for NYC Reads and NYC Solves were launched by Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks, rolling out unified curricula across more than 1,500 schools required the kind of sustained, disciplined execution that Dan Weisberg — a non-alum who oversaw the rollout in NYCDOE — described as essential “in-house consulting” capacity. “You need people who can do data analysis and synthesis, problem identification, policy analysis,” Weisberg said. “It’s critical if you’re trying to effect system change.” He observed that TFA alumni, who were embedded throughout the central office and community school districts, were a significant part of that capacity — people who brought a change orientation and systems-level thinking to the day-to-day grind of implementation.

One example of these alumni leaders is Liz Chu, a TFA alum and the executive director of the Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia University, which has served as a key partner in the strategy, design, and implementation of NYC Reads. Before the initiative was formally launched, CPRL helped establish — and continues to facilitate — the Literacy Advisory Council that convenes advocates, funders, and national experts to advise New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) on its literacy work. They developed a strategic roadmap for the initiative through a participatory design campaign; advanced a reimagined vision of NYCDOE’s Division of Teaching and Learning and Division of School Leadership to better support school leaders locally in implementing literacy reform; and built monitoring infrastructure that could track implementation across the system. Today, the CPRL team — which includes several other TFA alumni — is building on NYC Reads by extending the focus beyond the school day. Through NYC Reads Together, CPRL coordinates a citywide coalition working to align the city’s literacy ecosystem across schools, libraries, community programs, and families. The coalition aims to create greater coherence, share knowledge, and build momentum toward a common goal of full literacy for all New York City kids by 2035. “The management of this initiative has been huge,” Chu said. “New York City Reads Together is an opportunity for the city to champion a big goal with the same level of coordination and execution that’s happening in the school system. All of these actors are shaping kids’ literacy learning. Given that kids spend only about 20% of their week in school, it’s time we organize our work so the impact is greater than any one entity could achieve alone.”

Earlier groundwork laid by TFA alumni also helped build the institutional appetite for these sweeping instructional changes. Amy Jones, a TFA alumna, served in multiple roles at the NYCDOE, including as chief academic officer for special education from 2012 to 2019, and now co-chairs TFA New York’s board. Alongside fellow TFA alumna Johannah Chase, Jones led a years-long effort, begun during the Bloomberg administration, to transform the city’s approach to special education by expanding access to schools, inclusive classrooms, and high-quality instruction. Before this restructuring, schools had a ready “off-ramp” for students with learning challenges — flag them for an IEP and route them elsewhere. As a result of the heavy referrals of struggling students, field office staff were inundated with administrative tasks that did not necessarily improve student outcomes. 

Under her leadership, Jones’ team overhauled field and school staff supports. This included retraining over 960 school-based compliance-focused special education staff in the science of reading and evidence-based intervention, strengthening the capacity of educators to provide explicit, systematic instruction to address literacy issues early. Other TFA alumni, including Stephanie Downey-Toledo, Becky Meade, Sandy Ferguson, and Marc Sternberg, also played important roles in designing, implementing, or supporting different components of the reform from its inception through rollout. Jones described this work as a conceptual precursor to NYC Reads and noted how, over time, examples such as these helped the system become “more and more open” to centrally driven curriculum and instructional shifts by the time the Adams administration arrived.

Building Public Will and Buy-in for Change as Advocates

TFA alumni served as consequential leaders who helped build public will for major initiatives that took place during the de Blasio and Adams administrations — especially NYC Reads, NYC Solves, and Pre-K for All — through advocacy and organizing. In these roles, alumni brought crucial skills in organizing, convening, and advocacy, and they demonstrated a clear focus on improving outcomes and access for all kids.

