NYC Spends Insane Amount on Public Schools as Results and Enrollment Plummet [WATCH]

New York City is throwing a record 43 billion dollars at its public schools, yet the results do not begin to justify the price tag.

The system spends an astonishing 44 thousand dollars per student, far more than any other large district in America, even as enrollment collapses and test scores stagnate.

As Mayor Zohran Mamdani finalizes his first budget, education experts and fiscal watchdogs are raising alarms about an unsustainable spending spree that is entirely detached from performance.

Despite all this spending, New York City’s students remain stuck in the middle of the pack on standardized tests, lagging behind cities that spend far less.

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Andrew Rein, executive director of the Citizens Budget Commission, put it bluntly.

“Despite the City spending 44,000 dollars per student, too many of its schools are delivering middling results, and some parents are increasingly choosing charters over traditional public schools.”

Rein argues that spending must be tied to results, calling for adjustments in funding when enrollment declines and for merging schools that have become too small to operate efficiently.

But reform is stuck behind a wall of politics. Democrats at the state level continue to push an expensive class size reduction law, even though shrinking enrollment makes it nearly impossible to implement without blowing up the budget.

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Governor Kathy Hochul and her allies in the legislature, predictably in lockstep with powerful teachers’ unions, are considering giving the city more time rather than scaling back the costly mandate.

Daniela Souza, an education researcher at the Manhattan Institute, was blunt about the absurdity.

“The law is unworkable. It’s impossible to implement,” she said.

The numbers make her point. The Department of Education now educates nearly 158,000 fewer students than ten years ago, yet it operates 39 more schools.

One in seven schools are less than half full, and nearly half now have fewer than 400 students.

A new report projects the problem will worsen.

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By 2035, enrollment in the city’s traditional public schools will plunge by another 153,000 students, leaving roughly 720,000 in total.

Yet the bureaucracy shows no sign of right-sizing operations or matching budget realities to actual classroom needs.

While the number of children in classrooms shrinks, the bills only grow.

Federal data shows New York City now spends roughly 50 percent more per student than the next largest districts, including Los Angeles and Chicago.

Yet on the Nation’s Report Card, city students rank far below what that spending should buy.

Only a third of fourth graders are proficient in math, and less than 30 percent can read at grade level.

By eighth grade, the numbers are even worse, with proficiency dropping to 23 percent in math.

Parents have noticed. They are voting with their feet, moving their children to charter schools or leaving the city altogether in search of something better.

Charters have become a refuge for frustrated families, now educating about one in six students across the boroughs.

Many of these charter students outperform their peers in traditional public schools on the same state exams.

Despite the failure to improve results, the city continues to pour more money into the same broken system. In 2023, 61 percent of the education budget went to teacher compensation, far more than Los Angeles or Miami.

Meanwhile, spending on transportation ballooned to 1.9 billion dollars, and building maintenance climbed to 1.3 billion.

The city also burns through 700 million dollars on general contracts and consultants.

The special education budget tells the same story of runaway costs. City Comptroller Mark Levine admitted that spending on “due process” cases, which involve placing special education students in private schools at public expense, exploded from 500 million in 2019 to 1.5 billion this year.

Lawyers and reimbursements now eat up a massive share of the budget.

The DOE insists everything is fine.

Department spokeswoman Nicole Brownstein claimed, “There is no better investment than one in our children,” while touting Mayor Mamdani’s efforts to make the city “more affordable for families.”

She promised the city would find savings and cut “excess spending,” though she offered few specifics and no plan to address declining enrollment.

Her defense rings hollow given the sheer waste.

The city is now paying billions in pension contributions, fringe benefits, and debt service on top of ballooning operational costs.

Yet children are not learning what they need to succeed in life, and fewer families are willing to entrust the system with their kids.

Any private business that spent more while serving fewer customers with worse results would go bankrupt overnight.

In New York City, that sort of failure guarantees a bigger budget.

The result is a bloated system that exists for bureaucrats and union bosses, not for students.

Parents have seen enough, and the numbers show the system is heading toward a fiscal and academic cliff.

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