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Heed a Big Apple warning on expanding budgets

New York City’s unbalanced budget, which Mayor Zohran Mamdani called “a crisis of historic magnitude” last week, has a diagnosis from the Atlantic: it’s the schools.

“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,” writes Marc Novicoff. “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.”

Novicoff links the problem to three major factors:

• Too much money is being spent on teacher salaries to meet class-size mandates.
• A rapidly rising special education population, with many parents opting out of the public system and hiring lawyers to obtain, on average, $102,000 per year for services and private school tuition.
• Systemic restrictions in the form of “hold harmless” policies that prevent sensible reductions in school budgets when enrollment declines.

Readers of the Roundup will be well familiar with the first contributing factor, as it has been a common refrain from 50CAN Policy Fellow Danyela Egorov as she’s worked to help New Yorkers understand the actual education value they’re getting for the tax expenditure.

The second factor reveals how special education policies can blow huge holes in district budgets when they don’t come with reasonable safeguards. The issue at hand involves “Carter Cases,” legal cases that are brought when families of children with special needs believe that the local public schools have failed to provide a Free Appropriate Public Education. This allows parents to send their students to private schools, with the state reimbursing tuition. This approach can work in moderation but in New York, spending on Carter Cases rose from $45 million in 2005 to $1.3 billion last year: a 2,788% increase. In a New York State Education Department analysis from 2022, researchers found that 98% of the state’s Carter Cases were filed by families living in New York City.

The final factor is the policies that keep a solution to the education budget at arm’s length. “Under a policy known as ‘hold harmless,’ the city government does not reduce a school’s budget as its enrollment declines. Instead, the funding keeps flowing even as it is spent on fewer and fewer students,” Novicoff writes. New York’s schools budget is exploding as the district tries to maintain compliance with this unrealistic approach to school finance.

Make improvements in implementation of the science of reading

At Fordham, David Griffith and Brian Fitzpatrick have a new report, based on the findings of a nationally representative survey of K-3 teachers, that examines the science of reading progress across the country. The big finding? There’s still a great deal of work left to do when it comes to implementation.

“At least a quarter of teachers—and at least a third of those in disadvantaged settings—are not fully committed to the science of reading,” the authors write. For teachers in high-poverty schools, 41% did not express a preference for phonics-based instruction, compared to 26% in low-poverty schools.

That’s a major problem because it’s the students in high-poverty schools that need instruction aligned with the science of reading the most. The 2024 NAEP found a nearly 30-point scale score gap in reading, the rough equivalent of three grade levels, between 4th grade students who were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and those who were not eligible.

Part of the discrepancy may be attributed to a lack of pedagogical knowledge among new teachers. A 2025 report from EdTrust-Midwest found that “students who learn in school districts with the highest concentrations of poverty are nearly three times more likely than their peers in other districts to learn from a beginning teacher with fewer than three years of teaching experience.” That puts pressure on schools of education at colleges and universities to ensure students are emerging with strong literacy pedagogy, and the Fordham researchers found the opposite, alongside a prevalence of low-quality curriculum.

That’s a major problem because it’s the students in high-poverty schools that need instruction aligned with the science of reading the most. The 2024 NAEP found a nearly 30-point scale score gap in reading, the rough equivalent of three grade levels, between 4th grade students who were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and those who were not eligible.

Part of the discrepancy may be attributed to a lack of pedagogical knowledge among new teachers. A 2025 report from EdTrust-Midwest found that “students who learn in school districts with the highest concentrations of poverty are nearly three times more likely than their peers in other districts to learn from a beginning teacher with fewer than three years of teaching experience.” That puts pressure on schools of education at colleges and universities to ensure students are emerging with strong literacy pedagogy, and the Fordham researchers found the opposite, alongside a prevalence of low-quality curriculum.

A note of progress here is that efforts in states to provide professional development on the science of reading for teachers are already having an effect, but it’s clear that schools of education are often failing to instruct the next generation of teachers on best practices for literacy.

Key Resources

“We’re adrift, it’s killing us politically and it’s killing our kids,” Arne Duncan told The 74’s Kevin Mahnken as part of a sweeping critique over his Democratic Party’s lack of vision on education.

From online courses to tutors to microschools, homeschool parents are drawing upon a number of resources as they design a customized education for their children, Johns Hopkins researcher Angela Watson tells The 74.

At Urban Institute, Kristin Blagg offers a new study that finds districts serving a higher share of students from low-income families are more vulnerable to federal funding cuts.

Brookings identifies the core design factors that are common among exemplary “free college” state grants, including early eligibility notices and ensuring that state dollars are applied first, before federal aid.