De Blasio wants to press the students down into a valley of mediocrity.
Actually, he doesn't want to press students down into mediocrity; that wouldn't be good enough for him. He wants to indoctrinate them into a statist way of thinking so that they will obey.
In a nutshell, DeBlasio's policy mindset mimics closely what happened in Detroit over the last 40-50 years. The same results are likely to follow in New York, but he figures he'll be long gone from the political scene when the decadence reaches that level.
Now just a cotton pickin’ minit here. Let’s be fair. He can’t punish the rich, only drive them out. The rich can always move to their other home, and shut their factories and other businesses in NYC, and leave their employees in the lurch. But he really does like the poor, which is why he is working so hard to increase their numbers.