Four years ago, Mussab Ali won a historic race.
Twenty years old at the time, Ali won a seat on the Jersey City Board of Education by 68 votes in 2017 election, becoming both the first Muslim elected to public office in Jersey City and the youngest elected official in the city’s history.
On Tuesday night, the now 23-year-old Ali was elected school board president. He is thought to be the youngest BOE president in the city’s history.
“I was just making an Instagram post about it, actually,” Ali said Wednesday when asked about his victory. “It’s one thing to be able to serve on the board. But now to even have the respect of my colleagues to elect me as the president of the board — it’s really kind of unreal.”
As BOE president, Ali has become one of the highest-profile elected progressives in the county; he endorsed Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic primary and photos on his website show him posing with U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Though he is not aligned with vocal progressive groups that have protested outside County Executive Tom DeGise’s house, Ali marched in the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and has spoken out against Hudson County’s contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
His 2017 election as a 20-year-old outsider, and his subsequent swift rise to BOE president, is remarkable in a city known for its machine politics.
When he was first elected, Ali was a recent graduate of McNair Academic High School and a student at Rutgers Newark. The son of a schoolteacher, he attended public schools in Jersey City since pre-K, and ran for school board in the hopes of bringing a student’s perspective to the governing body.
“In every other industry, people go to consumers and poll consumers and ask them, how do you feel about the product?” he said. “But in education, for some reason, we don’t go to students and say, ‘How do you guys feel about the product, how do you guys feel about the education that you’re receiving?’”
Mussab Ali, second row on the far left, at a Jersey City Public School 23 Pre-K Class. Ali, 23, was elected Jersey City school board president on Tuesday.
The year he took office, Ali was among only 62 students nationwide awarded a $30,000 Truman Scholarship. In 2018, Ali was re-elected to the school board. A year later, he traveled to Beijing to attend a prestigious master’s degree program at Tsinghua University, from where he called into BOE meetings.
That led to a complaint from a former school board member, seeking to remove Ali from the board because he did not live in the city. The complaint was dropped after Ali moved back to the U.S. during the coronavirus pandemic.
As a trustee, Ali helped implement changes to the Jersey City school district’s dress code and to introduce halal foods to school cafeterias. He was also successful in his push for the board to switch from state-funded healthcare to a board-funded plan.
As president, Ali hopes to tackle the BOE budget, which has been hit by repeated cuts in state aid and has been a topic of contention between the BOE and Mayor Steve Fulop.
“Historically our schools have been underfunded for a very, very long time,” Ali said. “And that’s a combination of what the state did to us and what the city has done with us too.”
Ali was elected BOE president Tuesday night with the support of school board Trustees Marilyn Roman, Gerald Lyons, Alexander Hamilton, and newly elected Vice President Lekendrick Shaw.
On Wednesday, Jersey City Superintendent Franklin Walker congratulated Ali and Shaw on their election.
“They are close to many of the concerns that we have with our students,” Walker said. “I think the perspective they will bring is certainly going to be effective in terms of us being able to address the needs of the children.”
Ali is currently studying virtually at Harvard Law School. After graduating, he hopes to spend time as a community lawyer to offer legal services to low-income residents. As far as a career goes, Ali said, he doesn’t “necessarily have plans to do anything politically.”
“For me the bottom line is, no matter what educational institution I go to — and this is true for when I was in college, for when I spent a couple months in China, and even now that I’m at Harvard Law School — I’ve always been very clear that my goal is to take the knowledge, take the education, and to bring it back to Jersey City,” Ali said.
“Because I plan to spend my career here. I plan to raise my family here.”