New York City public schools shed another 22,000 students this year, with enrollment plunging 2.4%, the steepest decline in four years, according to preliminary Department of Education data — and experts say this trend will only get worse under incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The startling new numbers follow a post-Covid trend that has seen families hit the exits over the past five years, adding up to a 12.2% decline over the last five years.
Insiders see no end to the carnage.
“We are bleeding kids,” a city high school teacher told the Post.
At the start of the 2019-2020 school year, 1,002,200 kids were enrolled in NYC public schools. Today, the total has dipped to 844,400 — a stunning 117,800 drop.
Despite the exodus, the DOE budget has ballooned nearly $7 billion since 2019 to $40 billion this year.
“Every year is the same story, New York City public schools keep losing students, their budget grows, the per-pupil funding grows and we get the same mediocre results. It is a system that is failing,” said parent and Manhattan Institute Fellow Danyela Souza Egorov.
K-12 schools lost 18,411 students, while pre-K lost 4,555 pupils from the previous year.
Only 3K — programs for 3-year-olds — grew this year, adding 1,118 new students, the stats show. The surge could be fueled by working parents increasingly returning to the office.
Only 2023 saw an increase in students over the past five years — up 0.6% — which officials attributed to the migrant influx.
“We’re in a vicious cycle where there are no great schools, so people move and the schools get even worse,” Egorov said.
And that’s precisely what parents fear, they told The Post.
Lack of rigor was the number one reason NYC parents educate their kids outside of the public school system — with 41% of parents looking for a more intensive education for their kids, according to an April Department of Education survey.
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has vowed to phase out the city’s gifted and talented programs in kindergarten, a move Egorov said would drive more parents out of NYC.
A fed-up Queens dad said city schools fall short on teaching the fundamentals.
“I’m sending my son to private daycare instead of 3K,” he said.
Two-thirds of the city’s fourth graders are not proficient in math, and even fewer proficient in reading.
The No. 1 reason driving parents in the five borough to educate their kids outside of the NYC public school system was lack of rigor, according to an April survey released by the Department of Education.
Yiatin Chu, Co-President of Parents Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, or P.L.A.C.E., attributed the enrollment decline to an “anti-merit trend” in NYC education policy.
“We’ve seen an anti-merit trend in favor of more subjective factors,” she said. “With a Mamdani administration, I don’t see it going back.”
Enrollment in publicly funded but independently run charter schools rose to 150,000 students last year, up 14% since 2019.
New York City’s population shrank by 300,000 from April 2020 to July 2024 according to census data, and Chu says education spurred people to leave the city.
“You’re seeing families moving out to Long Island to buy their way into a better school,” Chu said.
Declining public schools could spell disaster for quality of life in the Big Apple, as fleeing families decrease the tax base, Egorov warns.
“It’s going to be harder to provide more services,” she said. “In the end, only families who can afford to live here have the resources to go outside the public school system.”
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