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: 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 way 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.