To the Editor:

Instead of developing effective programs to help lower-income parents help their children succeed in school, and perhaps become eligible for enriched or gifted programs, the mayor’s panel of ideologues advises the elimination of these programs. Sounds like the city shooting itself in its proverbial foot.

If this advice takes root, the whooshing you hear will be the sound of parental funding of supplemental programs being withdrawn. And yes, there will be a stampede to the suburbs. It has happened before.

Bob Ohlerking

Brooklyn

To the Editor:

In making the case that the New York City public school system is “racially segregated” because some of the top programs — such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science High School — have relatively few black and Hispanic students compared with the school system at large, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s panel and some news reports have ignored some basic realities that have existed for several decades in New York City: Parents of high-achieving “minority” children now have lots of alternative options, and they are using them.

For example: According to an Independent Budget Office report, in 2013 there were more than 240,000 children in city “nonpublic schools” — parochial and private — and 25 percent of them, about 60,000 children, were black or Hispanic. Charter schools educated another approximately 60,000 schoolchildren at that time, and students were overwhelmingly black (60 percent) and Hispanic (35 percent), according to that same report, and charter schools have seen a rapid increase in growth since that time .

It may well be that parents who have equal or better options for their children than the intensely competitive “specialized” high schools — including scholarships to independent schools like Horace Mann and Fieldston that seek out talented diversity candidates — are choosing those alternatives.