NYC’s Department of Education is waging war on excellence

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The surprise move to kill the accelerated math program at Lab Middle School is just the latest gambit in the city Department of Education’s war on excellence.

Parents raged over the e-mail from Megan Adams, the school’s principal, baldly announcing the change last weekend. By Friday, she’d given up, announcing that the courses would live — at least for next year.

Sadly, Adams was following a national trend, as educators acting in the name of “equity” ax access to advanced math courses all across the country.

It’s rubbish: Putting all kids in the same math class when some have already mastered the material while others are struggling does none of them any good. It frustrates the fast learners and makes it more likely the slow ones will fall even further behind.

Or, as former Lab teacher Maggie Boyd Feurtado, who founded the program a decade ago before retiring this year, told The Post, “having everyone in the same class hurts everybody.”

She’s also right to say the “misguided” decision was “likely coming from above”: After all, the de Blasio DOE has been waging war on standards and excellence all across the system. It has succeeded in killing screened admissions for high schools in some districts and for middle schools in others — which effectively destroys those schools by ensuring that many of their students aren’t actually prepared to do the work. Only state law stops the DOE from doing the same to Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant HS, the “crown jewels” of the public-school system.

Parents are revolting: Pro-excellence candidates just won eight of nine seats on Manhattan’s Community Education Council 2, which oversees the city’s top academic district. Candidates endorsed by Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, or PLACE, won elsewhere in the city, too — a development that may have encouraged the Lab MS principal to reverse course.

But, in yet another blow to a different kind of standard, the DOE says it’s ending the Absent Teacher Reserve, which holds union-protected “educators” that no city principal wants to hire. That will put substandard teachers into classrooms, simply to appease the United Federation of Teachers, which is embarrassed by evidence that it protects the paychecks of people who should just be let go.

None of this helps disadvantaged students; it only serves the ideological or financial interests of adults in the system. This war on excellence is just one more reason New Yorkers need to elect a mayor who firmly rejects the de Blasio agenda.

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