Daily Archives: 24 October 2025

Education Parity

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There are two paths for achieving some sort of “parity” in education. One path is through pushing for equality of opportunity. This path is exemplified by New York City’s gifted and talented programs that identify gifted children before they reach school age and try to funnel them into educational programs that are tailored to enhance their giftedness and encourage them to learn more and faster—to excel. This is a reflection of Theodore Roosevelt’s each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. Roosevelt was speaking economically, but the guarantee applies just as surely to education systems. That equality of opportunity makes each person—each student—equally capable of reaching his full potential, however large or small that might be from student to student.

The other path for education parity—it really is binary—is to push for—parity—in educational outcomes. This is the path Progressive-Democratic Party New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani espouses. Mamdani promises to eliminate the city’s gifted and talented program under the fiction that children will benefit more from experiencing the breadth of ability in their peers than they will be harmed from being held back to the pace of their peers. Mamdani’s claim extends to insisting that the gifted children will, in the end, be unharmed from being restrained.

Oh, sure, Mamdani gussies up his move:

Mr Mamdani argues that New York City’s gifted programs have produced racially inequitable outcomes, and therefore all students should remain in the same classrooms, regardless of ability.

This is a Mamdani paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson: [removing gifted and talented programs] is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you [parents]. This is deeply insulting to those parents and to their children. This is Mamdani saying in so many words that black children and brown children are intrinsically inferior to white children and Asian children, they cannot hope to compete in school, and so they must get the protections of holding back the white and Asian children.

It’s inconceivable to Mamdani and his fellow Progressive-Democrats that blacks and browns could easily compete did they have the same access to opportunity as their white and Asian fellow children.

New Sanctions and some Thoughts

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President Donald Trump (R) has implemented new sanctions on Russia in response to the barbarian’s continued intransigence in its invasion of Ukraine—blacklisting Russia’s two biggest oil producers and a plethora of their subsidiaries. As The Wall Street Journal notes, how much the sanctions will impact Russia depends on three major factors:

  • how well they are enforced
  • the reaction of major markets in India and China
  • whether Moscow can circumvent the measures

Regarding the first, that depends on Europe, India, and the People’s Republic of China. In the short term, Europe will give a strong indication of how serious those nations are in supporting Ukraine and how serious they are in beefing up their defense establishments and industries so as to be able to face down the confrontation with Russia that will follow as the night does the day if Russia succeeds in conquering Ukraine. Carrots can be offered those nations, and a primary one would be tariff relief in exchange for strictly enforcing the sanctions. There even are ready to hand alternative sources for oil and natural gas to supply their current and buildup energy needs.

Tariff relief and improved mutual investment agreements, along with those readily available alternative oil and gas sources, would go a long way to weaning India off Russian oil.

Another carrot is essentially self-referential. By taking themselves completely off Russian energy, they would be proofing themselves against Russian economic blackmail.

The Indian markets can be drawn off Russian energy with tariff relief and mutual investment agreements centered on other matters important to India, Europe, and the US.

The PRC, though, is going to buy Russian oil and gas regardless. The two nations already have an economic arrangement in place that allows the PRC to develop Siberian hydrocarbon resources in return for first pick on the output of that development. When those distributing pipelines are built from Siberia into the PRC, the latter will get the former’s oil and gas functionally at no cost.

There’s more to this, though than just the blacklists. What’s also needed is better enforcement and strengthening of the existing bars against technology transfers and against equipment and maintenance supply transfers that are needed to develop wells and to maintain delivery pipelines to refineries, to (re)build and maintain refineries, and to build and maintain refined output pipelines delivering to end users.

The third factor centers on the black market, the Russian shadow fleet of oil tankers serving that black market, and the buyers’ shadow fleet of tankers as ships meeting the Russian ships for at-sea transfers. This is, perhaps, the most straightforward factor to handle, if the most difficult for the politically timid national managers. The shadow fleet ships could be—have been in the main—easily identified and seized, their cargo transferred to the seizing nation for its use (not resale) and the ships sent to the breakers for recouping the scrap metal and such other items as might be useful. Those shadow fleet ships whose captains resist seizure should simply have their ships sunk on the spot, without wasting much time arguing the matter: “Prepare to be boarded.” “No.” Sink the ship.

All of that is straightforward, only that first factor of widespread enforcement will take some political maneuverings among the relevant nations.