Schools advice from a cop-killer’s fan: Another awful omen for Mamdani’s mayoralty

Anyone still hoping Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani means to moderate should consider Zakiyah Shaakir-Ansari, tapped for his transition team’s committee on youth and education: You couldn’t ask for more radical credentials.

Shaakir-Ansari nicely flew her true colors in an interview with the website Lingau Franca: Asked “If you could spend an afternoon with any woman past or present — who would it be?” she chose . . . a convicted cop-killer: Assata Shakur

Shakur, formerly Joanne Chesimard, was the Black Panther zealot convicted of the 1973 murder of NJ State Trooper Werner Foerster who lived in exile in Cuba since a late-1970s prison breakout.

She was on the FBI’s list of most-wanted terrorists from 2013 until her death in September.

Makes perfect sense as a soulmate for Shaakir-Ansari, who is a co-executive director at the far-left Alliance for Quality Education.

AQE, affiliated with a pack of progressive pressure groups such as Citizen Action, Make the Road and Communities for Change, is a clearinghouse for demanding ever-more school spending.

No matter that New York City’s public-school system now spends more than $40,000 per student, vastly above the national average, even as it largely fails the minority children the left claims to care about.

Shaakir-Ansari’s particular focus is “racial justice” a la the Panthers; she crusades for “culturally responsive education” — meaning focusing lessons for minority kids on radical claptrap rather than on actual education.

And of course she’s a staunch foe of charter schools, even though (or because?) they offer low-income New York children their best hope at the kind of education that leads to conventional success in life.

In short, Shaakir-Ansari is exactly the kind of hard-line ideologue who shouldn’t be guiding New York City education policy; her input can only undermine what good the system still manages to do.

That’s true of most of Mamdani’s transition brain trust; take Vincent Schiraldi, the anti-incarceration fanatic who’s on the committee for criminal legal services.

As the city’s jails boss under Mayor Bill de Blasio, he oversaw a huge surge of jail violence; more recently, as Maryland’s  chief of juvenile detention, he produced a statewide spike in teen crimes.

You can pretend the transition team is purely symbolic, and so doesn’t guarantee the new mayor will lead the city into an endless string of disasters — but when the symbolism is so terrible, you can expect the substance to be at least as bad.

That Mamdani just took the trouble to tape a video instructing illegal immigrants on how to evade ICE is an equally awful signal.

New Yorkers are about to pay a ruinous price for buying this guy’s claims to be focused on “affordability.”