{"id":411943,"date":"2025-11-29T02:54:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T02:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/411943\/"},"modified":"2025-11-29T02:54:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T02:54:14","slug":"face-the-facts-about-nycs-plummeting-public-school-enrollment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/411943\/","title":{"rendered":"Face the facts about NYC’s plummeting public-school enrollment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Enrollment in New York City\u2019s regular public schools<\/a> fell 2% this year, and is sure to keep on dropping \u2014 but our political leaders\u2019 most likely response will be deep denial.<\/p>\n

Baseline enrollment in the Department of Education system is well into a long-term decline, dictated by a dropping city birthrate and by an ongoing exodus of younger families; the now-ending migrant crisis only concealed the trend.<\/p>\n

The obvious, correct response is to right-size city schools: Close down some whole buildings and reduce total staff sizes (teachers and administrators); it\u2019s a chance to leave decrepit buildings and improve the overall quality of the instructional force.<\/p>\n

Of course the United Federation of Teachers<\/a> fears the change: Fewer teachers means less income from their dues \u2014 and a balance-of-power shift as retirees\u2019 role in electing UFT leaders increases.<\/p>\n

Getting the state to impose ever-smaller class sizes (and therefore force the city to pay more teachers to educate fewer students) was one UFT response; since pre-K staffers are also in the union, the UFT\u2019s salivating at the mayor-elect\u2019s universal day care plans, too.<\/p>\n

But it won\u2019t be enough: The number of new students registering for school this summer was down 7% from the year before.<\/p>\n

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Parents are giving up on the city, and on the DOE: Only charter public schools, which operate outside the bureaucracy and mostly without UFT members \u2014 and so reliably actually educate their students \u2014 are resisting the decline.<\/p>\n

At some point, every other interest that depends on city spending is going to notice how the DOE consumes an ever-larger share of the pie \u2014 it\u2019s already more than a third of the city budget! \u2014 to serve an ever-smaller population.<\/p>\n

Even a proud Democratic Socialist may start asking some tough questions.<\/p>\n

Mayor-elect Zohran Mandani<\/a> would be wise to use this reckoning to upgrade the public schools: If they can\u2019t deliver value, families need to pay out of pocket for their kids to learn \u2014 the reverse of making the city more affordable.<\/p>\n

If he lets the vested interests continue to milk the system dry, he\u2019s going to run out of taxpayers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Enrollment in New York City\u2019s regular public schools fell 2% this year, and is sure to keep on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":411944,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,17452,4691,15669,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,40852,3060,38597,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,5301],"class_list":{"0":"post-411943","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-department-of-education","10":"tag-editorial","11":"tag-government-spending","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkcity","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-opinion","19":"tag-public-schools","20":"tag-schools","21":"tag-united-federation-of-teachers","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-us","27":"tag-usa","28":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115630733009003879","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}