New York City is spending billions more on its public schools despite falling enrollment, notes a new Citizens Budget Commission report, headed to a jaw-dropping $39,304 per-pupil in Fiscal Year 2025.
Enrollment in Department of Education schools dropped by roughly a tenth from FY 2020 to ’23, when DOE costs per student went over $37,000, with a slight bump up in ’24 thanks to illegal-migrant kids.
Crucially, the United Federation of Teachers-inspired class-size mandate is pushing outlays ever higher, forcing the hiring of another 17,000 teachers at a yearly cost of $1.9 billion — even though the city’s lower-performing schools largely already meet the law’s standards, so the real impact will be to leave fewer seats in the better schools.
We’re reminded of old TV pitchman Crazy Eddie, whose price were “INsane” — because they were fraudulent.
At least Eddie was promising low prices: Under Albany’s lash, the DOE’s outlays are insanely high, and for reduced quality.
And the City Council is hoping to jack up education spending above what’s in the final budget negotiated with the Adams administration, which already ups city outlays $2.1 billion to offset the end of $2.4 billion in federal COVID aid.
That is: The pandemic’s long over, but apparently the pandemic spending must go on.
Meanwhile, DOE test scores remain mediocre at best; none of the voices howling to spend ever more even really pretend it will improve the systems’s results.
It is the height of insanity for taxpayers to pay billions more for the same academic mediocrity in return, year after year.
Crazy Eddie was huge in the ’70s and ’80s — ’til the fraud finally collapsed. How long until the bottom falls out on the scams that increasingly turn the city schools into a giant fraud for paying off special interests?