The New York City Schools Scandal

The collapsing enrollment in New York City’s schools is reaching a crisis level.The student population has dropped by 117,000 students from around 1 million in 2019, Congressional Insider reports. This is the result of a combination of people fleeing high taxes and moving away, people having fewer children, and an increasing number of students moving to private or home schooling.Over the next few years, the student population is expected to lose another 153,000 students. This will leave only 721,000 pupils in the New York City schools. All in, this means a 27 percent — more than a quarter — reduction of the student body from its peak.Thanks to the political power of the teachers’ union, though, the collapse in number of students is not paralleled by a collapse in cost to taxpayers. In fact, costs for New York City schools are projected to go up to $42,000 per student from $35,000 per student.Chris Papst reported on this pattern in his remarkable study of the Baltimore City schools, “Failure Factory: How Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future.” The political power of the teachers’ union makes it impossible to control costs. No matter how badly the schools perform, the teachers’ unions demand more money. (At Baltimore City, the third most expensive school per student, there are four schools in which not a single student passed the state exam). The bureaucracies grow, and any effort for reform is smothered by the sheer scale of tax money going to the entrenched forces of decay and failure.At New York City, despite the enormous increase in money per student, schools have had their graduation rate drop to 81 percent. This is the lowest rate in more than 20 years. At $35,000 per pupil, one in five students is not educated enough to graduate. This means that over a 12-year period, the taxpayers will provide $420,000 per student, and at least a fifth of that will be squandered. And of course, as the number of students shrinks, the amount per 12-year investment per pupil will go even higher.Clearly, money spent within the obsolete, self-serving bureaucracy is not preparing the children of New York City for a productive and profitable future — or with the tools for effective citizenship.As the awareness of fraud in different industries and activities grows we should also look into the public school bureaucracies which have been overcharging and underdelivering for at least three decades. We were warned about the national security — and national survival — implications of this failure in 1983 when the Reagan administration published “A Nation at Risk.” It asserted that if a foreign government did to our children what our school bureaucracies were doing, we would consider it an act of war.If the taxpayers provide $420,000 over a 12-year period and the system fails to deliver the achievement it promised, it should be considered fraud.The projected 27 percent decline in students in the New York City schools should lead to some tough-minded thinking.Should the bureaucracy and staff be reduced by the same 27 percent? How much would this save taxpayers annually and over a decade?How many of the schools built for 1 million students become unnecessary when the number drops to 720,000 pupils?Is this moment of dramatic change a good time to distinguish between schools, teachers, and administrators with high-performing graduates and those with large numbers of young people being cheated?This extraordinary moment for New York City schools could emerge as a time for extraordinary rethinking of the system, which is clearly failing the students and the taxpayers.

The New York City Schools Scandal

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