New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, will soon confront an ordeal that might finally knock that trademark smile off his face: balancing the budget. The city is projected to have a $5 billion deficit this year and is required by law to make up for that shortfall by raising revenue, cutting spending, or both. Mamdani has proposed large tax increases paired with modest cuts to city programs. But getting to $5 billion won’t be easy, in part because the biggest portion of the city’s budget is considered untouchable.
I refer not to the police department or the transit system, but to the department of education. It costs about $40 billion a year, making up a third of the city’s gargantuan budget. New York City spends more money per pupil—north of $40,000, according to one recent estimate—than any of the other 100 largest public-school districts in the country, and more than twice as much as the median district. Meanwhile, it generates educational outcomes that are average at best. According to federal data, its per-pupil spending is nearly 50 percent higher than Los Angeles’s and Chicago’s (the second- and fourth-largest districts), and 150 percent higher than Miami’s (the third-largest). Per pupil is the key phrase here. New York City’s public-school system is the largest in the country, but that’s not the problem. The problem, actually, is that the student body is small relative to the resources devoted to it, and shrinking fast—but the city and state governments won’t cut education spending accordingly. As long as that’s the case, the city’s financial situation will grow only harder to manage.
Where does all the money go? The simple answer is that it goes to the teachers. According to a cross-district analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, New York City spent 61 percent of its education budget on instructor compensation in 2023. Los Angeles spent 52 percent on teachers; Miami, 43 percent.
From the October 2019 issue: When the culture war comes for the kids
Surprisingly, given those figures, New York City teachers are far from the highest paid in the country. A starting New York City teacher makes about $69,000 a year, whereas a new teacher in Seattle makes $74,730. A first-year Dallas teacher makes $65,000, but the cost of living in that city is significantly lower than in New York. And unlike the New York teacher, the Dallas teacher will not be required to get a master’s degree within five years of starting. Closer to home: The median teacher in the New York suburbs of Long Island and the Hudson Valley earns 14 percent more money than their counterpart in the city.
New York manages to spend so much on its teachers without paying them all that much by having so many of them. New York City’s pupil-to-teacher ratio is lower than that of each of the next 80 largest school districts. According to the New York City Independent Budget Office, that number stands at one instructor for everynine pupils. (This includes all pedagogic staff, including specialists, guidance counselors, and speech pathologists—not just the classroom teachers.) Melissa Arnold Lyon, a public-policy professor at SUNY Albany, told me that small class sizes are often the natural result of a dance between teachers’ unions and school districts. “The teachers’ union is coming in asking for higher salaries,” she said. “The city will say, ‘We don’t have enough money for that salary ask. What else would you take?’” Small class sizes, which make a teacher’s job easier, are one answer.