Exposé on soaring NYC school spending should outrage every New Yorker
With Mayor Eric Adams ordering budget cuts and state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli warning of a possible monster $14 billion city-cash shortfall by 2027, a new Citizens Budget Commission school-spending report couldn’t be more timely.
And distressing.
Indeed, all New Yorkers should be outraged at the stunning sums (of their money) being flushed down the drain on Gotham schools.
Per the CBC, a full 35 cents of every dollar City Hall shells out — $36.9 billion in total in Fiscal Year 2023 (i.e., more than the entire budgets of dozens of nations) — goes to schools.
That amounted to a stunning $37,000-plus for every kid in the system last year.
Families could have used that money to send their kids to private schools, likely with better results.
New York’s nation-leading per-student outlays have long been off the rails, but began soaring wildly as early as 2016.
Between then and 2022, they grew 46.9% — more than double inflation.
With funding bloated by $7 billion in DC pandemic aid, and already-declining enrollments plummeting even faster, fiscal year 2022 spending per student rose 15.2% over the year before.
Counting expected pay hikes for school staffs, that figure will rocket up to a mind-blowing $43,778 per kid by 2026 — 73% more than in 2016.
And it’ll be even more after figuring in the added costs from Albany’s new mandate to reduce class sizes.
Despite all that cash (much for teachers and other staff), student achievement’s been dreadful — especially during the lockdowns, when schools were shut, kids were forced to stay home and learning went backward.
A recent DiNapoli report found that, statewide, New York’s fourth-graders lost twice as much ground in math and reading as their counterparts nationally from 2019 to 2022, based on National Assessment of Educational Progress scores.
Adams and Chancellor David Banks get it.
The Department of Education’s got a “$38 billion annual budget,” yet “we have 65% of black and brown children who never achieve proficiency,” Banks fumed in 2021. “If … your job disappeared tomorrow,” he asked administrators, “would that change anything” in the schools?
Alas, the City Council has shot down Hizzoner’s attempts to impose even minor curbs to school outlays, and Gov. Kathy Hochul conspired with lawmakers to require those class-size cuts that’ll unleash more spending.
It’s a testament to the power of the school unions, which control New York pols and demand nothing less than massive yearly funding boosts even as enrollments fall. If only taxpayers had such advocates.
