New York City's new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will soon confront an ordeal that might finally knock that trademark smile off his face: balancing the budget. The city is projected to have a $5 billion deficit this year and is required by law to make up for that shortfall by raising revenue, cutting spending, or both. Mamdani has proposed large tax increases paired with modest cuts to city programs. But getting to $5 billion won't be easy, in part because the biggest portion of the city's budget is considered untouchable. I refer not to the police department or the transit system, but to the department of education. It costs about $40 billion a year, making up a third of the city's gargantuan budget. New York City spends more money per pupil'north of $40,000, according to one recent estimate'than any of the other 100 largest public-school districts in the country, and more than twice as much as the median district. Meanwhile, it generates educational outcomes that are average at best. According to federal data, its per-pupil spending is nearly 50 percent higher than Los Angeles's and Chicago's (the second- and fourth-largest districts), and 150 percent higher than Miami's (the third-largest). Per pupil is the key phrase here. New York City's public-school system is the largest in the country, but that's not the problem. The problem, actually, is that the student body is small relative to the resources devoted to it, and shrinking fast'but the city and state governments won't cut education spending accordingly. As long as that's the case, the city's financial situation will grow only harder to manage....

Some 15 years after the No Child Left Behind Act promised to close the racial achievement gap, it looked as if charter schools were making real progress toward that goal. Using data from 2015 to 2019, Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes reported that more than 200 charter networks were closing or even reversing racial disparities in reading, math, or both. Their Black and Latino students were equaling or outpacing white students in the same states. 'More critically,' the report's authors wrote, 'there is strong evidence that these gap-busting schools can be scaled.' Then, just as the charter sector was posting striking results, many school networks strayed from their commitment to academic excellence. Staff-led demands for social justice convulsed the schools. 'Anti-racism' and 'equity' displaced effective instruction as their top priority. Indeed, I experienced the period's fervor firsthand in Ascend, the charter network I founded in Brooklyn. In a 2019 blog post, I expressed concern that training teachers to recognize 'worship of the written word' as 'white supremacy culture,' as many equity trainers urged, could alienate students of color from school. A firestorm followed, and I was asked to stay home. I was never to return. At many networks that served students of color from low-income families, academic performance plummeted'and has scarcely recovered....

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) was founded in 1950 in response to 'a new era emerging from social upheaval and the disasters of war,' as outlined in the 1949 Lewis Committee Report. The report's findings emphasized MIT's role and responsibility in the new nuclear age, which called for doubling down on genuine 'integration' of scientific and technical topics with humanistic scholarship and teaching. Only that way, the committee wrote, could MIT tackle 'the most difficult and complicated problems confronting our generation.' As SHASS marks its 75th anniversary, Dean Agustin Rayo answers questions about why the need for developing students with broad minds and human understanding is as urgent as ever, given pressing challenges in the midst of a new technological revolution. A: Artificial intelligence isn't just changing the way students learn ' it's transforming every aspect of society. The labor market is experiencing a dramatic shift, upending traditional paths to financial stability. And AI is changing the ways we bring meaning to our lives: the ways we build relationships, the ways we pay attention, and the things we enjoy doing....

The graduates of America's most elite universities dominate our economy and culture so disproportionately that the statistics can seem like a mathematical glitch. Students at Ivy League schools and the similarly selective University of Chicago, Duke, Stanford, and MIT together comprise less than half a percent of America's undergraduate population. Yet their alumni represent more than 12 percent of all Fortune 500 CEOs, 32 percent of all New York Times journalists, and 13 percent of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of the population. So the people who go to the fanciest colleges tend to have the most successful careers'this is not exactly news. The question of why this is the case, however, is surprisingly tricky to answer. Perhaps the super-achieving and super-privileged teens who get into Princeton would have thrived after college no matter where they went. Maybe (hear me out) they owe their success to the academic lessons imparted by world-class faculty. Or the answer could just be that employers are dazzled by the name of the school on the diploma....