Schools advice from a cop-killers fan: Another awful omen for Mamdanis mayoralty

Anyone still hoping Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani means to moderate should consider Zakiyah Shaakir-Ansari, tapped for his transition team’s committee on youth and education: You couldn’t ask for more radical credentials.Shaakir-Ansari nicely flew her true colors in an interview with the website Lingua Franca: Asked “If you could spend an afternoon with any woman past or present — who would it be?” she chose ..

.a convicted cop-killer: Assata ShakurShakur, formerly Joanne Chesimard, was the Black Panther zealot convicted of the 1973 murder of NJ State Trooper Werner Foerster who lived in exile in Cuba since a late-1970s prison breakout.She was on the FBI’s list of most-wanted terrorists from 2013 until her death in September.Makes perfect sense as a soulmate for Shaakir-Ansari, who is a co-executive director at the far-left Alliance for Quality Education.AQE, affiliated with a pack of progressive pressure groups such as Citizen Action, Make the Road and Communities for Change, is a clearinghouse for demanding ever-more school spending.No matter that New York City’s public-school system now spends more than $40,000 per student, vastly above the national average, even as it largely fails the minority children the left claims to care about.Shaakir-Ansari’s particular focus is “racial justice” a la the Panthers; she crusades for “culturally responsive education” — meaning focusing lessons for minority kids on radical claptrap rather than on actual education.And of course she’s a staunch foe of charter schools, even though (or because?) they offer low-income New York children their best hope at the kind of education that leads to conventional success in life.

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Never miss a story.In short, Shaakir-Ansari is exactly the kind of hard-line ideologue who sh...