Lowering Standards Hurts Everyone and Communicators Should Pay Attention
What you will learn from this article:
How New York City’s debate over gifted education reflects broader tensions between equity and academic standards
Why lowering educational expectations can have long-term consequences for professional industries, including communications
What communicators should consider as public school policy shapes the skills and readiness of future PR and marketing talent
I’m certainly no supporter of Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for mayor of New York City, and if I still lived in the city, I would not vote for him. But Mr. Sliwa made a comment about the city’s educational system that I agree with 100 percent, according to an article in the Oct. 3 New York Times: “The focus should be on raising standards for everyone so more kids can qualify, not eliminating opportunities for the few who do.”
Mr. Sliwa was responding to a plan by Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist candidate for mayor, to phase out the gifted program for kindergarten students if elected. He has also voiced skepticism about the city’s eight specialized high schools, which serve academically gifted students through a rigorous admissions process.
In a Times questionnaire sent to leading candidates about major city issues, Mr. Mamdani stated his intent to phase out the gifted program. His two opponents, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mr. Sliwa, both committed to keeping and expanding the gifted program.
As reported in the Times, “New York is unusual among large U.S. school districts in enrolling kindergartners in a separate gifted and talented program. It offers spots to fewer than 5 percent of children in kindergarten and has been criticized for admitting few Black and Latino students into the classes, which can serve as a pipeline to the city’s most desired public middle schools.”
Readers of this site know from past articles I’ve written that I would not support Mr. Mamdani. He won the mayoral primary not because of overwhelming support but because Democrats failed to unite behind a single candidate. He is not a Democrat in any traditional sense, and each time he makes a public statement, my concerns grow.
This essay focuses on one such concern: education. Mr. Mamdani’s educational priorities worry me. Rather than helping underserved communities rise by improving access to quality education, his approach appears to bring others down to a lower standard, presumably for the sake of equity.
I’ve lived through this before. During my years in New York, “limousine liberals” attempted to remake the school system in the name of fairness, and the results were devastating. City colleges that once earned the nickname “Harvards of the working class” lost prestige as admission standards were erased in the name of access. Eventually, free tuition became financially unsustainable and was discontinued, but not before standards were diluted. That decline was not accidental—it was the result of ideology that prioritized slogans over substance.
The same political movement pushed forced busing to integrate schools, which led to disruption in neighborhoods, increased dropout rates, and rising crime in schools that previously had few issues. The middle class fled for the suburbs. Rather than uplifting underserved students by improving their neighborhood schools, the best city schools were destabilized by an influx of students with disparate educational needs and little institutional support.
On Aug. 9, The New York Times ran a headline: “Mamdani’s Plan for New York City Schools Is Unclear as Election Nears.” It may be unclear to the reporters, but to me, the direction is all too familiar. I remember when forced integration policies led to the decline of once-great public high schools and a surge in drugs and violence in neighborhoods that previously had neither. I remember lifting my young child out of a stroller and ducking into a store as bused-in students overturned garbage cans and hurled lids across the street.
The Wall Street Journal, in an Oct. 2 opinion essay by Rahm Emanuel, highlighted how low our expectations have fallen. “We’ve spent the past five years debating pronouns without noticing that too many students can’t tell you what a pronoun is,” he said. He is not wrong.
Communicators take note: The quality of public education is not a distant policy debate. It affects your hiring pool. It affects the entry-level employees who write your press releases and pitch letters. I recall a senior editor at the Associated Press who told me she would discard a release the moment she saw a typo or grammatical error. I’ve seen it firsthand as a supervisor. One junior colleague once asked me what a client meant by referencing Dunkirk. The historical allusion was completely lost on him. That same client later asked me to remove him from the account. “I don’t want him learning the business on my dime,” he said.
These examples are not anecdotes for amusement. They are warnings. Lowering standards in our schools leads to a decline in the skills and knowledge communicators rely on every day: clear writing, critical thinking, and the ability to contextualize information.
If you’re a communications executive, educator, or public affairs leader, what happens in schools will eventually show up in your inbox and on your team. And that’s why I disagree with Mr. Mamdani’s education platform and support Mr. Sliwa’s call to raise standards for all.
