Troubling news keeps piling up for New York’s public schools. Kids keep performing poorly on standardized tests, fueling a race to the exits by parents seeking better opportunities.
That’s led to school enrollments well below capacity. Yet these schools remain open, draining dollars — without boosting achievement.
For taxpayers — and parents seeking better schools — it’s pure madness.
Take the just-released National Assessment of Educational Progress (a k a, the “nation’s report card”): It finds just 23% of eighth-graders in the city are proficient in math, and 29% in reading.
Only a third of fourth-graders are proficient in math, and even fewer, 28%, in reading.
Statewide, the best result was just 37% of fourth-graders proficient in math.
With such dismal results, it’s not surprising that New York public schools are also losing students at some of the fastest rates in the nation.
Data released by the National Center for Education Statistics show the state lost 5.9% of its students between the fall of 2019 and 2023, more than all but four other states.
It lost 3.6 percentage points more students than did neighboring Pennsylvania, for instance, and even 0.7 points more than California.
Over 80% of New York school districts are still below their pre-pandemic enrollment levels.
Given New York’s demographic trends, including fewer kindergarten enrollments and lower birth rates, student counts are unlikely to rebound in the years to come.
As such, lawmakers and taxpayers must closely monitor whether school districts are closing under-capacity schools when necessary.
New Reason Foundation research shows New York’s public school districts closed fewer schools after the pandemic and only returned to their pre-COVID closure levels last school year.
Despite a loss of 215,000 students, only 104 traditional public schools were closed between the 2017-2018 and 2023-2024 school years.
In 2024, New York closed just 16 public schools statewide. The city closed none.
Other states with far smaller populations closed nearly as many, and some even more.
Among the 15 states we examined, for example, Colorado (with less than a third New York’s population) closed 26 public schools in 2024, even though it lost a lower percentage of its students than New York.
Iowa shuttered 12 schools last year, and South Dakota closed 11. So it’s clear New York is not properly adjusting to its lower enrollment levels.
New York districts have been able to delay closures because the Legislature regularly approves massive spending increases.
The latest federal data shows New York schools receive $35,902 in per-student revenues — more than any other state.
Similarly, leading the nation’s largest school districts, New York City schools receive $44,790 per child.
The Empire Center reports state aid alone doubled from $7,264 to $14,304 per pupil over the last 12 years.
These large spending hikes make it easier for districts to avoid making tough decisions about school closures.
State lawmakers even maintained a “hold harmless” funding policy so school districts would not receive less funding than the prior year — even if they lost large numbers of kids.
Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab estimates that districts with under-enrolled schools can save about 4% a year by closing one of every 15 schools.
Research from Michigan State’s Center for Local Government Finance suggests the savings can be up to 15% of a district’s annual spending per student for every closed school.
True, school closures are politically fraught. Shuttering schools often requires navigating through difficult bureaucratic processes and facing intense backlash from teacher unions and parents.
So it may be understandable that state and local leaders drag their feet to right-size under-enrolled schools.
Yet, as disruptive and politically difficult as it may be, delaying a school’s closure is financially unsustainable when hundreds of thousands of students have been lost.
Instead of keeping significantly under-capacity schools afloat with billions of dollars in additional funding year after year, local and state leaders must restore some fiscal sanity to New York’s public education system by consolidating under-enrolled public schools.
Christian Barnard is an education policy analyst and assistant director of education reform at Reason Foundation.
