The real lesson of Zohran Mamdani’s education controversy

Last week, Zohran Mamdani revealed that, if he wins the mayorship this fall, he will end New York City’s “gifted and talented” program for kindergartners.

This triggered a minor firestorm. Mamdani’s chief mayoral rival, Andrew Cuomo, decried the socialist sensation’s proposal as “destructive.” In Cuomo’s account, when a city eliminates separate classes for its most intellectually sophisticated 5-year-olds, “the one possibility that your child might get a really first-class education in public schools goes with it.”

The Washington Post’s editorial board denounced Mamdani’s position in similar terms, deriding it as a scheme to “hold back gifted students in the name of equity.”

These criticisms are overheated. It is extremely unusual for schools to sort students by ability at the kindergarten level. In abandoning that practice, New York City would not be embracing a novel, communistic approach. To the contrary, Mamdani’s current education plan — which would retain gifted classes beginning in third grade, as well as the city’s selective high schools — entails far more advanced programming than is seen in a typical American school district.

That said, the adamance of Mamdani’s critics is understandable. His announcement came in the context of a much broader — and more consequential — debate within the Democratic Party about education policy.

For decades, some progressives have fought to restrict gifted programs, even at higher grade levels. This movement contends that “tracking” — the practice of sorting students into separate classrooms or schools, on the basis of their academic abilities — deepens racial inequities, while providing little to no benefit to high achievers. These arguments have led some blue states and cities to pare back advanced programming in recent years.

Yet “detracking” efforts have proven controversial. And many Democrats have called on their party to abandon such policies and unequivocally endorse tracking, at least in some grade levels.

On this broader question, I think the Cuomos of the world are largely correct. The Democratic Party can likely advance better educational outcomes for all children — as well as its own political interests — by championing some forms of ability grouping.

Opposition to tracking — both in New York City and beyond — has often centered on the concern that it perpetuates racial injustice. Gifted programs and advanced classes tend to overrepresent white and Asian students, while underrepresenting Black and Hispanic ones.

In New York City, for example, 42 percent of public school students are Hispanic, 20 percent are Black, 19 percent are Asian, and 16 percent white. Yet white and Asian students account for 75 percent of students in the city’s gifted and talented programs. Meanwhile, at New York’s elite high schools — which screen applicants by standardized test — just 10 percent of admission offers this year went to Black and Hispanic students.

To some critics of tracking, any policy that generates such statistics is inherently illegitimate: Large racial disparities, they argue, are dispositive evidence of bias.

This view is understandable. The disparities in New York City’s selective programs are stark and concerning. And it is reasonable to worry that they may reflect biases in selection processes. In theory, the wording of standardized tests could confer an advantage on students from certain cultural backgrounds, irrespective of their academic abilities. And racial prejudices could influence whom teachers choose to nominate for gifted programs.

Further, there is evidence that advanced education programs in other jurisdictions have under-identified gifted students from disadvantaged backgrounds, in part by relying on tests that parents must opt into. It’s therefore vital to scrutinize the fairness and accessibility of any tracking program’s selection process.

Still, there is no reason to expect that a perfectly impartial measure of student ability would avoid racially disparate outcomes. On the contrary, the opposite expectation follows from two of the left’s own premises, namely that:

Both these ideas are sound. Of course, a child’s academic performance is not dictated by their household’s income. Parents can abet their kids’ scholarly achievement through non-financial means. And good schools can foster the abilities of impoverished students. But there is both theoretical and empirical cause to believe that material privilege aids intellectual development. In other contexts, some organizations critical of tracking emphasize this point.

Meanwhile, it is unquestionably true that America’s white and Asian populations have higher median incomes and net worths than its Black and Hispanic ones. The median household income among Asian households in 2023 was $112,800 a year; among non-Hispanic white households, it was $89,050; among Hispanic households, it was $65,540; and among Black families, it was $56,490.

Thus, the fact that a gifted program or selective high school underrepresents Black and Hispanic students does not necessarily mean that its admissions process is racially biased. So long as economic privilege is conducive to student achievement — and Black and Hispanic households’ remain economically underprivileged — sorting students by ability is going to produce racial disparities.

In fairness, one could reasonably oppose tracking on precisely these grounds. After all, racial integration is desirable. The fact that sorting by ability makes classrooms less racially diverse is a point against such sorting.

Nonetheless, it is difficult to argue that schools should prioritize the racial diversity of their classrooms above the educational attainment of their students. If tracking academically benefits both those admitted into accelerated programs — and those who aren’t — then it would be hard to oppose it in the name of racial justice. In that case, there would surely be better ways to promote integration than detracking — approaches that would not undermine all students’ intellectual development. For one thing, we could try distributing wealth and income in a less wildly unequal manner.

Ultimately, then, the case against tracking hinges on its implications for student performance, rather than its consequences for classroom demographics.

There are legitimate reasons to fear that those implications could be negative, particularly for lower performers. Children who are not selected for “gifted” programming may suffer a loss in self-esteem. Isolating them from more academically advanced students could rob them of opportunities to learn from their peers. What’s more, since high achievers are disproportionately economically privileged, concentrating them in separate classrooms or schools could theoretically lead to an inequitable distribution of resources: Through their outsize political influence or direct giving, high-achievers’ parents might secure better equipment, funding or teachers for their kids’ learning environments.

