When Zohran Mamdani was a 24-year-old amateur rapper living rent-free in his parents’ Upper West Side apartment, he was interviewed on a podcast celebrating his alma mater, the prestigious and selective Bronx HS of Science, where he made clear that he was too good for a mainstream New York City public school.
Only the best would do for this privileged, Uganda-born son of a tenured Columbia professor and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker.
In 2016, he told the oral history podcast “Encompassed – Bronx Science Stories” that, in eighth grade, while he was deciding which tony private school would have the pleasure of his enrollment for the next four years, he sat for the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test on a whim.
He had developed “a small idea of maybe Stuyvesant” — an even more selective and prestigious public high school than Bronx Science. “And then, when I didn’t get in, I was like, ‘Nah, I ain’t going to public school.’ ”
Among the many private schools Mamdani visited that fall, he slummed a trip to Bronx Science, and found himself impressed because “when I walked in there was a jazz band playing and students just killing it and that hadn’t happened at any of the private schools, and the jazz band wasn’t all white, which was also different from all the private schools I had visited.”
As seen in Baltimore
Fast forward nine years and now the man who would be our next socialist, Democratic mayor wants to axe gifted and talented programs in New York City public schools to ensure other kids don’t have the educational opportunities he received.
Honestly, nothing could be more unsurprising.
This is the Democratic playbook: destroy educational opportunity for the children of your downtrodden constituents and consign them to a life on the margins where they will be forever chained to your big government largesse.
Of course, the machine always makes sure that the children of its apparatchiks and influencers are protected from the hell they create.
The failure of public school education for underprivileged minority children without political connections is the greatest civil rights scandal of our time.
The problem festers in cities that Democrats have controlled for generations and seems so intractable that hardly anyone bothers talking about it anymore.
But it is the root cause of the violent crime and juvenile delinquency that engulfs those cities, and that our new law-and-order president is trying to stamp out with federal troops.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
We’ve almost forgotten the power of journalism to create positive change.
But for eight years, investigative reporter Chris Papst has been digging into Baltimore’s public education system for Fox45 and the results are so earth-shattering they should set every American conscience aflame.
Papst chronicles his discoveries in a compelling new book, “The Failure Factory,” which ought to be mandatory reading for every lawmaker in Washington, DC, because Baltimore’s disaster is replicated across the nation.
He describes a system whose priority is to “employ adults, not educate children,” with principals who earn over $170,000 a year presiding over schools in which not a single child is proficient in math, science or reading.
He shows that teachers are instructed to change grades so that no child ever fails, and to remove comments from report cards so that parents never know.
Student suspensions have plummeted, but student bad behavior has not, because school administrators don’t want to be labeled “persistently dangerous” and be subjected to scrutiny.
For the same reason, hardly any students are ever arrested. The school becomes a dangerous hellscape for everyone else.
‘Priority is money’
And as Papst told me, 93% of the students in Baltimore city schools are minorities.
Their parents, whose frustrated voices thread through the book, were failed by the same public schools, and desperately want something more for their children than broken down public housing in crime-ridden neighborhoods and a life subsisting on welfare or menial work.
“The educational mindset that has taken over cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee is that the priority is acquiring money and the second priority is hiring adults,” says Papst. “That idea is spreading into the suburbs and the rest of the country.”
In a school system that spends $1.7 billion, just 10% of students are proficient in math.
In the eight years that Papst has been leading the investigative team at Project Baltimore, he says 6,500 children have left the Baltimore school system, yet the workforce has increased by 1,200 adults and receives $400 million more now than it did in 2017.
The graduation rate is unchanged at 72%, test scores are down, attendance is down and the drop-out rate is up.
Between 2017 and 2024 taxpayers gave Baltimore City public schools more than $12 billion, Papst says.
Spending per student went up 45% to $16,000 per student but “the school system is noticeably worse now than it was.” COVID-19 is cited as a convenient excuse, but Baltimore’s score decline is significantly larger than the national average.
“In Maryland, you no longer have to be proficient in math, reading and science to get a high school diploma,” he says.
A father tells Papst of the shock for his daughter arriving at military academy, having graduated high school with a “very false sense of superiority having the grades we had and the academic praise,” only to flunk out.
When President Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the federal Department of Education, he cited Papst’s revelation that 40% of Baltimore City high schools have not a single student who is proficient in math.
‘A lot of power’
This is the tragedy of fraud, waste and abuse that Randi “anti-fascist” Weingarten and her teacher unions have presided over in the three decades she has been in charge, extracting hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers only to use it to feather their own nest and fund like-minded Democratic politicians.
As Papst says, principals and administrators also have their own unions.
“There are a lot of unions in there, and when you’re talking about $1.7 billion, the unions are getting a lot of money through dues. That’s a lot of power. It’s not the student union; it’s the teacher union and its priority is the adults,” he says.
In 2021, Maryland’s super-majority Democratic legislature mandated 15,000 more teachers must be hired by 2031. That’s 15,000 more members paying dues to the teacher unions.
Then the cash-flush unions return the favor with big donations to Democratic candidates, and that’s how the money churn goes round.
Papst’s deep dive into Baltimore — including the rare success stories — is the key to understanding what’s gone wrong in the nation’s public schools and should be the catalyst to urgently fix it.
It is the antidote to Mamdani’s prescription for failure.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
