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New York City pours roughly $40 billion into public education while spending roughly $36,000 per pupil, and yet its schools are collapsing under the weight of bureaucracy and broken priorities. That level of spending would be unconscionable if it produced results, but instead it masks a system more interested in protecting jobs and union power than teaching children basic reading and math.
An analysis compiled by Success Academy found a staggering reality: 906 city schools — nearly half the system — had fewer than half their students passing math, reading, or both, enrolling about 409,379 students, or 43 percent of the city’s public-school children. These are not marginal failures; hundreds of schools have been stuck in the same destructive cycle for years while receiving more money and more excuses.
Eva Moskowitz and her researchers did what the city bureaucracy refuses to do: assemble the data and show where the rot runs deepest. Their report makes plain that dumping more money into a system rife with low expectations, watered-down standards, and institutional amnesia won’t produce literate, numerate children — it only props up a failing status quo.
The report also exposes policy follies that make the problem worse, from class-size mandates that will cost the city billions with no credible evidence of learning gains to a funding model that props up shrinking and even vacant schools. While enrollment has fallen, spending has ballooned, and politicians applaud themselves for measures that redistribute taxpayer dollars without demanding real accountability.
Consequences are predictable and cruel: chronic absenteeism sits at epidemic levels, remediation rates plunge students into remedial tracks in college, and whole cohorts are being passed along without mastery of grade-level skills. This is not an abstract policy debate — it is a moral failure that punishes the most vulnerable children and betrays hardworking parents and taxpayers.
Conservatives who love this country should be furious, not fatalistic. Real solutions start with high standards, transparent accountability, and empowering parents to choose what’s best for their kids — including charter schools, vouchers, and other forms of school choice that force competition and innovation. The Success Academy analysis shows the scale of the crisis; now it’s up to elected leaders and citizens to stop funding failure and start investing in results.
New Yorkers and Americans everywhere must demand an education system that honors merit and excellence rather than one that protects adult interests at children’s expense. Taxpayers won’t tolerate hollow slogans while half a million kids fall through the cracks, and parents shouldn’t have to beg a city bureaucracy to do what any responsible parent would: teach their children to read, write, and do math. The time for excuses is over — it’s time to choose students over systems.
