Mamdani actually stands up for NYC’s top high schools, hooray!

Let us offer at least one small cheer for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as he declined to fall for the annual, ritualized outrage over admissions to the city’s top public high schools.

He even pointed in the direction of the correct fix for the hysterics’ complaint: If you want more black and Hispanic kids to score well enough on the exam to win entry into Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and so on, start doing a far better job of teaching those children in earlier grades.

As a candidate, Mamdani rightly vowed to leave the test-in mandate for these schools intact; that’s one campaign promise we’re glad he’s keeping.

The left-leaning online news outlet Gothamist got this year’s ball rolling by screaming, “Just 3 Black students admitted to NYC’s elite Stuyvesant High School,” a conventional-wisdom headline that elides the key fact that the unhappy number is the result of a race-blind test: No more black students scored well enough.

Critics always fall back on charging that the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test is somehow racist; far-left City Councilman Lincoln Restler tweeted the usual dodge: Scrap the SHSAT because “a single test should never be [the] only factor deciding who gets in & who doesn’t.”

Why not? Point out the racist questions, Lincoln: Are they in the room with you now?

(By the way: In fact, 20% of Stuyvesant admissions now don’t rely exclusively on the test, because Mayor Bill de Blasio already undermined the standard.)

Note, by the way, that the “it’s racism!” crowd never explains why the white supremacists who wield such enormous power in New York don’t penalize the low-income Asian-American students who score big and so win entrance in good numbers.

The real blame should focus on the dysfunctional public-schools blob that has “normalized” failure for tens of thousands of kids; unions and a bureaucracy that line their own nests exclusively — and despise the public charter schools that actually do educate the minorities the left claims to care about.

Look: On the national “gold standard” NAEP exams, citywide 4th grade reading proficiency stands at 28%, math at 33%. But black and Hispanic students have proficiency rates less than a third of white and Asian ones.

And, incidentally, the top black and Latino students have other options besides the SHSAT: Private schools, eager to serve “social justice,” offer scholarships, while families that choose a charter school in lower grades often opt to stick with the angel they know when it comes to high school: That’s another reason for the “only 3” that Gothamist & Co. overlook.

As for real solutions: Mamdani’s shown zero appetite for taking on the interests that make the regular public schools such failure factories, but he could expand Gifted & Talented programs in minority ‘hoods, and create more elite high school seats (or even more elite schools!) to increase opportunity.

Think about it, Mr. Mayor: We’d love to have at least one area where we can keep on praising you.