Mamdani actually stands up for NYCs top high schools, hooray!

Let us offer at least one small cheer for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as he declined to fall for the annual, ritualized outrage over admissions to the city’s top public high schools.He even pointed in the direction of the correct fix for the hysterics’ complaint: If you want more black and Hispanic kids to score well enough on the exam to win entry into Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and so on, start doing a far better job of teaching those children in earlier grades.As a candidate, Mamdani rightly vowed to leave the test-in mandate for these schools intact; that’s one campaign promise we’re glad he’s keeping.The left-leaning online news outlet Gothamist got this year’s ball rolling by screaming, “Just 3 Black students admitted to NYC’s elite Stuyvesant High School,” a conventional-wisdom headline that elides the key fact that the unhappy number is the result of a race-blind test: No more black students scored well enough.Critics always fall back on charging that the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test is somehow racist; far-left City Councilman Lincoln Restler tweeted the usual dodge: Scrap the SHSAT because “a single test should never be [the] only factor deciding who gets in & who doesn’t.”Why not? Point out the racist questions, Lincoln: Are they in the room with you now?(By the way: In fact, 20% of Stuyvesant admissions now don’t rely exclusively on the test, because Mayor Bill de Blasio already undermined the standard.)Note, by the way, that the “it’s racism!” crowd never explains why the white supremacists who wield such enormous power in New York don’t penalize the low-income Asian-American students who score big and so win entrance in good numbers.The real blame should focus on the dysfunctional public-schools blob that has “normalized” failure for tens of thousands of kids; unions and a bureaucracy that line their own nests exclusively — and despise the public charter schools that actually do educate the minorities th...