The really socialist mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, the city’s new Handicapper General, wants to prevent the brightest children in the city’s school system from getting any extra training of their gifts and intelligence.
So he’s trying to do what one of his predecessors, the pretty socialist Bill DeBlasio, failed to do: eliminate the public school system’s Gifted and Talented programs.
What benefit could there be to students, their parents, and New Yorkers in general, in preventing gifted children from studying in schools and classrooms that give them the best chance of developing their gifts early in life?
None whatsoever.
Killing the more demanding academic work does not thereby improve what the average public-school classroom offers students. It also does not improve the ability of students who are not currently qualified to enter the most advanced programs. The only goal achieved is that of a nearer approach to the egalitarian “ideal,” the world of “Harrison Bergeron.”
If the concern were really to improve the average or below-average classrooms, this could be done — conceivably — by focusing on what could be improved in those classrooms. Are there bad teachers who could be fired? Disruptive students who could be better disciplined or shown the door? Vapid, unchallenging, or politically warped curriculum that could be overhauled?
Under the DeBlasio mayoralty, many parents protested his plan to erase opportunities for the Gifted and Talented, managing to thwart that plan. They’ll have to protest again if they want to stop Mamdani from stomping out excellence.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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One reply on “Equality, Not Excellence”
Donald Trump has done such absurd and unpleasant things that many of his supporters are now admitting that, without a change of course, the Republican Party cannot win enough seats in the upcoming elections to hold onto their majorities in the two chambers of Congress. I doubt that we’ll see much in the way of the urged change, though a constitutionalist decision from the Supreme Court could at least end Trump’s tariffs.
But, fortunately for the Republicans, elections are not so much won as they are lost. And Democrats through-out the nation are setting the Party up to lose the mid-term elections.
When a seat has changed hands from one party to another, the contest was generally between two candidates representing themselves as moderates.
(Usually, when a candidate not seen as moderate is elected, the incumbent was of the same party, as when AOC replaced Joseph Crowley.)
An ostensibly moderate Republican running anywhere in America against an ostensibly moderate Democrat is going to point to Mamdani, and say “That is what the Democrats want here, and through-out our nation!” The Democrat will claim that Mamdani is an aberration, and to be nothing like that. The Republican will then point to Spanberger, who ran as a moderate and then went full Obama. (Never go full Obama.) And Democrats who would have won without Mamdanis and Wilsons and Spanbergers and Newsoms elsewhere will instead lose.
Mamdani is not concerned to advance the interests of his party. What people imagine as bugs in his programme are features; he is out to wreck New York City, the commercial capital of the West. The wilder Democrats elsewhere have more typically been seeking to use the Curley Effect to carve-out fiefdoms, but they too have subordinated the interests of the Democratic Party on a national level to other considerations.