New York City Schools Are Failing

New York City’s school system is in crisis. Student achievement has fallen to near-record lows, absenteeism is high, and enrollment is shrinking—outcomes driven by more than a decade of poor decisions by city hall, the city council, and the state legislature. The next mayor can turn things around, but only by putting student success, school accountability, and parental choice ahead of interest groups and those who benefit from the system’s wasteful spending.

Before the last two mayoral administrations, the city’s schools had made significant strides, expanding educational opportunity in neighborhoods long denied quality options. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city drove these gains by holding schools accountable for results, regardless of the challenges students faced outside the classroom. The Department of Education fostered innovation by supporting the growth of both charter schools and newly designed district schools. It invited charter operators and district employees to propose new schools, often in cooperation with reform-minded community partners, and backed the best proposals, housing these new initiatives in space made available by the closures of failing schools.

The next mayor should take a similar approach, adapted to today’s challenges, to increase educational opportunity citywide. He must appoint strong leaders to the Panel for Educational Policy, the DOE’s governing body, and in the chancellor’s office. These leaders must deliver on parents’ desire for a diverse system that expands access both to merit-based advanced academic programs and to schools focused on workforce preparation for students who are not college-bound.

Whoever wins in November should build on Mayor Eric Adams’s efforts to implement proven methods of reading and math instruction. The next mayor—or Adams himself, if he wins a second term in what remains an uphill fight—should go further by ensuring students engage with challenging material from the earliest grades. Focusing on how students learn is important; what they learn matters just as much.

Despite declines in the city’s public-school enrollment, both the city and state have hiked spending. The next mayor should push back against this misguided waste by consolidating schools that fall below acceptable enrollment levels. He should also demand that the state legislature rescind its illogical class-size reduction law, which applies only to New York City and has required record-level hiring, despite the city’s already-inflated spending and staffing.

The next mayor should recognize the success of charter-school networks, which outperform district-run schools in many black and Hispanic communities across the city. Charter leaders should be invited to work with DOE officials to find ways to expand available seats, notwithstanding the legislature’s ill-advised cap on new charters. The administration should also make space in underutilized DOE buildings available to willing charter operators.

All students deserve safe and orderly streets around their schools. The city should make this an emphasis of policing while also enforcing laws that prohibit the sale of cannabis to persons under 21, and the sale of cannabis by unlicensed shops, particularly those close to schools. The mayor should address other quality-of-life issues, too, including high housing costs, that contribute to the city’s low birth rate. Some of the money now squandered in the school system should be devoted to families.

The next mayor will need parents as partners. Today’s high rates of chronic absenteeism can only be reduced if parents stress the importance of daily attendance with their own children. The mayor should launch a citywide, multi-agency campaign to promote the message that students must show up to school every day.

If the next mayor tackles the city’s education challenges seriously, he will inevitably face handwringing about the lingering effects of the pandemic and the White House’s efforts to rethink the federal role in education. A strong leader will tune out the excuses and stay focused on what matters: the city’s families and children.

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