Good news: The state’s top court just tossed out a lawsuit falsely claiming the city’s Gifted & Talented programs are biased against black and Latino students.
Bad news: Zohran Mamdani aims to kill them anyway, having endorsed the plan from the later de Blasio years to phase them out starting with Kindergarten programs.
Indeed, it was a Blas-era lefty outfit, IntegrateNYC, that filed the suit alleging that the screening and tests for admission into G&T favor white and Asian students.Â
Kudos to the Court of Appeals for ruling that the enrollment numbers don’t show racial, ethnic or gender bias, but the resentment over those disparities is what fuels the war on G&T.
G&T programs are simply learning environments that challenge kids with the smarts, aptitude and maturity to handle advanced classwork; it’s to the benefit of all children to identify such students at an early age — lest their boredom make them disruptive in class, or tune out.Â
Mayor Eric Adams, who rose from a tough start in life, has been trying to do the right thing: Expand G&T to increase access for all schoolchildren — an approach that every mayoral candidate except the privileged Mamdani supports.
Zohran’s parents paid to give him a solid start at the pricey private Bank Street School, but he shows no desire to offer the same opportunity to low-income families that rely on the public schools.
Somehow, the Democratic Socialist standard-bearer can’t be bothered to offer any kind of coherent plan for improving city schools — the central way New York City has always let the less privileged achieve better futures.
Any candidate who won’t support more opportunity for all city schoolchildren — more G&T, more specialized high schools like the one Mamdani was able to attend, more charter schools, more first-rate regular public schools — doesn’t really care about offering real hope to the less well-off.
So the socialist is the guy who truly opposes real progress.