{"id":273237,"date":"2025-10-03T00:51:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T00:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/273237\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T00:51:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T00:51:11","slug":"zohran-mamdani-just-escalated-his-war-on-excellence-in-nyc-public-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/273237\/","title":{"rendered":"Zohran Mamdani just escalated his war on excellence in NYC public schools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bad news for Big Apple families: Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani says he\u2019ll phase out gifted and talented programs<\/a> in city schools; he\u2019s doubling down on his vows to ensure New York\u2019s kids don\u2019t have the same educational opportunities his privileged background allowed him. <\/p>\n

He says he\u2019ll start by scrapping G&T classes in Kindergarten, but then move along in higher grades, following the plan Mayor Bill de Blasio outlined on his way out of office.<\/p>\n

Eric Adams rightly reversed that, instead moving to expand G&T: Does Mamdani really have to crush every seed Adams planted?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t just a blow to lower-income families that have high aspirations for their children; it\u2019s a slap at part of the socialist\u2019s own base: Killing gifted classes will make it harder for educated progressives with kids to justify not moving out of the five boroughs.<\/p>\n

And for the family-oriented South Asian community that has so far supported him. <\/p>\n

This is at least as senseless as Mandami\u2019s vows to end mayoral control of the regular public schools (restoring de facto teacher-union control<\/a>) and to harass independent public charter schools.<\/p>\n

All of it proceeds from some fantasy of \u201cequity\u201d that imagines that allowing some kids to excel somehow harms other children \u2014 when the only way to improve schooling is to offer as much opportunity for growth as possible.<\/p>\n

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Mamdani himself attended the premier St. George\u2019s Grammar private school in Cape Town, South Africa, Manhattan\u2019s prestigious Bank Street School and Bronx Science, a test-in-only specialized high school: Why does he want to deny such opportunities to the less privileged?<\/p>\n

Surely that\u2019s not what he thinks socialism is supposed to mean.<\/p>\n

Yet his vision for the city\u2019s schools seems to center on ensuring that only the rich benefit from school choice; everyone else would be condemned to the one-size-fits-all \u201ceducation\u201d that the centralized system offers.<\/p>\n

Bad enough that Mamdani\u2019s program will send businesses fleeing from the city; worse that he\u2019ll be making it harder even for his own supporters to stay. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bad news for Big Apple families: Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani says he\u2019ll phase out gifted and talented programs…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":273238,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,18728,9157,17452,4691,407,5299,141607,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,5341,1269,40852,38597,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,5301],"class_list":{"0":"post-273237","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-charter-schools","10":"tag-dei","11":"tag-department-of-education","12":"tag-editorial","13":"tag-education","14":"tag-elite-high-schools","15":"tag-gifted-and-talented","16":"tag-new-york","17":"tag-new-york-city","18":"tag-newyork","19":"tag-newyorkcity","20":"tag-ny","21":"tag-nyc","22":"tag-nyc-mayoral-election-2025","23":"tag-opinion","24":"tag-public-schools","25":"tag-united-federation-of-teachers","26":"tag-united-states","27":"tag-united-states-of-america","28":"tag-unitedstates","29":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","30":"tag-us","31":"tag-usa","32":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115307497751491647","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}