Zohran Mamdani announced early this month that, should he win the New York City mayoral race, he intends to shut down New York City public schools’ gifted and talented programs for grades K-2.
This proposal was met with national backlash, from parents and pundits far beyond the bounds of New York City’s school system. Mamdani may have questionable policy stances, but he’s very good at getting media attention.
Mamdani specifically targeted early-age GT (gifted and talented) programs, saying they’d be cut at the end of the current school year. GT programs from third grade onward would be left intact, although parents have voiced concern that those would be next (first they came for the kindergarten GT programs, but I said nothing, because I did not have a kindergartener…).
New York’s gifted and talented program has been a point of tension for some time. Bill DeBlasio tried to do the exact thing Mamdani is threatening on his way out of office in 2021. Eric Adams reversed the policy when he took office in 2022 and kept the programs intact.
It’s also not a new conversation on a national scale. Gifted programs are often seen as an extravagance, an unnecessary pull on resources more desperately needed elsewhere. The needs of the bottom 10 percent become so dire that they outweigh the needs of the top 10 percent, who are left cast adrift. Being ahead of the curve is a luxury. People assume kids progressing ahead of the pack will be “just fine” if they move at the average pace with everyone else.
But they won’t be “just fine” —they’ll be bored out of their minds. And such apathy runs the risk of becoming a life sentence, with kids checking out of learning altogether.
Mamdani said: “Ultimately, my administration would aim to make sure that every child receives a high-quality early education that nurtures their curiosity and learning.”
But he’s making an impossible promise. You can only have one or the other: you can cut gifted programs, or you can nurture every child’s curiosity and learning. “And” simply isn’t possible.
Pamela Hobart (mother of four gifted kids aptly posting on X as GT Mom) posted:
Kindergarteners are fidgety overgrown toddlers. Transitioning to school is difficult for many – even when they enjoy the social environment and academic activities. How are you supposed to explain to a five year old who can already read chapter books that it’s for the greater good that more interesting work is coming in 3-5 YEARS?!
Forcing a five-year-old to read Hop on Pop when they’re ready for The Hobbit is psychological cruelty. It makes them believe that school is boring, that formalized learning is unpleasant and pointless.
“I really do think that early years often define whether kids think of school as meaningful or as miserable,” Kelsey Piper, staff writer at The Argument wrote.
Mamdani’s campaign argues that the GT system is imperfect, because five-year-olds “should not be subjected to a singular assessment that unfairly separates them right at the beginning of their public school education.”
The “unfair” verbiage here is important. At the surface, it sounds like it’s referring to the child, but most public criticism of New York’s GT program centers around identity groups. The program has been criticized for contributing to segregation and retrenching biases along racial and socio-economic lines, because wealthier white and Asian students are overrepresented, and black, Hispanic, and poorer households under-represented.
But on the level of the individual student, focusing on that doesn’t help anyone. A child isn’t a fractional part of their identity group, but a little kid who needs to be supported at their level, to have their curiosity nurtured — regardless of their skin color or race or academic level.
If White and Asian students are overrepresented, the “solution” (if that’s even the government’s problem, which is debatable) isn’t to punish those top-performing students by boring them with backwards-looking instruction in the name of equity.
The real solution is to figure out ways to raise the students who are falling behind. There are known blueprints for this. Former New York City schoolteacher Robert Pondiscio spent a year inside Brooklyn’s controversial Success Academy, a network of charter schools that caters to low-income minority families, with outcomes rivaling (and even exceeding) the city’s most expensive private schools. He wrote a book, How the Other Half Learns, detailing the unorthodox — but effective — practices inside the school, and how it puts students on track, transforming even low performers into academic superstars.
But Mamdani is against expanding the city’s charter options, arguing that it goes against the principle of universal education.
This proposed “universal public education” sounds egalitarian, but really it just strips students of opportunity in the name of equity. It strives to be “fair” but defines fair as “cutting everyone down to the lowest common denominator” — as if the American promise of being “all created equal” means we must force individuals down identical paths instead of giving them equal chance to take the path that fits them best. It’s dystopia in utopia’s clothing.
The first principle of this policy isn’t greatness or success. If Mamdani really wanted students in New York City to thrive, he would organize schools to meet them at their level and help them onto the next rung on the ladder (whatever that “next rung” may be — the basics of phonics or the woes of Atticus Finch). Instead, his stance is to effectively punish students for being ahead, and fully choke off the possibility of a world-class education in a public school.
The proposal follows the collectivist trend of Mamdani’s other proposals: government-run grocery stores, city-owned commune blocks, higher taxes. Each one can be wrapped in sugar and tied with a bow: it’s making the world more fair, it’s lifting up the downtrodden and giving them access to the good things they’ve been denied for too long.
It makes a person feel good to support it. That’s how kind souls get suckered into supporting policies that ultimately stomp down the very people they meant to lift up.
Not everyone who opposes high achievers is motivated by kindness. The rhetoric also plays into something uglier, a deep-seated, nearly subconscious response that seeks to strike down anything “better” or “more good.” Some are nursing a visceral loathing, vile envy that looks at success and greatness and wants to crush it. This is the festering wound on which socialism thrives.
Mamdani’s educational proposals are the mutated offspring of that deeper philosophy: if not everyone can have a nice thing (in this case, a spot in a gifted program), no one should have it.
A rising-tides-lift-all-boats mentality celebrates excellence, in any form and from any corner, with the knowledge an improving world is better for everyone. New York classrooms should be nurturing young minds not just for their own sake, but for all the innovations (electricity, refrigeration, insulation, automobiles, air travel, cell phones, international shipping, the internet) that educated humans can build for each other. The super-wealthy invest, the super-intelligent design, the super-motivated create, and the innovations they produce become accessible to all, raising the global standard of living. In a very real way, investing in the gifted and talented brings up the bottom-ranked classroom’s future prospects, as well.
If the problem really is “segregation,” then cutting GT programs isn’t going to fix it. There are tens of thousands of applications for New York City’s limited GT spots. If gifted kids don’t have access to the resources they need in public school, parents with means will pull them out and send them elsewhere, gutting the public schools and leading to segregation in a more absolute form — not different classrooms, but different buildings. Gifted kids from families without means will be left to rot inside the system, their love of learning laid out as a sacrifice on the altar of equity.
Demolishing gifted and talented programs doesn’t make the world better. It makes it measurably worse. Even staunch collectivists must acknowledge that the collective benefits from individual achievements. A world where gifted kids are enabled to excel, are given every chance to succeed, to go forth and build things that are valuable and make the world better – that world becomes progressively better, for everyone.