Shrinking pupil population should prompt smart planning and consolidation, not hasty closures that harm families in need
According to the most recent data, New York’s public schools will enroll just over 900,000 students this fall, with projections that the number will continue to fall in the coming years. This will create significant challenges that the city must begin planning to address, and it must do so strategically.
Just 10 years ago, the system had 1.1 million students. The steady decline (notwithstanding a blip of an increase, the first in eight years, last year) is due to many factors, some of which are affecting cities across the country: a lower birth rate that is affecting enrollment at schools and colleges throughout the country; the rising cost of housing, which has forced many families with children to leave the city; work-from-home and COVID, which accelerated some family outmigration; and the loss of students to charter schools which now enroll 146,000 students or 15% of the school-age population. It is important to note that the decline in enrollment would have been substantially greater had the city not received tens of thousands of migrant families from Latin America, West Africa and other parts of the world.
Loss of students translates into a significant loss in revenue for the city’s schools, since the state and City’s funding formula for schools is based on the number of pupils enrolled. Although Mayor Eric Adams restored $127 million in funding last June, larger cuts are anticipated in the years ahead as enrollment continues to decline.
To make matters more complicated, the cost of serving students will continue to increase as salaries for teachers and staff rise, and the percentage of children from families in poverty grows. Currently, nearly a quarter of the city’s students are from families in poverty and over 100,000 of these are from families experiencing homelessness.
Since Adams, like mayors de Blasio and Bloomberg before him, insists on maintaining control over the Department of Education, it’s time for his administration to begin planning for shrinkage. In other U.S. cities, declining enrollment has brought poorly thought-through school closures that have made life worse, not better, for the low-income families most reliant on the public schools. Why not use the shrinking public school population as an opportunity to create better, consolidated schools?
With census data readily available, the City can predict which neighborhoods will experience the greatest losses. The DOE should begin planning to consolidate schools in neighborhoods where enrollment is projected to shrink. Experience teaches us that this is most likely to occur in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, which for years have suffered from a lack of good schools to choose from.
Proper planning combined with effective outreach to parents will allow the DOE to develop a smaller number of comprehensive schools that can offer more services and higher-quality programs in neighborhoods that desperately need them. The alternative is to put this decision off until it becomes a financial necessity, stranding families that depend on these flawed schools for vital services.
This would go against the trend to create small schools that started under Mayor Mike Bloomberg. At that time, enrollment was still growing and the city was flush with cash from Gates and other foundations that promoted small schools. However, small schools are expensive to operate and can offer fewer services to students, particularly as enrollment declines.
The DOE should begin planning to consolidate schools in neighborhoods where enrollment is projected to shrink. Current projections show that this is most likely to occur in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, which for years have suffered with a lack of good schools to choose from.
Closing schools will also make it difficult for the DOE to comply with the state’s relatively new class-size reduction law, in the midst of a five-year phase-in, which will ultimately require the city to cap classrooms to no more than 20 students in kindergarten to third grade. While the benefits of lower class size to student achievement are mixed, there is no doubt that it helps teachers who are frequently overwhelmed when working with large numbers of high-needs children. Skillful leadership from the mayor and legislature will be needed to figure out how to balance this mandate during a period of declining enrollment and revenue.
Policymakers must be forced to recognize that in this era of shrinkage, it’s time to let schools and some classrooms get larger — but to do so with services in place to ensure that they can meet student needs. Smart consolidation is far, far preferable to stupid closures.
The best charter schools in the city have shown us how to do this. From 2009-2012, I chaired SUNY’s charter school authorization committee. What I saw is that most of the educators who led these schools used planning funds to design schools that would be responsive to the needs of the parents they hoped to attract. Sports, music, theater and wellness centers, combined with state-of-the art pre-school and afterschool programs are generally attractive to parents and kids. If more such schools can be created, it will make it less likely that parents will complain about losing some of the shrinking schools now, especially if they have been underperforming.
School closures are always controversial — but given the likelihood that it will soon be unavoidable, the DOE can ease the pain by assuring parents that newly consolidated schools will be an improvement on what was available before.