A Mediocre Public-School Education for Just $40,000 a Pupil
New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will soon confront an ordeal that might finally knock that trademark smile off his face: balancing the budget. The city is projected to have a $5 billion deficit this year and is required by law to make up for that shortfall by raising revenue, cutting spending, or both. Mamdani has proposed large tax increases paired with modest cuts to city programs. But getting to $5 billion won’t be easy, in part because the biggest portion of the city’s budget is considered untouchable.
I refer not to the police department or the transit system, but to the department of education. 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). Per pupil is the key phrase here. New York City’s public-school system is the largest in the country, but that’s not the problem. The problem, actually, is that the student body is small relative to the resources devoted to it, and shrinking fast—but the city and state governments won’t cut education spending accordingly. As long as that’s the case, the city’s financial situation will grow only harder to manage.
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.
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Surprisingly, given those figures, New York City teachers are far from the highest paid in the country. A starting New York City teacher makes about $69,000 a year, whereas a new teacher in Seattle makes $74,730. A first-year Dallas teacher makes $65,000, but the cost of living in that city is significantly lower than in New York. And unlike the New York teacher, the Dallas teacher will not be required to get a master’s degree within five years of starting. Closer to home: The median teacher in the New York suburbs of Long Island and the Hudson Valley earns 14 percent more money than their counterpart in the city.
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. (This includes all pedagogic staff, including specialists, guidance counselors, and speech pathologists—not just the classroom teachers.) Melissa Arnold Lyon, a public-policy professor at SUNY Albany, told me that small class sizes are often the natural result of a dance between teachers’ unions and school districts. “The teachers’ union is coming in asking for higher salaries,” she said. “The city will say, ‘We don’t have enough money for that salary ask. What else would you take?’” Small class sizes, which make a teacher’s job easier, are one answer.
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. That increase has been driven by rising diagnoses for ADHD, speech and language issues, learning disabilities such as dyslexia, and autism. Boys in New York City schools are twice as likely to be classified as disabled as girls are. Christopher Cleveland, a Brown professor who studies special education, told me that growth in these categories typically reflects not an underlying change in the student population, but a change in the way they’re treated. “The higher the percent goes in the U.S., the more it means that we likely have this changing social definition of disability relative to biological definitions of disability.”
Although poor students are disproportionately likely to receive special education in New York City, well-off disabled kids are the ones most acutely driving up the budget. In 1993, the Supreme Court ruled that parents who prove that their school district does not adequately accommodate their child’s disability are entitled to reimbursement for private school or private tutoring services. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city initiated a policy of rarely contesting such claims, meaning that, in most cases, all a family had to do to get reimbursed—to the tune of $102,000 a student on average last year—was hire a lawyer. These publicly funded private services accounted for $200 million in department spending in 2015. The preliminary budget for next year allots $1.5 billion to pay for them.
Even more than disability accommodations, the school district’s fundamental issue is that overall enrollment is shrinking. The number of children in New York City is declining rapidly, even faster than in most big cities. From 2020 to 2024, the population of under-5-year-olds declined by 17 percent or more in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.
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. The future looks even dimmer. Statistical Forecasting, the consulting firm that the city hires to model enrollment for school capital investment, projects that enrollment will drop another 11 percent in the next five years in the city’s traditional public schools.
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. “It’s not fun to go to schools and say, ‘Hey, remember the money we said we were gonna give you? We’re gonna give you less,’” Jonathan Collins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and a member of the city’s Panel for Education Policy, told me. Avoiding those tough conversations costs the city billions of dollars.
By the 2022–23 school year, roughly a quarter of all schools were below 60 percent capacity, twice as many as in 2014–15. At these schools, as the miniature chairs empty, the options available to each remaining student for electives, clubs, and extracurriculars go down too. Tina Collins, the policy director of the New York City teachers’ union, told me, “You have some high schools, for example, that can’t field sports teams anymore.”
The same problem exists in macrocosm at the school-district level. A New York State law known as “Maintenance of Effort” enshrines that New York City may not appropriate fewer dollars to education than it did the year before, unless city tax revenues go down, in which case the cut must be proportionate to the revenue decline. Another law prevents the state, which provides more than a third of the city’s education budget, from reducing its aid to a given school district. These provisions combine to make every part of the city’s education spending function like a ratchet. Spending can go only up, even as the student population shrinks.
Changing these laws is politically radioactive. In 2024, Governor Kathy Hochul tried, but Republicans and Democrats in both chambers of the legislature rebuffed her. When Mamdani’s predecessor Eric Adams proposed simply letting schools’ funding shrink along with enrollment, he was sued, protested against, and, eventually, bullied into backing down.
In fact, rather than New York legislators coming together to help the city manage its enrollment decline, they have instead chosen to inflate costs even further. In 2022, the state legislature nearly unanimously passed a law requiring New York City (and only New York City) to dramatically reduce its maximum class sizes, capping them at 20 to 25 kids a class, depending on the grade level. Most schools in poor areas already had small classes, meaning the law will disproportionately benefit affluent neighborhoods. But the teachers’ union rejoiced, knowing the law would make teachers’ lives easier and increase demand for their services.
All of this spending on small class sizes, small schools, and accommodations for students with special challenges might be worth it if the investment led to a high-performing school district. But New York City’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are average for a large-city school district. In fourth grade, only a third of students score at or above “proficient” in math, and only 28 percent do so in reading. The numbers for eighth grade are slightly worse. This puts New York City on par with Denver, which spends half as much per pupil, and Clark County, Nevada, which spends one-third as much.
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Faced with ballooning per-pupil spending and mediocre results, Mamdani has demonstrated only the barest interest in school-budget cuts. He has abandoned some of his education-related campaign promises, such as tuition assistance for students who become teachers; proposed eliminating a few small programs together worth about 0.1 percent of the budget; and suggested procurement reform. He also has asked the state for more time to comply with the class-size law.
These modest measures pale in comparison to the amount of money he plans to add to the city’s school budget. His preliminary budget for the 2027 fiscal year called for a 9 percent increase—$3 billion—to the department of education’s funding. Mamdani has already moderated on many issues, but cutting the education budget would apparently have been a bridge too far.
As New York City becomes more expensive to live in, fewer families with children live there. The education budget nonetheless continues to go up, hurting taxpayers and diverting funds from other important services. This makes the city even more expensive to live in, and leaves young families even more squeezed, causing even fewer children to live there. The situation stems from the commendable liberal impulse to devote extensive resources to public education. But what’s the point of public education without a public to educate?