Attacks on Excellence: Escape from New York

Issue #1 (July 2025)

Welcome to Attacks on Excellence, our newsletter highlighting threats to student excellence throughout the United States. You can help us identify and call attention to the forces holding our students back. Each newsletter will include a roundup of recent submissions from our readers, community, and staff.

Submit an anonymous report [here] or email centerforedprogress@gmail.com (subject: Attack on Excellence)

New York’s educational anti-realism

There is an outbreak of education-related “zombie facts” in New York, and unfortunately the New York State Education Department (“NYSED”) seems to be doing its part to spread decades-old bad information about how students learn best. As part of its “Numeracy Initiative” for the coming school year, NYSED has published eight “Numeracy Briefs” that, in their words, “highlight the evidence-based features and best practices of effective instruction in mathematics.”

The problem is that the Briefs do nothing of the sort. At best they are an exercise in confusion, and at their worst they actively misrepresent their own sources and the teaching practices they attempt to discredit. Consider the bizarre entry on ability grouping in Brief 2, the boldly-titled “Debunking Myths about Mathematics Teaching and Learning”:

This language is agonizingly indirect and beside the point, but that has become a common feature of excellence-eroding education materials like this one. First, putting the word “ability” in quotes — thus from the outset misdescribing the practice they claim to debunk — should be immediately baffling to anyone who has actually experienced being taught math alongside their peers in school. Of course different students have different innate academic talents. And no subject makes this more self-evident than math, wherein across centuries, continents, and cultures prodigious youngsters have made a name for themselves precisely due to their immense innate mathematical talent.

For being so concerned with potential sources of student frustration and demotivation, the Numeracy Briefs pay shockingly little attention to the obvious and predictable distress that slower-learning students might feel seeing their quicker peers easily dispensing with material they keep struggling to master. If that cannot be because of natural differences in ability, then what else could be the cause? Student motivation is often an answer, but when the answers from the “experts” repeatedly identify the problem in the mere notions of grading or “innate ability” themselves, their so-called theories of education just become self-refuting.

The “Key References” section at the end of Brief 2 is a particularly bad omen for the Numeracy Initiative, if only for the mere four references its authors use to try to “debunk” seven different myths. A closer look at one of the papers that supposedly debunks ability grouping, though, shows that its primary findings hardly begin to establish that ability grouping is an ineffective pedagogical practice. Here is the abstract:

So ability grouping might, in some cases, foster dependency on teachers, and “cap” opportunities for more independent learning? So does requiring students to attend school. I’m sure the introduction of better emergency services to underserved areas increases light pollution and might, in some cases, cause traffic accidents themselves. But so what? These are not serious arguments against ability grouping, but ideological materials meant to shift the conversation away from practices that actually work.

One of the sources cited in the Brief is just a 400-word, 14-year-old webpage titled “An introduction to magic squares,” which mostly just provides a brief history of the concept:

The only pedagogically relevant excerpt from this page simply states: “You can make similar magic squares, of order 3, using different numbers. Can you see any patterns in the numbers that work?”

The NYSED has unintentionally provided a new entry in the long line of myths about “magic squares.” Whatever their value as a slightly-more-fun addition or multiplication exercise, clearly a lot more work needs to be shown by the NYSED to demonstrate that magic squares represent some alternative to math instruction that does not require repeated drilling (another myth they “bust”). And neither the entry on magic squares nor any other source cited by the NYSED, for that matter, comes close to disproving the notion that different students have different innate mathematical abilities, or talents, or whatever other term that has been subjected to endless academic attempts to problematize or discredit. The 2025-2026 NYSED Numeracy Initiative is an exercise in wishful thinking, not serious educational policy.

Benjamin Solomon, an education professor at the University of Albany, penned an open letter calling attention to the myriad other unscientific claims and questionable practices endorsed by the Briefs. The full letter is worth a read. (And you can sign the petition here!)

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Where should New York City’s most gifted students be?

