Inside The New York City "Budget Crisis": PreK-12 Education

You may have heard that New York City has a “budget crisis.” The reason you may have heard that is that our new Mayor Mamdani has been loudly proclaiming that mantra to anyone who will listen. After taking office on January 1, Mamdani promptly came up with the “budget crisis” theme during his first month in office, of course blaming the supposed crisis on his predecessor Eric Adams; and he has been repeating the mantra regularly ever since.

From a Mamdani press release on January 28:

TODAY, Mayor Zohran Mamdani outlined the “Adams Budget Crisis,” a fiscal emergency driven by years of staggering mismanagement under former Mayor Eric Adams. . . .

It’s not just a “crisis,” but also an “emergency.” And moving forward to two days ago, there was Mamdani once more, this time in the City Hall rotunda, harping on the same words again — and using them to demand that the state Legislature and Governor enact new taxes to provide him with additional revenue. From NBC News, April 28:

"New York City faces a budget crisis of historic magnitude," Mamdani said Tuesday during a joint press conference. "We've inherited a deficit larger than any since the Great Recession. Years of mismanagement and chronic under budgeting, alongside a structural imbalance between what New York City sends to the State and what we receive in return, have taken a toll. We cannot close this deficit with savings alone. We need new revenue.”

So has New York City actually been the subject of “chronic under-budgeting” as Mamdani asserts?

In fact, Mamdani’s claim is completely absurd. You can tell that Mamdani’s claim is absurd by comparing New York City spending on any budget line item or service to the spending by any other jurisdiction in the country. In literally every category, New York City spends more per capita than the national average, and in some categories it is the very highest spender by a wide margin. This is particularly true in the two largest spending categories, which are PreK-12 education and Medicaid.

Today, let’s look at PreK-12 education. New York City’s wild over-spending on this expense category is not exactly a secret. Among others, the Manhattan Institute and the New York Post have repeatedly covered the topic over the years, even as the City’s education spending has gotten farther and farther out of line from national norms. Just a few weeks ago on April 6, the Post had a piece with the headline “NYC’s insane $38B school budget just buys failure — here’s where Mamdani must cut.” The authors were Danyela Souza Egorov and John Ketcham of the Manhattan Institute. Excerpt:

New Yorkers simply don’t get good education value for their tax dollars, mostly because the public schools too often put the interests of teachers first, families second. . . . Mamdani’s budget sets aside $38 billion for DOE’s operations — $3 billion, or 8%, more than the current fiscal year. Education already accounts for about a third of the city’s budget, and the Citizens Budget Commission estimates that per-pupil spending now exceeds $42,000, the most expensive among large urban districts. Yet . . . enrollment has fallen 12% since 2020. . . .

The Manhattan Contrarian has also covered this subject repeatedly over the years, for example here in April 2020, and here in May 2023 (“Ever More Absurd New York City Education Spending”). In that May 2023 post I noted that New York City per student spending, then about $38,000 per year, was “well more than two and a half times average per pupil spending for K-12 education in the U.S.” Not 10% more, or 20% more, but two and a half times more. And since then, as City per student spending has gone up again by more than 10%, the gap has widened even further. My May 2023 post also incorporated charts of results on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests, showing that New York City students consistently have achieved below-average scores on those tests in every category over the past two decades.

But meanwhile, over on the left-wing side of the ledger, it would appear that all criticism of New York City’s out-of-control PreK-12 spending is simply not permitted in polite society. Try finding an article in the New York Times calling out the City for excessive education spending that fails to achieve any results. I can’t find it. Same for the rest of the mainstream sources. The average voter likely has no idea how much the City is over-paying for its poor schools.