These risks would be worrisome in any context. In a world where less advanced students disproportionately suffer from racial and economic disadvantage, they are particularly concerning.

And some studies suggest that tracking provides little benefit to high achievers while harming less advanced students.

Nevertheless, we have more reason to believe that separating students by ability works for all students – when done right – than we do to doubt that notion.

To start, there is a strong theoretical basis for thinking that tracking would benefit students in general and high achievers in particular. American classrooms tend to feature pupils with vastly different abilities. One recent study suggests that a typical fifth-grade class includes students who have yet to master second-grade math and those who’ve already mastered the eighth-grade variety.

It’s hard to see how this could be academically optimal. Providing instruction that simultaneously challenges advanced students — and aids struggling ones — seems inherently more difficult than doing either of those things in isolation.

And a substantial body of research affirms this intuition. And a substantial body of research affirms this intuition. A 2016 review of 100 years of research on ability grouping found that gifted programs and various other forms of tracking conferred benefits on high achievers, medium achievers, and low achievers alike. Many (though not all) previous meta-analyses — which are analyses of analyses, in other words — have produced similar results.

Further, there is evidence that advanced education programs can specifically help academically gifted Black and Hispanic students realize their potential. A 2016 study of one large urban school district’s gifted or high-achieving program found that it significantly increased math and reading scores for high-achieving Black and Hispanic fourth-graders. These gains came at no discernible cost to students who remained in non-advanced classrooms.

Meanwhile, an experiment conducted in over 100 primary schools in Kenya found that tracking benefited lower-achieving students by enabling teachers to tailor curricula to their level.

It remains true that not all studies of ability-grouping show substantial benefits. But this may reflect the highly variable quality of advanced education programs. Merely separating students by ability will have little impact if instruction isn’t adjusted to meet the particular needs of sorted classrooms. Tracking programs in which curricula are heavily modified tend to show positive results, while those with less customization have little benefit.

Beyond its direct impacts on learning, tracking offers one other substantive benefit: It can prevent affluent families from abandoning your public school system.

Oddly, critics of tracking have sometimes criticized the practice for serving this function. The Century Foundation’s Eishika Ahmed writes that, “By not solving for equity,” New York City’s gifted and talented program “essentially continues to function as originally intended: as a way to keep [w]hite middle-class families in the public school system.”

Obviously, this should not be the sole objective of any educational program. But if Democratic policymakers in New York — or any other major city — want to maximize the resources available to disadvantaged students, then they need to satisfy the educational demands of affluent parents.

After all, when a high-income family leaves Brooklyn for a more class-segregated suburb, that reduces revenue for the city’s government — and therefore, the funds available to its public schools. More indirectly, middle-class families sending their kids to private academies can reduce political support for school funding. And in either case, socioeconomic integration declines.

In theory, tracking can help avert these outcomes, since it provides affluent families with a way to access accelerated learning opportunities for their more gifted children — without needing to abandon public schools or move to a rich suburban district. And this does seem to hold up in practice: A recent study of Texas public schools found that districts with higher levels of tracking have a lower share of students enrolled in private schools.

The case for Democrats to embrace tracking is not only substantive but political.

The Democratic Party has historically boasted a strong advantage on the issue of public education. But this edge has declined significantly in recent years, disappearing entirely in some polls. In 2024, the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research found voters narrowly favoring the Republican Party on education. Two years earlier, two separate polls of voters in battleground areas — one by a pro-education reform group, one by the American Federation of teachers — each found a slim plurality of voters leaning towards the GOP on the issue.

Democrats appear to have regained the upper hand in more recent surveys, although even these show the party’s advantage is much smaller than it once was.

There are surely multiple explanations for this. Republican governments were generally faster to reopen schools after Covid. And some red states have recently posted impressive gains in student performance, with Mississippi fourth-graders now demonstrating greater literacy than their peers in California.

But opposition to Democrat-led detracking efforts may be part of the story.

In New York, a 2022 NY1/Siena College poll found voters opposed the elimination of the city’s gifted and talented programs by a 67 percent to 28 percent margin. In San Francisco, policymakers barred algebra instruction in middle schools in 2014, so as to delay tracking in math instruction. A ballot referendum to reverse this decision passed last year with 81.75 percent of the vote.

It is difficult to find national polling on tracking from disinterested parties. But a 2024 poll from Morning Consult and the education reform organization EdChoice found nearly 60 percent of parents opposing the elimination of academically advanced classes.

Of course, the best way for Democrats to restore their reputation on education policy is to deliver better outcomes, not take dictation from opinion polling. At present, blue states do not consistently boast higher test scores than red states, despite typically charging parents higher taxes. Changing that will principally require the universal adoption of evidence-based teaching techniques (such as phonics) along with measures to hold school and students accountable for their performance.

But expanding the most effective forms of tracking could also help substantively, while combating the politically harmful perception that Democrats would rather promote a tendentious conception of “equity” than academic excellence.