On August 8, 2026, the New York Post reported that Mamdani had appointed anti-police and anti-Israel figures to the PEP. The article cited Canary Mission’s findings.

A Board With Power Over New York City Schools

The Panel for Educational Policy votes on key contracts, education policy and other decisions affecting New York City’s public schools. The mayor appointed 13 of the 24 members—enough to shape the body's direction. According to Chalkbeat, the appointments cement “his control over the panel that votes on major policy changes, contracts, and decisions to merge or close schools.”

Lucas Koehler

Lucas Koehler is a former seventh-grade math teacher and a former senior finance and operations official in the DOE’s early-childhood division. He is now chief financial officer of the Foundation for City College, where his official biography says he oversees financial management connected to an endowment of approximately $500 million.

Koehler’s signature appeared on the Division of Early Childhood Education (DECE) coalition materials (see below) and on the Bureaucrats for Black Lives (B4BL) public signature page.

B4BL called for eliminating admissions screens and tests and "anti-oppressive approaches" in DOE hiring and policymaking.

Bureaucrats for Black Lives was an activist network of NYC Department of Education employees who explicitly committed to pursuing anti-racism through their official roles within the agency. Its public materials called for shifting funding from the NYPD, eliminating admissions screens and tests, scrutinizing racial disparities in hiring, using racial-affinity spaces and dismantling what it described as oppressive systems within government.

According to the advocacy group, DOE bureaucracy should actively dismantle systems it considers oppressive. B4BL says members seek to understand their institution in order to “dismantle these systems of oppression.”

Koehler combines control of large education and nonprofit budgets with the appointee slate's clearest personal anti-police record. That makes his position on school-safety-agent funding and governance especially relevant.

Courtney Rajwani

Courtney Rajwani is a managing consultant at The Lewin Group. She previously served as an executive director for policy development and support in the DOE early-childhood division.

Rajwani and Koehler signed on to the DECE Anti-Racism Coalition letter. The anti-racism coalition’s published demands call for severing all ties between the DOE and the NYPD. Its letter also attacked what it called the NYPD’s “unchecked abuses of power.”

Additional demands include “Dismantling White Dominant Culture.” This is to be achieved, in part, by:

• “Create separate spaces for white people and non-Black people of color to interrogate their own internalized anti-Black racism and unlearn white dominant behaviors without causing harm to Black colleagues.”

• “Acknowledge the pain by providing space for Black and brown colleagues to heal.”
• “Host forums to foster conversations around race, class, gender, education, sexual orientation, and other identities.”

Mehrain Mahdi

Mehrain Mahdi, a Solutions Delivery Lead at Amwell, was an active volunteer who campaigned for Mamdani with the groups Moms for Mamdani and Shias for Zohran.

In a public Telegram statement written by Alex Abbasi, she was named as a member of the Shias for Zohran organizing committee. Canary Mission documented Abbasi calling for intifada (Abbasi wrote “Death to Zionism! Long live the intifada”) and supporting terrorism.

The message thanked the committee collectively for canvassing, phone-banking, fundraising and recruiting support for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. The statement separately thanked CAIR Action for infrastructure and campaign-law guidance.

Overall, Shias for Zohran claimed to raise over $500,000 for Mamdani’s campaign.

Following her efforts on behalf of Mamdani, Mahdi was appointed by the mayor to a position with decision-making power.

Dr. Maddy Fox

Dr. Maddy Fox is a Brooklyn College associate professor and a faculty member in urban education and critical psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Fox’s public record combines anti-Israel advocacy with scholarship focused on policing and inequality.

Fox signed a 2025 Jewish-faculty letter that described Israel’s campaign in Gaza as “genocidal,” disputed claims of a “rampant crisis of antisemitism” on college campuses and accused government efforts against campus antisemitism of repression, racism and Islamophobia.

She also co-authored research on young New Yorkers’ experiences with aggressive policing and later participated in a CUNY labor protest at which she and other union members were arrested.

Raysa S. Rodriguez

Raysa S. Rodriguez is the executive director of Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York (CCC) and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work.

Before Rodriguez became executive director, CCC published testimony urging the city to redirect $350 million from school policing, freeze school-police hiring and reject expanded surveillance. A later CCC statement again supported shifting funds away from school policing.

Mamdani appointed the leader of an influential organization with a sustained police-out-of-schools agenda.

The DSA Model Moves Into the School System

Mamdani’s PEP appointments include officials whose previously stated positions on school policing closely align with positions advanced by both NYC-DSA and National DSA. Both have explicitly called for the removal of police from schools in the past.

NYC-DSA has explicitly called “to get the NYPD Out of Schools.” In 2020, the chapter sponsored a march to “get the NYPD Out of Schools,” calling for “our city to divest from the NYPD, remove NYPD oversight of school safety employees, and invest heavily in more restorative justice coordinators, social workers, nurses, teachers, and school counselors.”

At its 2021 national convention, DSA adopted a political platform calling for the removal of both public and private police from all schools, colleges and universities. Under the section titled, “Abolition of the Carceral State,” DSA demanded: “Decarcerate our schools by repealing truancy laws, ending all zero tolerance disciplinary policies, suspensions and expulsions, surveillance of students, and removing police — both public and private — from all schools, colleges, and universities.”

DSA’s new 2026 national program called for steps toward “fully abolishing the police and prison system.”

Mamdani’s appointments are not merely personnel choices. They reveal the governing coalition he is building around New York City schools: officials tied to anti-police advocacy, anti-Israel activism, progressive nonprofits and the political network that helped put him in office.

The PEP is where ideology can become policy. Its members can influence contracts, school closures, spending priorities, school-safety arrangements and the direction of the public-school system.

This is the larger pattern Canary Mission has documented in its investigation of NYC-DSA’s governing strategy: activist networks do not stop at electing candidates. They seek influence over the institutions that control budgets, policy and public life. Mamdani’s PEP appointments show what that model looks like when it reaches the school system.