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Avoid New York’s self-inflicted fiscal crisis

The Big Apple has a big enrollment problem. And given other choices the state and district have made, from holding schools harmless for lower enrollment to the small-class-size mandate from Albany, it’s becoming a fiscal problem as well.

“New city data shows there are 219 schools with fewer than 200 students, and the number of these tiny schools has been rising,” writes Jessica Gould for Gothamist. “About a dozen are in District 16, which includes Bed-Stuy. Overall, Northeast Brooklyn, Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx have especially high concentrations of small schools, making them the next potential battlegrounds over school closures or mergers.”

It would make sense that the early fiscal cracks would appear most prominently in New York City, with per pupil expenditures already cresting over $40,000. As 50CAN William E. Simon Policy Fellow Danyela Egorov has chronicled, New York’s enrollment crisis is deepened by two factors. First, a poorly conceived class size reduction law that caps classrooms at 20 to 25 students. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has spent $450 million on teacher hiring to meet the mandate and plans on spending an additional $1 billion. Second, there’s the city’s “Hold Harmless” provision, which divorces school funding from student enrollment, locking in pre-pandemic funding amounts no matter how many students they lose. 

What’s being done to address the problem? Among New York’s elected and appointed leaders, there’s plans for a lot of meetings and tried-and-true rhetoric signaling that they’re going to approach budgetary decisions with the community rather than making decisions for the community, but NeQuan McLean, president of the District 16 Community Education Council, lays out the reality: “We really understand that we’re going to have to close schools, we’re going to have to merge schools.”

Danyela Egorov greets the city beginning to take the enrollment crisis seriously as a positive step forward. “New York City has the catastrophic situation of declining enrollment while at the same time massive increase in educational spending. I haven’t been quiet about this in the media and in conversations with district leaders. An adjustment is inevitable. I’m glad they’re beginning to see it,” Danyela shared.

Take action on CTE program quality by skilling up educators and building accountability

Both the number of career programs and students enrolling in them have surged since the Covid-19 pandemic, with AdvanceCTE noting that over 11 million kids are now enrolled in programs across the country. 

As EdWeek points out, however, “that also means a massive struggle to recruit more specialized educators, or tap existing teachers to earn new certifications, particularly in the fastest-growing areas of healthcare, advanced manufacturing and information technology (including artificial intelligence).”

Across the country, districts’ CTE leaders are trying to confront the challenge. “Technology and engineering just move a lot faster than we do in education,” Aaron Williams, Kenosha, Wisconsin’s CTE coordinator, told EdWeek. “When we look at career and technical programming, we’re slow at moving big systems. We have to focus on teaching the essence of industries and then just sprinkle in the things that are moving forward as we can.”

In other words, with the explosive growth of these programs, the number of people who can successfully train the next generation is being diluted across a growing number of programs. This has led some leaders to argue that an entirely new approach is going to be more effective: outsourcing CTE from schools to employers. “The biggest challenge [in career education] is always that people with the most relevant experience and skills in an industry can make more money outside of teaching,” the superintendent of California’s Cajun Valley School District told EdWeek. “It doesn’t make sense to ask most people who are successful in industry to give up what they’re doing to make a percentage of their private industry salary to be in public education. So we rely on industry and business to do the teaching.”

Assessing the quality is also important, John Arnold of Arnold Ventures argues in a new opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal. The solution, for Arnold, is infusing the system with accountability, including outcomes-based contracting. “What is scalable to other job training is the rigorous accountability of sector programs. Federal, state and local governments have created a plethora of overlapping and disconnected job-training initiatives—a nonsystem destined to produce nonresults. What this mess of programs needs is a set of clear and ambitious standards, incentives to meet them, and consequences for falling short. When Arnold Ventures reviewed all states’ official 2024 plans for job training through the main federally funded workforce system, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, we found only 13 that included explicit minimum criteria for wage outcomes. In effect, programs can keep getting funded even if their participants stay in or near poverty after they finish.

Key Resources

Students at microschools are progressing at the same rate on i-Ready assessments as public school students nationwide, despite serving a much higher population of students with learning needs, writes Linda Jacobson for The 74.

Research from AEI indicates that low-income students are only half as likely to play varsity sports as their higher-income peers, and all students were significantly more likely to play sports when enrolled in smaller schools.

Bell-to-bell cell phone bans are working, writes Brookings in a new report based on a survey of US teens.

A new Fordham survey of 1,100 high school students finds that illicit tech use is rampant and the prevalence of AI use is undermining both learning and the high school experience.

Urban Institute released the Education-to-Workforce Framework data tool, compiling data from all 50 states on the effectiveness of workforce programs, from career pathways to college enrollment to financial aid.