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NEW YORK, N.Y. — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s education agenda might be the most concerning of his administration and would have a damaging impact, a local GOP leader told Fox News Digital, arguing that schools will be shifting away from merit-based achievement under Mamdani’s tenure.
Mamdani has proposed phasing out the city’s gifted and talented programs for younger students over inequity concerns, a move critics argue could limit academic opportunities for high performers from low-income families.
“That’s my biggest concern,” Forte told Fox News Digital. “The lack of merit and the lack of competitiveness…is going to lead to test scores declining and the quality of our education declining significantly.”
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Zohran Mamdani, mayor of New York, speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview at City Hall in New York on Jan. 29, 2026. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg)
Forte went on to caution that Mamdani and the people he appoints would “gut” the entire program.
“He’s going to gut the gifted and talented program. He said this already,” he said. “Who he’s put into the Department of Education here in New York, gonna gut the program.”
He said Mamdani would transform the system into one “based on race and racial quotas,” undermining academic fairness in schools.
“It’s not going to be about merit anymore,” he said. “It’s going be about what is somebody’s skin color? What is their race? They’re going to make this an equity-based system based on race and racial quotas, and a lottery system. That is no way to have education. That is no way to educate students.”
But he said this would backfire, with Mamdani’s plan ultimately harming students.
“What this is going to do is lower test scores across the board, it is going to lower expectations across the board, and students are going to suffer because of it.”
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Turning to the new curriculum, he said teachers will eventually lead students to “hate their history.”
“We don’t know what he’s going to be implementing as curriculum,” he said. “We don’t know what he is going to do with American history. We don’t know what’s he’s gonna do with the history of New York.”
“Is that going to be standard operating procedure for all of New York schools? Is that what they’re going to be teaching? That they hate their history?” he added.
Shortly after taking office, Mamdani appointed Kamar Samuels, a longtime New York City educator and Manhattan superintendent, as the city’s next schools chancellor, which many critics took issue with given Samuels’ history of attempting to dismantle the gifted and talented program.
Teacher unions and their potentially increasing power under Mamdani are another issue Forte raised, saying they “will play a more active role.”
“The teachers’ union is the most, I don’t even want to call them progressive. They’re more than that,” he said. “The most socialist, militantly woke organization in the country. That doesn’t make sense. That’s not good.”
He said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is going to be “a very powerful figure in Mamdani’s New York.”
“That is going to be what is educating the next generation of Americans and they’re not keeping their politics out of the classroom,” he added.
Forte also targeted teacher training programs. He said they are shaping how future educators will think and teach.
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Zohran Mamdani announces new members of his team at the Brooklyn Public Library Greenpoint Branch in Brooklyn, Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025. (Shawn Inglima/ New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
“We have to do something about the teacher colleges where they are teaching the next generation of educators how to be Marxist, how to be liberals…and how to indoctrinate the next generation of students.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s office and the American Federation of Teachers for comment.
Mamdani found himself in hot water on education last week when he announced that his first veto as mayor was to derail a bipartisan bill aimed at combating antisemitism by expanding protest security safeguards for places of education.
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