Money can’t buy me love, and apparently not reading either. Let’s check the latest from the public schools in New York City:
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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.
It 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.’
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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.’
Failing by national test metrics? I don’t know exactly what that means, but I have a different reaction: How do these people keep their jobs? I mean the administrators, who run these schools. Can you think of another enterprise in the real world where the people running something into the ground still keep getting a paycheck?
We don’t live in New York City, but some friends who live there tell me that public education is a disaster. One family took an extra job just to send their kids to Catholic schools, where at least they graduate reading at grade level.
Seriously, what’s the point of paying public education taxes if you have to get an extra job to send your kids to a private school?
What is Mayor Mamdani going to do about this? He’ll probably blame the rich and tell us that they need to pay their fair share, or whatever that means. Or he will say something like we need another billion dollars to fund the system…it’s always about more money isn’t it?
Good luck to New York City parents, but there is not much hope unless there is some change in your voting patterns first.
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