Ray Domanico New York Schools Spend the Most, but Students Are Falling Behind A new report highlights how the state trades big bucks for middling results.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-public-schools-spending-students-ranking
For 18 years, up to and including Governor Kathy Hochul’s most recent proposal, the budget messages of New York’s last three governors have proudly noted that the state leads all others in school-district spending. What they omit is that, over that period, New York has remained in the middle of the pack on the National Assessments of Educational Progress. A recent report from the centrist Citizens’ Budget Commission, amplifying trends that I observed in 2022, presents a sobering picture of Albany’s failed policies.
The CBC observes that New York fourth-graders rank 32nd and 46th, respectively, on reading and math NAEP exams nationwide. Eighth-graders are 9th and 22nd, respectively. The state “now spends $36,293 per student, a 21 percent increase since the 2020-21 school year,” the report observes. “Given these middling results and the $89 billion New York School districts will spend this year—with $39 billion coming from the State budget—it is disappointing that education policy reform efforts have not focused on examining and rectifying New York’s unsatisfactory performance.” Instead, the education debate has “mostly centered on increasing State school aid even more and modestly shifting how dollars are allocated.”
New York’s political leaders continue to pump money into our public schools without regard for efficiency or effectiveness. If California has shown us how to fail at fire prevention, New York is the nation’s paragon of failing at educational improvement.
New York’s families have noticed. Enrollment in the state’s public school districts for grades K–12 fell by more than 320,000 students between 2014 and 2024. The drop-off is even worse in the earlier grades, with K-to-8 enrollment down 17 percent over the decade. Some of the decline is offset by enrollment growth in public charter schools, which grew by nearly 90,000 students in the same years. Yet the state legislature has capped charter school growth in New York City, home to almost 80 percent of the state’s charter school enrollment—even though charters receive less public funding than district schools, while their students score higher on state tests.
Albany has also refused to offer financial relief to families who choose to send their children to private or religious schools, which educate one in seven students. This reluctance, combined with New York’s high cost of living, has contributed to Catholic school enrollment falling by a third between 2014 and 2024.
The state is not prepared for the challenges brought by changing demographics. Statewide, enrollment of white students in public district schools declined by 23 percent over the decade, while black enrollment fell by 32 percent. Enrollment of all other groups increased. Under current trends, Asians will soon outnumber black students in the state’s public school districts. In New York City, Hispanics are already the largest group of students—43 percent, compared with whites’ 15 percent.
These ethnic and racial changes will alter the education debate. For more than 60 years, educational policy was driven by civil rights concerns and the existence of white-majority suburban districts alongside black and Hispanic inner-city systems. Over the last ten years, however, the debate in New York has increasingly focused on admission to the city’s academically selective middle and high schools, pitting the concerns of black students against those of Asian students, who now earn many of the seats in those schools. The same voices decrying the imbalance in these schools were willing to sit by as charter school growth was capped, even though 46 percent of charter students are black and 43 percent are Hispanic.
Albany’s solution to these challenges—more money for fewer students—serves no one’s interests, except those employed or contracted by the system. With political leaders more attuned to changing demographics, it might be possible to honor the state and city’s diversity in meaningful ways—by, say, allowing public dollars to follow families of all racial and religious groups to the schools of their choice.
The out-of-control educational spending that has resulted from one-party rule in Albany has not benefited schoolchildren, nor is it sustainable, with a shrinking student population and families fleeing to other states.
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