NYC's next mayor will inherit some severe education challenges

Bloated budgets, achievement declines, and falling enrollment

Earlier this month, Danyela Souza Egorov and Ray Domanico published “An Education Agenda for New York City’s Next Mayor.” If presumed Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani is smart, he’ll read it to understand some of the challenges New York City’s schools are facing.

The authors start by looking at achievement trends. Like the rest of the country, NYC was making pretty good gains for much of the early 2000s and 2010s, but student achievement scores peaked pre-COVID and have continued to fall (other than 4th grade math, where gains among the highest-performers powered an increase in the overall average).

But I want to focus on New York City’s enrollment trends. Figure 5 in Egorov and Domanico’s paper shows the PK-8 enrollment by sector for 2004, 2014, and 2024. As you can see, the traditional district-run schools have lost about 170,000 students over the last 20 years. Private schools have lost nearly 70,000 kids while charters have grown and now serve 114,000 students.

Who’s been leaving the city-run schools? It’s mostly Black families. From 2004 to 2024, the number of Black students attending district-run schools fell by about 125,000, a decrease of 54%. There are now about as many White students in NYC schools as there are Black students. The largest racial/ ethnic group is Hispanic students, but their numbers fell by about 32,000, a decline of only 11%.

And where do the remaining students go? Figure 8 from the paper tells an interesting story. Asian/ Pacific Islander students mostly go to district-run schools (89%). Meanwhile, 27% of Black students attend a charter school, and 56% of White students opt out of the public sector entirely and instead go to a private school.

The enrollment declines have left a lot of schools under-enrolled. The authors note that NYC is operating 65 schools with under 200 students. It’s not necessarily true that small schools are better or worse than bigger schools, but it certainly costs more to operate them on a per-pupil basis. All told, as of last year, district-run schools spent $32,284 per student. That is… a lot. Those costs have been driven in part by the district increasing the number of staff it employs even as it lost students.

But this is all in the past now. What about the future? That doesn’t look good either. Egorov and Domanico show that the number of babies born in New York City is down by 20%.

Will these numbers revive in the coming years? I certainly wouldn’t bet on it, and Mamdani or whomever wins the mayoral election in November will need to make some important decisions about how to navigate these trends. They could start by absorbing the lessons from Egorov and Domanico’s paper and considering their policy recommendations on how to get things back on track.