Advocacy Around NYC Reads and NYC Solves

TFA alumni helped create the conditions for NYC Reads and NYC Solves by organizing educators, elevating teacher voice, and pressing the city to treat literacy and math instruction as systemwide priorities. The groundwork for NYC Reads and NYC Solves was actually laid years before it was announced by Mayor Adams, in part through the sustained policy work of Educators for Excellence (E4E), a teacher-led advocacy organization that mobilizes educators in New York and other cities to shape education policy, elevate teacher voice, and advocate for more equitable outcomes for students. E4E was co-founded by TFA alumni Evan Stone and Sydney Morris out of their New York City TFA classrooms in 2010. Stone recalled how initially, he and Morris simply wanted to organize a group of reform-oriented educators within the United Federation of Teachers. Eventually, fellow TFA alumni White, then Deputy Chancellor for Talent, Labor, and Innovation, and Sternberg, then Deputy Chancellor for Portfolio Planning, took notice of their work and brokered an introduction to Chancellor Klein and his leadership team. After meeting with the Chancellor, Stone and Morris recognized a critical gap in the education landscape: there was no independent, teacher-led advocacy group dedicated to elevating educators’ voices in shaping policy. That realization became the seed that ultimately grew into the national nonprofit E4E is today.

In recent years, E4E members have been critical to advocacy for instructional reforms in the city, actively pushing each incoming chancellor on the need for a centralized curricular infrastructure long before there was political will to act on it: “We’ve met with every chancellor over the last seven years about this topic, at least twice a year, with large gatherings of teachers pushing for and calling for these changes.” When the Adams administration finally moved forward with NYC Reads, E4E was ready to help implement the reforms, working alongside district superintendents to engage teachers in the curriculum selection process, build demand for the changes, and ensure that educators felt ownership rather than imposition. Stone described E4E’s approach as trying to “build the infrastructure for teachers to engage on the front end of change, help shape it, and create more buy-in and better strategy as a result… We knew there were a majority of educators who supported these shifts, but meaningful change requires more than agreement; it requires engagement. If educators aren’t invited into the process, they’re far more likely to resist change when it’s imposed on them.” Another community leader reflected that E4E’s advocacy was especially critical in building educator buy-in for the reforms: “They played a big role, particularly in making the case with teachers and helping [navigate] the politics with the union.” The results of this campaign were evident in survey data. E4E’s polling showed teacher support for NYC Reads grew from 65% in year one to over 75% as implementation deepened — suggesting that the initiative was taking root and succeeding where others had failed. When reflecting on the leadership skills and mindsets most critical to this effort, Stone mentioned a passionate belief in student potential and a healthy mix of boldness (to push for transformative goals) and humility (to recognize the incredible work being done on the ground every day).”

The path to NYC Solves followed a similar pattern, and it illustrates a broader shift in how the alumni leading the TFA–New York regional office positioned themselves as community connectors and advocates in the city’s education landscape. Under TFA–New York Executive Director Tia Morris, also a TFA alum, the region moved beyond a narrower focus on teacher placement and took on a more active role as a coalition builder and policy advocate. “I don’t see any work being done without partnership, collaboration, and coalition,” Morris reflected. That orientation led TFA–New York to partner with E4E, EdTrust, Just Equations, and the National Parents Union’s New York chapter to build a coordinated case for elevating math instruction with the same urgency the city was bringing to literacy. The coalition was intentionally multi-organizational, leveraging the credibility and reach of each group to apply collective pressure. TFA’s role, Morris explained, was in part to surface the specific needs of students and educators on the ground — including work with the National Parents Union chapter to incorporate parent voice and a focus on high-impact tutoring and translate that into a policy argument. “We stood up a small coalition that put some pressure on the city and leveraged the weight of all of our organizations,” she said, “and I believe that was part of what brought about NYC Solves.” As TFA–New York Chief Operating Officer and alum Jen Early noted, this represented a meaningful evolution for TFA in the region as they crystallized a policy agenda and focused more attention on grasstops and grassroots engagement: “Because we weren’t in the [policy] spaces [previously], we weren’t invited to those spaces. Now that we are involved in those spaces, we are getting a seat and a voice at many more tables.”

