Mayor Zohran Mamdani, standing next to Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, holds a press conference to announce the expansion of 1,000 new 3-K seats in Staten Island on Monday, March 9, 2026. Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Post A week after they united in canceling an AI-focused Manhattan public high school over bogus “racial justice” concerns, Chancellor Kamar Samuels proudly joined Mayor Zohran Mamdani to give The Bronx … Hip-Hop High.
Samuels bragged that it and four other new schools will deliver “innovative and culturally responsive instruction” and “build a stronger, more equitable future” for the city.
Which school is more likely to put students on a solid career path?
Next Gen Tech was to be academically rigorous, with a strong math and science curriculum including calculus and coding.
The School of Hip Hop plans to teach “hip-hop foundations,” entrepreneurship, and “civic engagement through music” — blatantly vaporous stuff — with the vague promise that kids will “graduate not only academically prepared, but performance-ready.”
AI and STEM skills generally are vital to the future economy; hip-hop is a music genre founded 50 years ago — whose future is behind it.
What a tale of two schools: Chancellor Samuels rejected the one that set the academic bar high, then embraced the one that’s transparently an academic joke.
And, ooh, the racism: First in the cries that screening for ability to do Next Gen Tech classwork would exclude black and Hispanic students, and then the smirking “gift” to mainly-minority Bronx kids of a school “rooted” in the “five elements” of hip-hop: Emceeing, DJing, Graffiti, Breaking and Knowledge of Self.
Of course, this “soft bigotry of low expectations,” as a former president termed it, goes all the up to the anti-education State Education Department, which now pretends that “project-based learning” is a fine pathway to a high school diploma.
New York City parents need leaders dedicated to preparing their children to succeed in school and in life; instead they’ve got Mamdani and Samuels, who plainly see the public schools as some combination of a con and a joke.