Other decades-old bad ideas for education policy have recently emerged in New York. The victor of the recent Democratic Party primary for the upcoming New York City mayoral election — Zohran Mamdani — has put a short-sighted, paint-by-numbers educational reform agenda at the center of his vision for citywide education. The report, titled “Making the Grade II: New Programs for Better Schools,” was published in 2019 by the School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG). Established by the NYC Department of Education, the SDAG is composed of academics, advocates, and community members charged with recommending policies to further the integration of NYC schools.

What the SDAG actually recommended in “Making the Grade II” can only be accurately described as a blueprint for citywide educational arson. First, it recycles the same kinds of bad arguments we saw above in the NYSED Numeracy Briefs, but it does so with even more misleading doublespeak and self-contradicting commitments. In one paragraph, for example, the SDAG tells us it “believes that high achieving students deserve to be challenged and supported,” but immediately dismisses public gifted and talented enrichment for “not being designed to advance equity.” This is a non-sequitur: NYC’s gifted and talented enrichment programs are designed to enrich the city’s students who demonstrate the potential to succeed in the gifted and talented programs. The problem is that the SDAG simply just does not believe in these concepts in the first place.

The report claims that gifted and talented enrichment often excludes low-income students who “would have otherwise been entitled to admission” had they received additional support; the papers it cites to support this claim are actually more concerned with eliminating concepts like “ability” and “giftedness” from the educational lexicon altogether. One paper is called “Detracking: The Social Construction of Ability, Cultural Politics, and Resistance to Reform.” Another argues that “giftedness” is actually just a surreptitious stand-in for “whiteness,” based on “ethnographic fieldwork” in California. This other paper is just about how equity-based detracking reforms in 9th grade social studies went relatively badly at a less diverse, lower-socioeconomic status high school, and seemed to go better at two relatively wealthier, higher-performing high schools (one of which was meaningfully racially diverse). The author mostly attributes this to more productive cultural attitudes that two of the (wealthier) schools had already adopted.

I can think of an even more straightforward way to exclude New York City’s poorest students from gifted and talented enrichment than, well, funding and operating public gifted and talented enrichment programs: getting rid of the only publicly available options. Which, of course, is the actual objective of almost every policy endorsed in “Making the Grade II”: Disallow competitive middle schools from considering grades and past attendance for student admissions. A moratorium on any new selective high schools. “Phase out” gifted and talented programs.

Mamdani’s impressive primary campaign was not without its own controversies and strange revelations, but the nihilistic vision he has so far endorsed for NYC education needs to get more flak. The slow-burn sabotaging of the specialized schools, the elimination of gifted and talented programs, the destruction of effective admissions tests, and the otherworldly rejection of basic notions of student ability and standards for their behavior: all of these efforts should be understood as part of a fundamentally anti-utopian vision for educating the city’s students. The vision becomes even more cynical, though, coming from a class-conscious socialist who himself graduated from Bronx Science, one of the selective specialized public high schools in the city. Though someone from his self-described “privileged upbringing” would likely have the means to find ability-appropriate education outside a neutered public school system, no such option would be available for those bright students and their families who cannot afford to pay up to get out. Who will speak up for them?

New York City’s specialized schools are a crowning accomplishment of American public education, but perhaps Mamdani just thinks that the vision of schooling endorsed by groups like the SDAG and NYSED offers a workable alternative to the current system. But it does not — and never will — until we see a revolution in the culture of anti-excellence that has silently swept across the educational system and its most entrenched ur-reformers.

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Submit a Report!

Thanks to everyone who submitted a report, shared a link, or brought these stories to our attention. The more we look into all of these stories, the more we realize there is to uncover — so if you didn’t see your submission this time, look out for future issues! We want to get every story out there, but we have to make sure we get every story right. We’re thrilled to have your support as we embark on the long journey ahead.

If you’ve seen it, name it. Our line is always open for tips to investigate and profile. We want local experiences and individual discoveries that all too often remain overlooked in the national education discourse. We would love to hear your story, whether you’re a student, teacher, parent, administrator, or just a concerned observer. (Reports are always kept anonymous unless you explicitly request otherwise!)

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… or email us at centerforedprogress@gmail.com (subject: Attack on Excellence)