One of the issues where Zohran Mamdani has backed away from his own extreme views has to do with education. Mamdani made news a few weeks ago when he announced he planned to do away with the city's gifted program for Kindergarten students. That decision was immediately controversial.

Children are selected during pre-K by their teachers; a previous system that tested 4-year-olds was abandoned four years ago.

But it can play an outsize role in directing students’ educational paths and regularly emerges as among the most provocative education issues in the nation’s largest school system.

The highly selective program is often viewed as a steppingstone to the city’s competitive middle and high schools. Many families clamor for access to gifted classes as a way of ensuring that high-achieving children can be challenged and receive prime educational opportunities in later grades.

But critics say the gifted program exacerbates inequality in a school system deeply divided along lines of race and income. Black and Latino students are enrolled in gifted classes at far lower levels than their overall presence in the public school system.

Being against gifted programs for Kindergarteners may sound pretty niche but it's actually part of a whole approach to education championed by woke academics and politicians. Those who are against gifted programs are also usually against tracking in junior high and high school and against standardized testing for high school and for college admissions. The reasons for these views all boil down to the same thing. The current system results in a big achievement gap where Asian and white kids do well and Hispanic and Black kids do less well (roughly in that order).

I've written about California's race-based fight against tracking here, here and here. I've also written against efforts in other states to do away with gifted programs (always for the same reason). And I've written about the push against standardized testing here. All of this relies on the same type of analysis. If there are differences in outcome then the tests/tracking/gifted programs are racist.

Today the NY Times (in fact the same author) has a story up going into detail about the differing views over gifted programs.

In New York City, families sparred over whether a few thousand 4-year-olds should be funneled into gifted education programs.

In Seattle, teachers disagreed on how to improve the dismal enrollment rates of Black and Latino students in schools for gifted pupils, a problem decades in the making.