NYC’s outgoing mayor plans to scrap the only part of the city’s schools that works: the gifted-and-talented system.
The outgoing mayor plans to scrap the only part of the city’s schools that works: the gifted-and-talented system.
I f Bill de Blasio had a plan to cut back trash delivery in New York City to once a month, he’d call it “Operation Sparkling Streets,” and if he had a plan to let every criminal out of jail he’d call it “Operation Public Safety.” Guess what he’s calling his idea to dumb down the one corner of the city-run school system that works fairly well? “Brilliant.”
Today, de Blasio announced he is implementing a phaseout of the test-based gifted-and-talented programs for city-run public schools. De Blasio is notoriously late for everything, but even for him this is an extraordinarily chaotic last-minute scramble. After seven and three-quarters years in office, with exactly twelve weeks left to serve, he is trying to bomb the one successful corner of his school system. According to the New York Times, he developed the plan in secret, with no input from parents, so he’d be able to spring it on an unsuspecting city.
As of January 1, Bill de Bozo will no longer be mayor, so who cares what he thinks should happen in 2022? The presumed next mayor, Democratic nominee Eric Adams, has opposed eliminating the programs, instead calling for expanding them, and seems unlikely to follow through on de Blasio’s wishes, though the two were behind-the-scenes allies when Adams won a tightly contested primary in July. Adams, a former cop who made many enemies while he made a career of criticizing the NYPD, was strongly identified with the left wing of the party, but since he began running for mayor, he has taken a much more moderate line than de Blasio, earning him the backing of the New York Post.
De Blasio is entertaining a fantasy, playing in his head and nowhere else, that he is going to be the next governor of New York, and in this essentially one-party state, he thinks that veering even farther left is the way to attract attention from the tiny minority of dedicated activists who will choose the Democratic gubernatorial nominee next fall. Kathy Hochul, the accidental incumbent, has already said she plans to run for a full term, but so luck-fueled was her ascendancy that half the major Democrats in the state are plotting against her.
And also a minor one: de Blasio. He is widely despised in New York City, and in red-tinged upstate, he’d have difficulty winning a popularity contest against Ebola. At the tail end of his disastrous reign in City Hall, he’s still trying to convince fellow progressives that he’s their champion. The only reason he ever achieved office in the first place is because people liked his then-teenage son’s 2013 TV commercial.
De Blasio has been railing against the city schools’ gifted-and-talented system for years because most of the kids in the program, admission to which is determined entirely by success on a test given in early childhood, are white and Asian, and blacks and Latinos are underrepresented relative to the general population. (The New York Times for this reason refers to the program as “segregated.” If the gifted-and-talented program is segregated, so is the National Basketball Association.)
The “G&T” program, as parents call it, is somewhat misnamed: You don’t need to be a baby Einstein to get into it. Huge numbers of parents send their kids to G&T programs, which operate in most cases within ordinary public schools. One classroom is characteristic of a run-of-the-mill city-run school, with all the failure that implies; the one next door, with motivated kids drawn from the same geographic pool, might be a successful G&T room.
The success of the G&T system is why vast numbers of city parents opted to stay and raise families in the city. It’s a life raft in a raging sea. A couple of generations back, it was understood that middle- and upper-middle-class parents who couldn’t afford private school would simply move to the suburbs once their kids were of school age. G&T programs make the city livable for thousands of striving families. Ending these programs in the name of “equity,” “fairness,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” or any other euphemism would be the last straw for large numbers of successful New Yorkers — the people this burg can ill afford to lose more of. The pandemic has already given lots of families a foothold in the suburbs. Ending G&T would make many families permanent exiles.
Eric Adams has given every indication that he understands these dynamics; if he wants to preside over the city’s rebound in the manner he says he does, with successful people no longer being treated as public enemies, he’ll expeditiously forward de Blasio’s idiotic plan to the circular file.