Ultimately, the success of NYC Reads and NYC Solves also depends on teachers being willing to fundamentally change how they teach — posing a change management challenge that TFA alumni have also helped overcome. Marcel Deans, a TFA alum who served as deputy chief of educator development at NYCDOE during the NYC Reads and NYC Solves rollout and now serves as Bronx High School Superintendent, confronted that implementation challenge directly in his central office role. Deans recognized that while the city had made the “macro decisions” to shift toward unified curricula and supports across the system, the harder question was identifying the right change management levers to ensure those policies actually took root in classrooms. To bridge that gap, he oversaw the Lighthouse Initiative, an office “purely dedicated to network learning.” Rather than relying on top-down mandates to drive the curriculum shift, the initiative sought out what Deans called “rays of sunshine” — schools that were already successfully embedding the new curricula and instructional best practices — and transformed them into communal learning spaces where educators from across the city could come to observe, ask questions, and learn from their peers. The goal was “cross-pollination”: equipping teachers and leaders to carry powerful instructional strategies back to their own school communities so that the curriculum shift began to occur through peer-to-peer collaboration rather than just top-down mandates.

Advocacy Around Pre-K

TFA alumni also played an important advocacy and will-building role to support pre-K expansion during the de Blasio administration by serving as connectors and advocates who brought a rooted understanding of the on-the-ground realities confronting educators. Inside TFA–New York, alumni and leaders had already begun building a dedicated early childhood pipeline before the citywide expansion created large-scale demand. Hope Lesane, who led the TFA–New York’s early childhood initiatives from 2014 to 2018, argued that children ages 0 to 5 were a “missing piece” in the city’s education reform story and pushed the region to treat early childhood as a distinct talent strategy rather than an extension of elementary education. Beginning in 2012, TFA–New York formally began the recruitment and training of early childhood corps members for district schools, Head Start programs, and community-based organizations, while creating specialized preparation, a certification pathway for lead teachers, and dual certification in special education to support early identification and intervention. Lesane also built partnerships with smaller community providers and helped match corps members to local needs, including bilingual capacity and practices aligned with students’ cultural backgrounds. These efforts were reinforced by a broader Early Childhood Educator Initiative led by TFA alum Laura McSorely and the TFA national team.

As a result of its work to strengthen early education talent pipelines, alumni leaders at TFA New York also became involved in efforts to address persistent disparities in the early childhood workforce, particularly differences in compensation between community-based organizations and the NYCDOE. CBO pre-K educators historically earned substantially less than their counterparts in district schools, making it difficult for providers to attract and retain qualified teachers. TFA leaders and alumni helped elevate the experiences of educators working in these settings and brought an on-the-ground perspective to the broader campaign for improved compensation and working conditions.

These decisions made the pipeline a bright spot in a sector that had long struggled to attract and retain talent. As Lesane put it, recruiting early childhood professionals into federally funded programs had often been “next to impossible,” but TFA was able to draw hundreds of mission-driven educators into Head Start, CBO, and pre-K classrooms at a moment when the city was preparing to expand access. Just as importantly, the pipeline helped develop a broader base of early childhood advocates and leaders. By training corps members specifically for early learning environments and equipping them to engage with the developmental, instructional, and policy dimensions of the field, TFA alumni helped make early childhood education a more visible and professionalized part of New York City’s education ecosystem. Fernandez summed up the importance of this work in shifting public mindsets about the profession: “The work that was happening [at the City level] … certainly made it easier for us to make the case that early childhood education was not ‘babysitting’ and was more critical [than people understood] … I think we unwittingly built a lot of advocates for early childhood.”

Expanding Innovative School Options Across Sectors as School Leaders and Educators

TFA alumni also helped expand New York City’s innovative school landscape by supplying teachers, founders, principals, network leaders, and system leaders across the district and charter school sectors. That role was perhaps most visible in the city’s charter sector, where alumni helped build and lead schools at a time of rapid growth. Weisberg described TFA as critical to the city’s effort to attract and scale strong charter networks, saying there was “no way that could have been successful without TFA.” Morris made the point even more directly, estimating that New York City would not have many of its charter schools without TFA leadership. For Morris (the current TFA–New York executive director), that reflected the “problem-solving, entrepreneurial orientation” that led many alumni to found schools, start organizations, and build new models for students. Today, the city’s charter schools outperform traditional public schools on average, especially for historically marginalized students.

