Report Shows Mass Failure in NYC Schools as Spending Keeps Soaring Under Mamdani

New York City, like so many other big, blue cities, serves as an excellent model for how spending overwhelming amounts of taxpayer money can get so much less than underwhelming results.

A recent report created a damning picture of New York City public schools as mass factories of educational failure.

New York Success Academy, a charter school network in New York, dug through public data to show “New Yorkers how deep this failure runs” and how long it has been running.

The results are both sad and infuriating.

The study found that 906 schools in the city, roughly half of the total number, “had fewer than half their students passing math, reading, or both on state exams last year.”

“Those 906 schools enroll 409,379 students: 43 percent of all NYC public school children. In 503 of those schools, the majority of students failed both math and reading,” the report noted.

They said the data came from “NYS Education Department school accountability records, NYC Department of Education school quality and expenditure data, federal school improvement designation databases, and standardized test results spanning more than a decade.”

Not only are the schools failing by national test metrics, but according to the report many of the public schools have been trying to hide their bad report cards from the public with methods like grade inflation, lowering test cut scores so it appears more students are passing, and “a school survey designed to measure satisfaction rather than learning.”

Fox News reported on a New York Public Schools official’s response to the report. The official said that it is “riddled with misdirections, misinformation, and allegations not based in fact” and that they are “proud of the gains that have been made in reading and math across schools and demographics this past year.”

The public data, however, hardly looks like something the city should be proud of.

“Imagine a hospital where more than half of patients died from routine procedures. A fire department that failed to respond to more than half its calls. A municipal water utility that delivered contaminated water to more than half its residents, or air traffic controllers whose lack of oversight regularly resulted in massive casualties,” the report says. “No other public institution would be permitted to operate in this way.”

New York State public school performance has been worsening for some time, at least since the early 2010s. And the decline became precipitous during the Covid-19 lockdowns that New York was particularly zealous about.

This after being near the top of the heap in the early 2000s.

The problem appears to be even more acute in New York City as poor test scores are combined with collapsing enrollment.

The New York Times reported in May that the New York City public school system has lost “more than 123,000 students” since the start the pandemic and is projected to lose 153,000 more over the next decade.

Steep declines in enrollment have hit other big cities too, though few have been as dramatic as those in New York.

Given the data from the Success Academy report it’s not hard to find at least one reason why this is happening. Far too many of the city’s schools are failing students. Or—to be more precise—the students are failing, the schools are flailing, and they appear to be sweeping this problem under the rug rather than fixing it.

And that gets to the second big failure in New York City (on top of the failing test scores). Instead of assessing and fixing the problem, the city is just throwing money at it.

New York City already spends more money per pupil than any other state, including the District of Columbia, according to 2024 census data.

But the New York Post reported on Monday that the New York Department of Education under Mayor Zohran Mamdani quietly added $680 million to its already massive, nearly $40 billion budget. This despite Mamdani’s promise to get costs under control by tamping down on “contracts and consultants.”

“We have to always ensure that every dollar of that budget is being spent effectively,” Mamdani said of the education budget in November.

Cue the laugh track.

Oh, and you will be shocked to learn that teachers unions are doing their part to make sure the money keeps flowing to the failing schools and the students remain on the road to educational perdition.

Their plan to set things right appears to just be filing lawsuits to block their competition.

The Washington Free Beacon, which reported on the Success Academy study, noted that the report wasn’t specifically framed as an indictment on Mamdani’s leadership—the problems existed under predecessors like far-Left Mayor Bill de Blasio too.

But, according to the Free Beacon, it does make a sham of Mamdani’s administration claiming that New York public schools had an “another incredible year” last year.

It was only incredible if you mean incredibly bad.

When you combine the abject failure to teach children the basics of reading and writing with the noxious focus on ideology and indoctrination, it’s not hard to see why the public school system is facing a collapse in New York City and elsewhere.