A report highlighted in the New York Post says that 300,000 New York City public school students did not show up to school last year.
“Teachers’ unions de-emphasized the importance of coming to school after COVID, which sent a signal to students that attending class was optional,” Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital in a statement. “This continues to have devastating effects on student learning outcomes.”
The New York Post story reported that “The number of K-12 students deemed chronically absent — or out for 10 days or more in the 180-day school year — has spiked from 26.5% in the 2018-19 term preceding the COVID-19 pandemic to 34.8% in 2023-24,” according to a study they covered exclusively for The Manhattan Institute.
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Those numbers would suggest that over 300,000 of 900,000 students in the New York City Public School system were absent.
Spending for students in New York school districts, however, has vastly increased.
A January report by the Citizens Budget Commission found that “New York’s school districts are set to spend $89 billion in the 2024-25 school year—$36,293 per student. Over the past four years, total spending per student has grown by 21.0 percent, or 4.9 percent annually.”
Even with the large increases in funding, proficiency levels for subjects including math and reading are also suffering.
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The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, found that last year, only 33% of NYC’s fourth grade students were proficient in math, compared with 23% in 2022 and 32% in 2019. Twenty-eight percent of the city’s fourth graders were proficient in reading.
Twenty-three percent of eighth graders in the Big Apple were proficient in math and 29% were proficient in reading, with reading up slightly from 25% and 27% in 2022.
Burke told Fox News Digital that the increase in spending coupled with the decrease in proficiency “troubling.”
“The fact that New York now spends $36,000 per student per year on K-12 education — a breathtaking amount of taxpayer money – makes chronic absenteeism that much more troubling,” she said. “New York is now spending $89 billion annually on public education — more than the GDP of Croatia — yet academic outcomes remain flat. Fewer than 3 in 10 eighth graders can read proficiently — a statistic that should keep New Yorkers up at night.”
She added that “New York families would be far better served by the state giving them access to a portion of the $36,000 spent per year to pay to attend a school of choice. These new numbers add urgency to the need for universal school choice in NY.”
President Donald Trump, who campaigned on eliminating the Department of Education during the 2024 presidential election, is expected to issue an executive order calling on the new Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, who was confirmed Monday as the 13th Secretary of Education, to begin the process of abolishing the department.
A press secretary for NYC Public Schools told Fox News Digital in a statement, “Since the pandemic, New York City Public Schools has reduced chronic absenteeism over the past three years thanks to strategies that encourage student attendance, including ‘Every Student Every Day’ – providing a range of services and support in and out of school, working in collaboration with schools, city agencies, shelters, foster care agencies, and community-based organizations.”
The press secretary added, “We also offer professional development to staff and targeted supports to community schools. Additionally, we are supporting districts and schools to help families access food, clothing, and hygiene supplies, as well as counseling, and health services, all of which are barriers to regular attendance. There is much more work to be done to reduce chronic absenteeism, but we are on the right path.”
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