Mamdani’s Socialist Failure Factory Experiment in New York City’s Schools

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral election essentially puts the Democratic Socialist in charge of the nation’s largest school system.

Chris Papst’s “Failure Factory: How Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future” is a brilliant, groundbreaking exposé of the Baltimore City Schools. It is comparable to Lincoln Steffens’ classic, “The Shame of the Cities.” That 1904 work helped launch the progressive movement, which reformed state and local government for over a decade.

Mr. Papst’s eight-years of investigative reporting enabled him to expose the depth of corruption and dishonesty at the heart of the nation’s third most expensive big city school system (when measured per student). He discovered that the Baltimore City school bureaucracy gave up on trying to educate the students. Instead, they passed students who had learned nothing, while taxpayers funded a massive, failing bureaucracy.

Big city education shares a level of fraud and corruption comparable to what we see in health care. At Gingrich 360, we are applying the Papst approach to other big city schools, starting with New York City. The findings are startling.