But here’s something new: On Tuesday (April 28), the Atlantic published a long piece acknowledging the disaster of New York City PreK-12 education spending. The Atlantic is a decidedly left-wing, even woke, institution. Maybe this indicates that the wall of silence surrounding New York’s ridiculous education spending is starting to crack? One can hope. The author is Mark Novicoff, and the headline and sub-headline are “A Mediocre Public-School Education for Just $40,000 a Pupil: How New York City’s education budget became an untouchable money pit.” The piece is behind their paywall, but they will let you read it for free if you give them your email and credit card for a 30-day “free trial.” (Don’t forget to cancel after you read the piece.)

Some excerpts from Novicoff’s piece:

It costs about $40 billion a year, making up a third of the city’s gargantuan budget. New York City spends more money per pupil—north of $40,000, according to one recent estimate—than any of the other 100 largest public-school districts in the country, and more than twice as much as the median district. Meanwhile, it generates educational outcomes that are average at best. According to federal data, its per-pupil spending is nearly 50 percent higher than Los Angeles’s and Chicago’s (the second- and fourth-largest districts), and 150 percent higher than Miami’s (the third-largest).

So far, that’s just noticing a few obvious things that the New York Post and the Manhattan Contrarian have been pointing out for years. But to his credit, Novicoff goes at least a little deeper to highlight some of the larger items of wasted spending. For starters, there is a ridiculously low ratio of students to teachers of about 9:1:

Where does all the money go? The simple answer is that it goes to the teachers. According to a cross-district analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, New York City spent 61 percent of its education budget on instructor compensation in 2023. Los Angeles spent 52 percent on teachers; Miami, 43 percent. Surprisingly, given those figures, New York City teachers are far from the highest paid in the country. . . . New York manages to spend so much on its teachers without paying them all that much by having so many of them. New York City’s pupil-to-teacher ratio is lower than that of each of the next 80 largest school districts. According to the New York City Independent Budget Office, that number stands at one instructor for every nine pupils.

Another category of wildly out-of-line costs is what they call “special education.” Novicoff:

Another factor contributing to the city’s high teacher-to-student ratio is the surging special-education population. In 2000, 11 percent of New York City students were classified as disabled. Today, that figure is up to 22 percent. The national average, by contrast, is 15 percent; in Los Angeles, 16 percent; and in Chicago, 17 percent.

And then we have the fact that enrollment is declining rather rapidly. You would think that declining enrollment would be an opportunity to reduce spending without reducing services to the remaining students; but somehow New York has decided that no school shall have its annual budget cut no matter how few students it may have:

[T]he school district’s fundamental issue is that overall enrollment is shrinking. . . . In the 2019–20 school year, just over 1 million kids were enrolled in New York City public schools. Preliminary enrollment figures for the 2025–26 school year have that number at 884,000. . . . A shrinking student body mechanically pushes up per-pupil spending unless the education budget is cut—and the budget is never cut. Under a policy known as “hold harmless,” the city government does not reduce a school’s budget as its enrollment declines. Instead, the funding keeps flowing even as it is spent on fewer and fewer students.

Indeed, Mamdani is proposing a multi-billion dollar increase in school funding in his upcoming budget, even as enrollment continues to shrink.

And the categories of over-spending just keep coming, one after the other. My favorite is that a few years ago (2022) the State Legislature, at the demand of the teachers’ union, enacted a class-size mandate for New York City schools of no more than 20 or 25 students (depending on grade), beginning in 2028. Now, you would think that, already having a teacher for every 9 students, they would have no trouble meeting this mandate without hiring any more teachers. But somehow they are in the process of hiring thousands more. The union is rubbing its hands with glee.

Novicoff concludes:

Faced with ballooning per-pupil spending and mediocre results, Mamdani has demonstrated only the barest interest in school-budget cuts. . . . His preliminary budget for the 2027 fiscal year called for a 9 percent increase—$3 billion—to the department of education’s funding. . . . The education budget nonetheless continues to go up, hurting taxpayers and diverting funds from other important services.

Thank you, Mr. Novicoff and the Atlantic. But it will take a few thousand more articles like this, and in bigger-circulation outlets, before the message actually breaks through to the voters.