I feel I must adapt a saying of Milton Friedman in response to this: "When you aim for equality over excellence, you will achieve neither equality nor excellen

I feel I must adapt a saying of Milton Friedman in response to this: "When you aim for equality over excellence, you will achieve neither equality nor excellence." This is so wrongheaded one almost doesn't know where to begin. There are so many fronts of error and public policy gone wrong to the tune of populism (ironically). First of all, you ask what the goal is, for these equality advocates. Is it equality of performance across all students, and none of them shall ever be allowed to have a gifted talented program in the future? Because if they miraculously are successful, someday all students will be minimally achieving across all demographics, and then what about the gifted ones? Will they reinstitute gifted programs then? Or only if it again samples the racial groups equally? Or worse (and I hope they think this self-aware), only if the "right" minorities are sampled? Because sometimes I wonder if only certain favored minorities get advocated for in this way. Anyway, as many have said before, the problems of underachieving students extend far beyond the help of the classroom, and are the product of homes, parents, environment, that no banning of otherwise race-blind programs will do any more to achieve. This move will not somehow make NYC's schools better or in-classroom instruction more effective, you'd better believe that -- and isn't that the point? 2nd point: NYC will be gutting no small fraction of the people who make its future bright, in the name of trying to remediate the general population (ineffectively I may say). Why? Because unpopular as it is to say, a city's (or country's) future isn't propelled by the average person. It's driven by outstanding people, rockstars, high performers. The kinds of people who get into (and are educated at) places that get called "elite". You can see this in your daily life. Most people who do a job are just barely doing it competently. It takes the people with imagination, drive, ideas, talent, who are a cut above the rest to make significant differences and change. People don't flock to NYC because it's average. They flock there because there's exceptional people, places, companies, and infrastructure to do the things they want to do. NYC would be cutting its exceptionality off at the knees to make the average person only slightly better. That's a mistake. Finally, a closing thought: "THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. "