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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

My biggest skepticism about Mamdani in NYC is that he wants to get rid of gifted programs. Apparently some thing it's wrong to adjust each child's learning experience to their capacity for learning. Which is... Wild.

If an 8 year old can do algebra, let them cook.

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That’s not what he said. He wants to get rid of kids being tracked into gifted kindergartens because a) it’s ludicrous and b) testing four year olds is just a roundabout way of finding the kids with parents who got them a tutor for kindergarten entrance exams, and the replacement metric of getting pre-k teachers to pick them is not much different. He argues that kids don’t need to be shuffled off to special schools until more like 8 years old, when the 2nd grade testing happens.

He also obviously doesn’t believe it’s wrong to adjust learning to capacity. He just has the less popular view that this can be done without tagging kids at four years old and changing their lives. (He probably also understands that there’s plenty a brilliant math kid who belongs in a standard English class, or even in remedial classes to deal with a concurrent learning disability).

If this is true then I stand corrected. I understand the bias of "rich kids get training" so if he is not killing gifted programs but merely adjusting them, then fine.

I was blown away when I learned that public schools were testing kids before kindergarten and actually assigning the kids to different schools based on the result. I'd only ever heard of that as a "rich people pressure-cooker dystopia" kind of practice.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/10/02/zohran-mamdani-...

That makes complete sense. We live in HK and here most kindergarten will have an interview before starting school either at 3 or 4 years old. We applied to a play-based school and to a Montessori school and our son was admitted to both but that's because those two schools target more play focused parents.

So the interviews for those schools are less strict and competitive than some of the better ranked schools where children are competing against children who have tutored and been coached to ace the kindergarten interviews (!?).

I strongly agree with you that there's absolutely no point in testing for giftedness before 2nd grade. Even testing in 2nd grade is fully ripe for creating an arms race between parents by inciting them to hire tutors.

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