Education Special: How to Fix New York's Schools
More money won't solve the structural issues that need addressing.
This week, much time was spent criticizing the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) after just 3 Black students were admitted to Stuyvesant, one of the city’s most prestigious selective high schools, with little focus on the many reasons why.
The media, including the New York Times and Chalkbeat, the outlet covering education in the city, also failed to give proper attention to the many reasons why Black and Hispanic students may be so woefully underrepresented. Among them are the large disparities in educational achievement before high school, compounded by attendance issues that start in kindergarten, and the fact that many of the high achievers are enrolled in charter schools or get scholarships to attend private schools.
While there are many characteristics of students that may hinder their academic success, such as limited English proficiency, a disability, or poverty, the city takes these into account when determining a school’s quality — its performance as well as its impact on students’ achievement.1
About half of Black students attend schools deemed less than “Good” by the city .2
To better understand what that means, I mapped some of the data provided by the city’s Department of Education on middle and high school quality, students’ elementary and middle school math proficiency, and the share of Black students as a share of a school’s total enrollment. The charts speak for themselves (and are best viewed on desktop).
The mayor acknowledges there are issues to be addressed and that rigor must be part of the solution. “[W]e know that there’s so much more work to be done,” Mamdani said at a press conference, before praising Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels for his “emphasis on addressing racial inequities and doing so while providing the strongest and [most] rigorous education that is possible for New York City students.”
In a comprehensive new brief on how to improve the city’s schools, released this week, the Manhattan Institute’s fellows identify the structural and operational issues in need of reform and offer pragmatic solutions to help the mayor in his efforts.
That and more below.
An Education Agenda for New York City: NYC Schools Need Significant Change, Not More Money
New York City’s school system faces deep structural issues—marked by falling enrollment, rising costs, and inconsistent academic outcomes—that cannot be solved simply by increasing funding, my colleagues Ray Domanico, Danyela Souza Egorov, and Jennifer Weber write in a new Manhattan Institute brief.
To achieve better results with its existing resources, the city must adapt to its smaller student population and focus on closing the achievement gap between its best and worst schools. They advocate for consolidating under-enrolled schools, redistricting school district boundaries, reinstating strict quality monitoring and accountability, and annually reviewing special education placements.
Additionally, the city should seek to improve student outcomes by prioritizing elementary instruction, expanding specialized and technical career pathways, and pairing restorative justice policies with structured, behavior-based discipline among many other recommendations.
High Expectations
City Councilmember Lincoln Restler took to X earlier this week calling for “state legislation to modify the admissions process” at the city’s specialized high schools, writing that “A single test should never be the only factor deciding who gets in & who doesn’t.”
The city’s eight specialized high schools currently admit students based on the results of the three-hour SHSAT, blind to other criteria.
Bringing in holistic measures like middle school grades, extracurriculars, or interviews would do the exact opposite of promoting fairness, Manhattan Institute’s Wai Wah Chin writes in City Journal. Instead, it would “inject subjectivity and bias and favor those with economic privileges” who have the resources to polish their resumes.
Rather than diluting the standards, Chin insists that the city’s leadership needs to step up and build a system of “abundance, rigor, merit—and accountability.” In her view, the real path to equity is in raising the floor for everyone.
“New York City’s students would be far better served,” she writes, “by improved elementary instruction, expanded high-quality charters, honest grading, and an unapologetic culture of excellence.”
Attendance Matters
Part of academic success involves showing up for school in the first place. “Students cannot learn effectively if they are not present in school, and chronic absenteeism is reflected in test scores,” my colleague Danyela Souza Egorov writes.
While absenteeism is a serious system-wide issue, the high absenteeism rates among Black and Hispanic students should be a cause for alarm, since these attendance issues start in kindergarten and contribute to the great variation in educational outcomes among the city’s ethnic groups.
Extra! Extra!
This week, the city released its Rental Ripoff Report, recommending 23 policy actions with the goal of protecting renters and modernizing housing oversight by formally recognizing tenant unions, requiring landlords to disclose the use of AI in rental listings, and upgrading building registration systems, as well as aggressively targeting repeat offender landlords through inspections, targeted programs, and litigation.
Counterfeit goods peddlers vs Mamdani — 1:0, as the administration fails to clean up the notorious stretch of Canal Street. “Just 30 minutes after the raid, they [the illicit peddlers] were set up and back in business,” the New York Post reports. Nicole Gelinas, Rafael Malangua, and I discussed the situation on Canal Street on our podcast a couple of months ago.
Westside homeless encampment by the Intrepid spans 12 blocks, with residents even tapping into utility poles as the city slow-walks enforcement, the New York Post reports.
Governor Kathy Hochul announced a moratorium on data centers in New York, something MI’s Sean Speer calls a “huge mistake”, while Shawn Regan explains that it is not data centers so much as bad policies that are raising your electric bills.
MI’s Stephen Eide looked back at how the internet changed New York City and what that might mean for the impact of AI.
Benjamin Schneider writes about the future of New York’s historic preservation movement in Planetizen.
To better understand how an individual school is performing, you can review individual schools here, and to see how the Instruction and Performance rating is calculated, you can check here. This data provides a much more comprehensive review of how well a school is doing in absolute terms, compared to citywide data, and against comparable schools, including trends over time across a wide spectrum of metrics.
This dataset excludes K-8 schools, many of which are charter schools educating predominantly Black and Hispanic students, because the data is not broken out by the city. Data used can be found here for elementary and middle schools, and here for high schools.