If New York City’s public school system could educate a child for what it costs to educate a child in one of New York’s Catholic schools, the city would be spending about $6.5 billion less on its Department of Education each year. That’s setting aside special education, which is a topic for another editorial.*

In 1962, New York educated a student population of about one million with about 40,000 teachers. Today, the city educates about 100,000 more students, but the number of teachers has doubled to about 80,000. Has the quality of education improved by a factor of two? If the question doesn’t make you cringe, you haven’t seen the latest test scores for New York City’s schools. Only 29.8% of the city’s eighth-graders, to take but one of many examples of the public school system’s failings, were able to test to standard on the math test.

The cost to educate the students in New York’s Catholic schools averages $3,200 a pupil for Kindergarten through eighth grade and $5,800 a pupil for high schoolers, according to a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of New York, Nora Murphy. Most of that comes from tuition, but contributions from graduates and other donors cover a 10% to 20% share. The public schools spend nearly double that, about $10,000 each in elementary and middle schools and more than $9,000 for each high-school student.

The two largest factors that account for the difference in costs are the government bureaucracy surrounding the schools and the enormous power of the city’s teachers union. These two factors, minimized in the Catholic school system, are the biggest obstacles to education reform in New York’s public schools.

The Archdiocese of New York is able to administer to about 110,000 students with a total central administrative staff of 28. At that level, the city’s school system would have no more than a few hundred administrative staff. But New York has almost 9,000 administrators, secretaries, clerks, accountants, and other assorted bureaucrats. In total, the city’s school system employs more than 136,000 persons, a ratio of about one employee for every nine students.

When asked what makes the Catholic schools stand apart from the public schools, Ms. Murphy of the Archdiocese said the differences are a lower average teacher salary, less top-down management, an administrative consciousness toward cost-effectiveness, and small schools. New York’s Catholic schools have few assistant principals. They don’t centrally budget everything that goes into making a school run.

Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Civic Innovation had a different way of expressing the bureaucratic obstacles to improving the city’s education. In the Catholic schools, teachers and administrators “trust each other,” he said. Because the teachers share a sense of philanthropy and there are fewer rules and administrators to enforce them, Catholic schools offer a better work environment and a sense of mission, something that allows the schools to attract teachers who will work for about half the salary of a New York City teacher.

Granted, some of the Catholic school teachers are nuns and priests. By definition, these teachers do not have families to support or other expenses that non-clerical teachers have. But, despite the popular stereotypes to the contrary, Catholic school teachers are not primarily nuns — religious figures make up a minority of these teachers. Also, the public school system does provide some services to the private religious school system, such as transportation. These costs are added to the Department of Education’s budget and diminish the per-pupil cost of Catholic schools. Catholic schools also have a limited special education program. Still, says Mr. Greene, the per-pupil costs would still be much lower for Catholic education with these factors figured in.

A sense of philanthropy is hardly something that is missing from potential teachers in New York’s pool. The New York City Teaching Fellows program saw a 21% increase in applications this year. What is missing is the sense of urgency. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has made some steps toward improving the way the schools do business —laying off administrators and moving to privatize some of the school system’s accounting functions. But the city faces a $6 billion budget gap and already high taxes. It’s hard to see how the politicians can go on claiming there is no room to cut when the Catholic schools are educating students at half the price that the city bureaucrats are — and with better results on standardized tests. Parents seem to realize this: When private philanthropists offered 7,500 scholarships to New York City private and parochial schools in 1999, applications were filed for nearly 170,000 students.

The city could try wrestling concessions out of its unions, laying off administrators, and increasing class sizes until it could educate a student for what it costs the Archdiocese — and then try improving quality so that it attains the same results.

But a simpler way might be to just offer a publicly funded voucher to any student who wants one, and let the schools sprout up to fill the need. If the demand for vouchers is still at 1999 levels, that would mean 162,500 students channeled out of the public school system. Assume that it costs $7,000 to educate each one — far more than the current level of spending on Catholic schools, but enough to adjust for whatever backdoor transportation funding the public schools are currently providing and for some of the capital costs of space for the influx of new students. The city still saves $406 million. ________________

*”Special Ed Savings,” The New York Sun, November 29, 2002.