The start of a new school year finds New York’s public education system in a well-funded state of confusion and contradiction: flush with cash amid falling test scores and declining enrollment, spending more than ever as state-level bureaucrats plan to weaken graduation standards—but still can’t tell parents how their students performed in last spring’s assessments.

Based on long-term trends, the state’s preK-12 public system is poised this year to educate fewer students than at any time since the early 1950s. Enrollment has collapsed from its peak (3.5 million in 1970-71) to just under 2.4 million in 2023-24, when all but one county (Rockland) had fewer students than in 2018-19.

The enrollment decline reflects three factors: a nationwide fall in birth, exacerbated by net outmigration of families from New York, and an increase in the number of parents choosing private alternatives to the public school system.

Meanwhile, New York’s education spending keeps exploding.

The most recent federal data, for school year 2021-22, show New York spent $29,873 per pupil, almost double the national average ($15,633) and more than any other state. And this was before massive increases in school aid were approved as part of state budgets in 2022 and 2023.

All told, school aid has grown at three times the rate of inflation over the past dozen years.

What is the state getting for this massive “investment”?

Not much.

More is, still, never enough

New York, each year since 2008-09, has had the highest per-pupil spending, but that hasn’t translated into anything by way of exceptional student performance or even noteworthy improvements.

That’s because New York, in a nutshell, is trapped in a destructive cycle where policymakers focus more on inputs than outcomes.

Its education bureaucracy is unique because it’s overseen by the Board of Regents, a body picked solely by the state Legislature. Most state education boards are selected primarily by their governor, and only New York allows lawmakers to name the entire board. As a practical matter, that’s left the Regents free to work against instead of toward the governor’s education agenda.

Most state lawmakers—the people choosing those Regents—were themselves elected with backing from New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), the statewide teachers union, which treats New York schools as a jobs program for unionized workers.

Those NYSUT-aligned lawmakers tend to focus on how much state aid the Legislature can pump to local districts while all but ignoring how that affects student performance.

When Governor Hochul tried tapping the brakes on school spending growth earlier this year, NYSUT and state lawmakers screamed bloody murder, particularly at her suggestion that funding should be reduced in districts that had seen double-digit enrollment declines over the past decade. They stopped Hochul from changing the state’s “save harmless” rule, which essentially requires Albany to pretend those decreases didn’t happen and to keep filling empty classrooms with state money, even in some of the wealthiest districts.

State lawmakers, for the most part, have been more passionate about preserving union jobs in public schools than preserving the quality of education received there.

Coincidentally, most lawmakers—including a large chunk of Albany’s Republicans—  running for re-election were endorsed by NYSUT.

Every day that NYSUT and state lawmakers can keep the focus on inputs is a day that the Legislature isn’t scrutinizing let alone improving outputs.

The consequences are playing across the street, at the State Education Department (SED), which is controlled by the Board of Regents—and therefore, to an extent, by NYSUT.

• New York was again unable to produce results from June testing in time for teachers and administrators to make use of the data this fall. Results last year weren’t released until December—when the school year was nearly half over. Preliminary assessment results indicate only 46 percent of students were proficient in language arts and only 52 percent were proficient in math.
• SED officials have repeatedly changed the basis for measuring whether students are proficient (the “cut scores”), making year-to-year comparisons virtually meaningless.
• The Regents, meanwhile, are weakening the state’s graduation standards “to bring greater equity to the State’s education system.” That’s included eliminating the once-coveted Regents diploma, among other things.

There are other systemic problems in New York schools: Newsday last year documented the widespread use of confidential settlements in cases involving Long Island school districts, as teachers accused of abuse were allowed to resign and often kept their teaching licenses. (The newspaper also reported on the case of a Babylon teacher who raped a student and was removed from the classroom in late 2021—but who kept getting paid until 2023.)

Neither state lawmakers nor the Board of Regents have conducted any sort of review related to Newsday’s finding, which would potentially reveal hundreds of additional cases in which wrongdoing was covered up—and students were put in danger.

As former Massachusetts Board of Education member Dr. Roberta Schaefer explained last month, schools in New York and the Bay State have produced starkly different results. Massachusetts students in 2022—facing many of the same headwinds as their New York peers—together had the nation’s highest test scores across four major categories, while New York schools posted middling results with 36 percent more spending.

Why?

In most states, governors could count on an education commissioner pressing his or her case for better outcomes. Hochul, however, is trumped by the Regents-appointed Commissioner Betty Rosa, who hand-delivered NYSUT’s (successful) demands for weaker teacher accountability rules, cheered the Regents’ plan to weaken diploma requirements, and has disparaged the state’s charter schools.

Commissioner Rosa toasts NYSUT President Melinda Person and Assembly Education Chair Michael Benedetto in March after Rosa and Person together delivered their successful proposal to roll back the state’s teacher accountability rules. Source: NYSUT

For some parents, a choice

A rare bright spot in the state’s education scene has been that, even as lawmakers and the Regents gut standards and accountability measures, more students are avoiding the fallout.

Hochul in 2023 successfully pressed the Legislature to permit more charter schools, privately run publicly funded schools which this year are educating about 181,000 students. Charters play an outsized role in New York City, where they educate about 15 percent of public school students.

Plans to add roughly 2,000 more charter seats will be welcomed by the parents and guardians of roughly 2,000 students now poised to escape underperforming district-operated schools. But New York’s arbitrary cap on charter schools remains, and the state—unlike a growing number of others—doesn’t have any other program that would allow public education funds money to follow children to a different school.

Not that New York’s system hasn’t given parents plenty of reasons to wish they had such a choice.