Zohran Mamdani just escalated his war on excellence in NYC public schools

Bad news for Big Apple families: Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani says he’ll phase out gifted and talented programs in city schools; he’s doubling down on his vows to ensure New York’s kids don’t have the same educational opportunities his privileged background allowed him.

He says he’ll 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.

Eric Adams rightly reversed that, instead moving to expand G&T: Does Mamdani really have to crush every seed Adams planted?

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

And for the family-oriented South Asian community that has so far supported him.

This is at least as senseless as Mandami’s vows to end mayoral control of the regular public schools (restoring de facto teacher-union control) and to harass independent public charter schools.

All of it proceeds from some fantasy of “equity” that imagines that allowing some kids to excel somehow harms other children — when the only way to improve schooling is to offer as much opportunity for growth as possible.

Mamdani himself attended the premier St. George’s Grammar private school in Cape Town, South Africa, Manhattan’s 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?

Surely that’s not what he thinks socialism is supposed to mean.

Yet his vision for the city’s 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 “education” that the centralized system offers.

Bad enough that Mamdani’s program will send businesses fleeing from the city; worse that he’ll be making it harder even for his own supporters to stay.