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 kindergar

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