America’s public schools used to be the one institution every parent could count on. You sent your kid to school, and the school taught your kid to read. That was the deal. It wasn’t complicated. But in city after city — wherever progressive leaders have held uninterrupted power for decades — that basic compact has collapsed. Not quietly, either. Spectacularly.
The playbook never changes. More spending. More administrators. More initiatives with glossy names and zero results. And when the test scores come back ugly? Bury them. Rename the problem. Congratulate yourself on “another incredible year.” The latest numbers from the nation’s largest school district suggest this strategy has produced something genuinely historic — just not the kind of history anyone should celebrate.
From The Post Millennial:
Nearly 900 New York City public schools are failing to adequately educate students, according to a new report that accuses education officials of allowing poor academic performance to become “normalized” through grade inflation, weak accountability and rising spending.
The report, released by the charter school network Success Academy and titled By Any Honest Measure, found that 906 public schools had fewer than half of their students proficient in math, reading or both on New York state exams last year. According to the analysis, roughly 43% of the city’s approximately 912,000 public school students attend those schools.
Stop and do the math on that. Over 400,000 children — sitting in classrooms named after Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, and Frederick Douglass — cannot demonstrate basic competence in reading or mathematics. At 503 of those schools, a majority of students are failing both subjects. The irony of a school called “Leaders of Tomorrow” producing kids who can’t pass a grade-level reading test practically writes itself.
A $40 billion reward for failure
New York City spent $40 billion on public education in 2024. That works out to roughly $36,000 per student. Read that figure again. Double the national average. And here’s the kicker: spending surged 67 percent over the previous decade, climbing from $24 billion to $40 billion, even as enrollment dropped by nearly 100,000 students. More money. Fewer kids. Worse outcomes.
The incentive structure is almost comically backwards. The deeper a school fails, the more categorical funding it unlocks. The worst-performing schools frequently receive the highest per-pupil spending. In what other sector of American life does catastrophic incompetence get rewarded with a bigger budget?
The cover-up is the quiet part
The spending is bad enough. The dishonesty is worse.
In 2015, New York’s state legislature struck the term “failing school” from official regulations. Too harsh, apparently. They replaced it with “struggling school” — because euphemisms fix everything. The state education department then stopped including exam results in its press statements entirely, burying the raw data inside a proprietary ACCESS database that requires technical expertise to query. They made it genuinely difficult for parents to find out whether their children’s school was functioning.
Consider this: 98 percent of New York City teachers are rated “effective” or “highly effective.” Meanwhile, 43 percent of students attend schools where most kids can’t pass basic assessments. Both of those things cannot be true simultaneously. One of them is a lie, and it isn’t the test scores.
At one failing school, a parent survey skipped the obvious question — are our children learning? — and instead asked whether race and ethnicity were “positively represented in the curriculum.” Ninety-four percent said yes. Congratulations. Their kids still can’t do long division.
On June 22, socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his schools chancellor released a cheerful video congratulating students on “another incredible year.” Incredible is one word for it.
Decades of progressive leadership built this mess
None of this materialized overnight. According to the report, a third of the 906 failing schools have been cycling through state accountability designations for over a decade — “receiving additional funds and support, merging, rebranding, relabeling, but never turned around.” This is the accumulated wreckage of generations of progressive governance in New York City.
Now it falls to Mamdani to address it. Don’t hold your breath. His administration is pouring billions into a class-size reduction mandate that evidence doesn’t support while maintaining a ban on new charter schools — the very institutions serving comparable students at lower cost with measurably better results. A socialist mayor blocking the one model that actually works isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
The Success Academy report closes with a line worth tattooing on the door of every school administrator’s office in New York: “What is missing is not money. What is missing is honesty.”
Four hundred thousand children are trapped in schools that cannot teach them to read. They don’t have another decade to wait while progressives rebrand failure as progress.
Key Takeaways
- NYC spends double the national average per student while nearly half attend failing schools.
- State officials banned the word “failing” and buried test data from parents and the public.
- Decades of progressive leadership produced 906 failing schools — and a socialist mayor is unlikely to reverse course.
- Charter schools deliver better results at lower cost, yet New York City bans new ones from opening.
Sources: The Post Millennial, Free Beacon
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