New York public schools have become a legal racketeering conspiracy
Soaring spending, falling enrollment, continued academic mediocrity: New York state’s public-education trends mirror the city’s, and for the same reason: This system serves the financial interests of adults far more than the educational needs of children.
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The numbers are in the new Citizens Budget Commission report: The Empire State spends far more per student than any other state, about $32,000 a head, with total outlays rising year after year (nearing $100 billion) even though it serves 12% fewer students than 15 years ago.
(Indeed, K-12 public-school enrollment fell in every New York county from the 2009-’10 to the 2025-’26 school year.)
But the results are middling at best: On gold-standard National Assessment of Educational Progress testing, our students score right in the middle on reading and a bit lower on math.
Massachusetts, which ranks first, spends 23% less per student than New York.
(By the way, black students in low-spending Mississippi now outscore their Bay State peers in reading.)
New Jersey also outdoes New York on the NAEP, while spending 17% less.
One part of the problem are the bizarre Empire State’s rules that effectively let the Assembly speaker choose the members of the Board of Regents, who oversee the State Education Department.
And the current speaker, Carl Heastie, needed teacher-union support to win the job — in large part because the unions have long made Albany power their No. 1 political goal (not that they don’t wield immense local power, too) .
This doesn’t let Gov. Kathy Hochul off the hook: She still has huge power over the state budget, yet goes along with the ever-rising school spending, including the insane “hold harmless” standard that prevents cuts in state funding though enrollment drops — even in areas where it’s down 20%.
Indeed, the gov boasts of her administration’s “record investments” in school spending, though those “investments” plainly only pay off for the people employed in public education, not the actual students.
It’s not just the teachers’ unions that feed off this spendapalooza: Local political machines exploit the public schools in a host of ways, with jobs and contracts distributed to office-holders’ allies.
But the bottom line is that New York state spends 81% above the national per-pupil average on public schools purely to benefit adults, not kids.
The high costs to taxpayers and the poor return to students is another reason for the slow exodus out of state: New York is too busy redistributing wealth to favored players to truly invest for the future.
It’s basically one vast racketeering enterprise, immoral as hell even if it’s completely legal.
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