Jeff Bezos’ pointed remarks this week about the city Department of Education’s horrific dysfunction only begin to describe the epic waste.
“If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, packages would take six weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it,” Bezos thundered Thursday.
Indeed. A recent Citizens Budget Commission report details the grotesquery: New York City now spends $43 billion a year on the regular public schools, amid plummeting enrollment, stagnating test scores and chronic absenteeism.
That’s more than most states spend on public schools, and amounts to a nation-leading $44,000 per child, for a mediocre-at-best showing on standardized math and reading tests.
The DOE has 157,900 fewer students than a decade ago yet it operates 39 more schools, and 249 of the its 1,600 schools (15%) operate below 50% capacity.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani should be merging some schools and closing others, but the special interests that feed off the system won’t have it, and indeed have written “hold harmless” into state law, preserving outlays for schools that have lost more than half their enrollment.
To his credit, schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels has blasted the costly “hold harmless” funding policy as well as the state’s even-more-insane class-size mandates, and Gov. Kathy Hochul got some relief on these fronts into the new state budget.
But spending on schools will still devour more than a third of the city’s $126 billion budget — ironically leaving little room for Mamdani to spend on any of his socialist ideas.
Fact is, public-school dysfunction is a prime reason for young families to flee New York: It’s a big reason why enrollment plunged 88,300 between the 2014-15 and 2020-21 school years before dipping another 69,600 kids between 2020-21 and 2024-25.
And now the CBC estimates the student population could plunge another 153,000 students by 2034-35.
The system still has its gems — decent neighborhoods schools and elite ones like Stuyvesant HS, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech — but those successes survive despite the overall system.
With spending rising even as enrollment drops, you have to wonder how much the DOE would shell out to “educate” no kids at all.
