Wai Wah Chin writes for the New York Post about the latest example of teacher unions’ negative impact on education.
They don’t teach this in New York City public schools, but: Good morning, children, the teachers union is adding to the city’s looming fiscal crisis.
The city reached an agreement this week with the union for a new expensive contract.
Everyone knows there are budget deficits, except, it seems, the union and the elected officials behind them. The city’s new contract — which gives teachers raises and bonuses of up to 20% and retroactively to 2022 — is particularly rich when taxpaying companies, from local McDonald’s to major corporations such as Morgan Stanley and Meta are making major layoffs.
At a $37.5 billion total budget, the city Department of Education spending per student is higher than any other system in the world, let alone country.
The public-district schools’ per student spending is $36,000, against the per public-charter-school-student cost of $18,000. Once the smaller-class-size law Gov. Hochul signed is implemented, it will in effect give more compensation to teachers as a group and raise costs per student in district schools.
Meanwhile, study after study shows that on average, the public charters do better academically than public district schools. Out of the top 25 city public schools in math, 23 are charter schools. City charter schools, mostly with minority and poor students, do not use union teachers.
We clearly need more school choice, more options as families weigh where to send their children to school or whether to leave the school system or city altogether. New York was able to get only 14 “new” charter schools from the zombie licenses recently, what’s just a recycling rather than addition of schools. Again, elected officials, under the pressure of the union loathing competition, would not allow for what families want and need — the charter cap to be raised.
