Money Can’t Buy ‘em Learning
New York’s Court of Appeals has just ordered the state to spend an additional $1.93 billion on NYC public schools. It is the resolution of a 13‐year lawsuit claiming that the city had been nickel‐and‐diming NYC students, but neither the plaintiffs nor the dissenting Chief Judge are satisfied.
The ruling “does not resolve the inadequate funding of the New York City public schools,” wrote Chief Judge Judith Kaye. Democratic City Councilman Robert Jackson, who helped organize the original lawsuit, called the decision “very disappointing because the amount of money that the court is talking about is not what’s needed.”
So what is the putative pittance that NYC spends per pupil in public schools, which will purportedly remain inadequate even after the injection of an additional $2 billion: about $14,000 per year. Back in 2003, NYC was already spending $13,640 per pupil annually – almost identical to the $13,826 per pupil average for the state as a whole. That was $341,000 a year, per classroom of 25 children. The current figure would of course be higher.
In the 1999–2000 school year, the average private school tuition in the United States was $4,689. Catholic schools, of which NYC has many, charge considerably less. And, as I found in a recent analysis of Arizona private schools, tuition typically comprises about 80 percent of total private school revenue. So private schools get by with thousands of dollars less per pupil annually than the supposedly underfunded government system, while offering far higher graduation rates and comparable or better student achievement. They even do a better job of promoting such social virtues as tolerance and civic engagement among their students.
How high will government school spending have to rise before the institution’s believers start to question their absolute faith in its beneficence? How many more children’s futures will they sacrifice to their ideological vanity before acknowledging that monopolies are just as dysfunctional in education as in every other field?
