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As Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to fill his $5.4 billion to $7.1 billion budget hole, he has so far shown little willingness to cut Department of Education spending.
But he’ll never balance the books if he keeps throwing good money after bad in the city’s public schools.
Mamdani’s budget sets aside $38 billion for DOE’s operations — $3 billion, or 8%, more than the current fiscal year.
Education already accounts for about a third of the city’s budget, and the Citizens Budget Commission estimates that per-pupil spending now exceeds $42,000, the most expensive among large urban districts.
Yet while enrollment has fallen 12% since 2020 — even with the addition of some 50,000 migrant students — and city births have dropped 20% since 2000, the DOE’s budget keeps on growing.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
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Danyela Souza Egorov is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. John Ketcham is a legal policy fellow and director of Cities at the Manhattan Institute.