Albany Floats $1B Boost for NYC Schools as Cheaper Southern Districts Outperform Us

Despite gargantuan spending, New York’s schools deliver tepid returns—prompting lawmakers to pitch yet more cash, even as southern states school the city on efficiency.

When it comes to educating its youth, New York City cuts no corners—at least fiscally. The city’s Department of Education boasts a mammoth $35.1 billion budget, translating to over $42,000 per pupil each year—more than the median household income in much of the country. By contrast, a Mississippi student receives a paltry $12,500—yet, perplexingly, recent years have seen southern upstarts such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama best the Empire State’s children on national measures of learning.

Undaunted by this arresting paradox, officials in Albany are floating a proposal to buoy city schools with another $1 billion annually. Senator John Liu and Assembly member Jo Anne Simon seek to rejig the state’s funding formula in a way that would deliver a windfall of some $819 million to the city’s classrooms, per calculations by its Independent Budget Office. The underlying rationale appears straightforward: New York schools, still battered by pandemic-induced disruptions, have mounting needs. But the sum already being allocated is, by almost any yardstick, prodigious.

Neither outsized investment, nor the city’s status as the largest public school system in the United States, has yielded academic dominance. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the oft-touted “Nation’s Report Card”—have dropped by roughly 10 points for New York’s students over the last decade. Meanwhile, Mississippi, once routinely mocked for its public schools, has seen fourth-grade reading results climb by an equivalent margin.

Louisiana’s fourth-graders, similarly, have gained 5 points on reading since 2013 despite the state’s education budget being less than half, per student, of New York’s largesse. Alabama, long pigeonholed as an educational laggard, emerges as a national overachiever when test results are adjusted for poverty and demographics; the Urban Institute now ranks Alabama’s system first in the country, while New York limps in at 32nd.

The implications for New York City are unflattering. If money were the chief determinant of success, as classic urbanist logic once posited, Gotham’s schoolchildren would be trouncing their peers. Instead, the city spends liberally but achieves middling results—a dispiriting outcome not lost on observers such as Danyela Souza of the Manhattan Institute, who dryly remarks, “If it was just about the money, our schools would be number one academically.”

The city has not always eschewed accountability. A generation ago, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, schools received A-to-F report cards, and persistent underperformance triggered closure or intervention. The approach was controversial, but it forced schools to confront their shortcomings. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, however, this system was quietly scrapped, replaced with what can only be described as vague aspirations toward improvement. Former schools chancellor Eric Nadelstern notes, with characteristic understatement, that the current regime lacks “accountability”.

The city’s teachers’ union, ever a political force, argues that more money is essential to meet New Yorkers’ growing needs, especially those of disadvantaged and immigrant communities. And it is true that Gotham’s schools shoulder unique challenges: more than 20% of students are English-language learners; poverty rates among families remain stubbornly high. Yet one could hardly call such obstacles unique to New York. In the South, states contend with their own deep-seated inequalities and yet, resource-starved though they may be, have made palpable gains by demanding proof of progress.

A southern lesson in frugality

Southern states’ turnaround did not come from windfalls. Mississippi embraced a radical focus on phonics-based reading instruction, enforced by a hard-nosed policy of retaining students who failed to read at grade level by third grade—a stance unfashionable among progressive educators, but apparently effective. Louisiana adopted rigorous curriculum standards and aggressive teacher development. Officials in Alabama, meanwhile, retooled assessments and provided “data dashboards” so principals could track student progress in real time.

These states’ relative success seems to portend that targeted, evidence-based policy trumps unlimited funding. For New York, the lesson is uncomfortable—though not, perhaps, unfamiliar. New Yorkers have long viewed Southern politics and policy with a measure of condescension, but in educational reform, humility may now be warranted.

On a national scale, the trend underscores a growing disconnect between spending and outcomes. Massachusetts, previously the undisputed darling of American schooling, has stagnated by some measures while others leap ahead. For high-spending states—and for Washington, where debates over federal education aid perennially simmer—this bodes ill for the argument that more dollars alone can engineer uplift.

A global comparison offers further cause for scepticism. The United States, on the whole, spends more than nearly every OECD country on its schools. Yet in international rankings such as PISA, it lands mid-table—comfortably ahead of Mexico, but well short of Poland or Estonia, both of which wring surprisingly buoyant results from their modest purses.

It would, however, be glib to reduce the puzzle solely to dollars or deprivation. Urban school systems operate in contexts of social complexity that defy any one-size-fits-all remedy; high-quality teaching, strong curricula, school safety, and parental engagement all matter. Yet for all the political drama over funding, what is conspicuously scarce in the city’s never-ending education debates is any semblance of rigorous accountability. Parents and taxpayers could be forgiven for asking what, precisely, will change after another billion is spent.

It is tempting for lawmakers to try to spend their way out of a problem—especially when local politics favour largesse, and when there are plenty of interest groups ready to lobby for their share. But as the southern example shows, careful deployment trumps bountiful outlay. If New York wants to restore its schools to true preeminence, the time has come for clear-eyed, data-driven scrutiny, not simply deeper pockets.

Absent such change, the city risks joining the ranks of high-cost, low-yield American institutions—a result neither taxpayers nor their schoolchildren deserve. ■