FIGURE 5: TOTAL CONFIRMED ALUMNI PRE-K THROUGH GRADE 12 EDUCATORS IN NEW YORK CITY, 2022 TO 2025

Note: Notes, if any, should come before Sources. Source: Organization, “Source Title With Hyperlink,” Date.

Leslie-Bernard Joseph’s career illustrates that pattern. A TFA alum, Joseph joined the founding team of a charter school that became the first public school physically located inside a New York City Housing Authority development. He described the charter sector as a place where leaders could move quickly, build schools in communities with few high-performing options, and respond to families with urgency. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Joseph noted that the city’s charter school leaders stepped into an unusually proactive policy role, moving faster than the city government to close schools, protect vulnerable communities, and develop plans for remote learning and reopening. During this moment of crisis, charter networks that often operated as competitors instead collaborated more closely as “sister organizations,” sharing research and resources, and advising and advocating to state and local leaders on matters like PPE, testing, school closures and reopenings, remote learning, and long-term academic recovery.

According to TFA alumni data, at least 2,139 confirmed alumni have served as charter school teachers and 561 confirmed alumni have served as charter school administrators over the years (Figure F). (In the traditional public school sector in New York, another 1,745 alumni have served as teachers and 241 alumni have served as administrators.) During the peak year of 2016, TFA alumni comprised at least 2% of all New York City teachers, including 12% of all charter teachers (Figure F). Research and data show that the city’s charter sector typically exhibits higher academic performance on state assessments than the city’s traditional public school sector.

FIGURE 6: NUMBER OF ALUMNI TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS BY SECTOR, 2002 TO 2025

Note: From 2006 to 2025, alumni at a minimum comprised between 0.4% (in 2006) to 1.9% (in 2016) of New York City teachers. The percentage of charter teachers who were alumni ranged from 6.0% (2024) to 16.5% (2011), and the percentage of TPS teachers who were alumni ranged from 0.3% (2006) to 1.0% (2021). Source: Organization, “Source Title With Hyperlink,” Date.

TFA alumni also helped sustain the district’s small schools movement that began during the Bloomberg administration and continued to shape the city after 2010, demonstrating improved student outcomes in the process. As the city phased out large underperforming high schools and opened smaller schools of choice, the district needed a supply of innovative, entrepreneurial, and motivated teachers and leaders willing to build new school cultures from the ground up. Weisberg described TFA corps members and alumni as “a key talent pipeline for those new schools.” Marcel Deans, the TFA alum who currently serves as Bronx High School Superintendent, experienced the movement firsthand. He moved from teaching in Harlem to helping lead a small school on the Martin Luther King campus, then founded another small school, Victory Collegiate High School in Brooklyn. Deans described the shift toward autonomy, empowerment zones, and small schools as one of the most important changes of his career because it gave principals more freedom over hiring, budgets, and school design.

The alumni role in community schools was more diffuse but still visible. The de Blasio administration shifted the city’s strategy toward integrating academics with health, social services, and community partnerships, and alumni worked throughout the effort as community school directors, coordinators in community-based organizations, DOE staff, and principals of schools that transitioned into the model. Fernandez described this as typical of New York City, where TFA alumni were spread across so many layers of the education ecosystem that they often appeared in major initiatives even if they were not always part of an intentional strategy, like in the efforts to expand pre-K and strengthen literacy and math instruction.

Conclusion

In all, the story of TFA alumni impact in New York City is one of a broad and deeply embedded network of leaders who helped influence, direct, implement, and sustain citywide education priorities across the nation’s largest school system. Their influence was visible in the expansion of early childhood education, the implementation of NYC Reads and NYC Solves, and the growth of innovative school models across the city. At times, alumni served as public architects and system leaders; at others, they worked more diffusely as teachers, advocates, principals, central office staff, coalition builders, and nonprofit leaders whose collective presence helped make ambitious change possible.

Acknowledgments, About the Authors, About Bellwether

Bellwether is a national nonprofit that works to transform education to ensure young people — especially those furthest from opportunity — achieve outcomes that lead to fulfilling lives and flourishing communities. Founded in 2010, we help mission-driven partners accelerate their impact, inform and influence policy and program design, and bring leaders together to drive change on education’s most pressing challenges. For more, visit bellwether.org.