New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to trim the Department of Education's sprawling budget. Instead, the city's newly adopted spending plan hands the DOE $680 million more than Mamdani himself proposed, bringing total education spending to $38.6 billion in a school system that is losing students by the tens of thousands every year.
The City Council approved Mamdani's $126 billion budget on June 29. But the fine print told a different story than the mayor's campaign rhetoric. Budget detail documents, released without fanfare late last week, revealed the DOE's share had ballooned by nearly $4 billion over the prior fiscal year. The department now commands nearly one-third of all city spending, for a system that enrolls roughly 780,000 students and where close to 300,000 of them are chronically absent.
At approximately $49,500 per pupil, New York City spends 50 percent more per student than the next two largest urban districts, Los Angeles and Chicago, according to federal data. And the returns on that investment are dismal.
Where did the extra $680 million go? At least $400 million was allocated to keep funding flat in schools where enrollment has declined, in other words, paying the same amount for fewer students. About $100 million in school cleaning costs had been quietly left off Mamdani's executive budget proposal and was added back in. The City Council tacked on roughly $42 million more, including money for social and emotional support programs and art activities.
Even that accounting does not fully explain the gap between what the mayor proposed and what the city adopted. The remaining balance is unaccounted for in the publicly released documents.
Andrew Rein, who leads the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscally conservative watchdog group, put the problem plainly:
"Not only is budgeting to pay for students that don't exist unfair, it means you miss the opportunity to spend those dollars on programs to help New Yorkers... or building reserves that help New Yorkers weather a rainy day."
That critique lands harder when you look at the enrollment trajectory. The latest demographic projections show New York City's school system losing another 153,000 students over the next decade. The budget is heading in one direction. The student body is heading in the other.
Shortly after winning the 2025 mayoral race, Mamdani told the New York Post he would cut the DOE budget by reining in contract and consultant spending. At the SOMOS conference in Puerto Rico on November 6, he laid out his thinking in specific terms:
"When you look at the DOE with a $40 billion budget, about $10 billion goes to contracts and consultants, some of those are for incredibly important things, and some of that spending is also spending that can be reduced when you take a real look at the duplicative processes."
He added: "We have to always ensure that every dollar of that budget is being spent effectively."
Seven months later, the budget he signed does the opposite. The DOE's spending climbed by almost $4 billion. No public accounting has been offered for which contracts or consultants were reduced, if any. Neither City Hall nor the DOE responded to requests for comment.
The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the "Nation's Report Card", paints a grim picture of what nearly $39 billion buys in New York City classrooms. Only one-third of the city's fourth-graders scored proficient in math. Just 28 percent were proficient in reading. Among eighth-graders, the numbers were worse: 23 percent proficient in math and 29 percent in reading.
Nearly 35 percent of the city's students, roughly 300,000 kids, are chronically absent. That means the city is spending record sums on a system where more than a third of students do not regularly show up, and among those who do, fewer than one in three can read or do math at grade level.
No amount of budget padding fixes that. More money has been the default answer in New York City education policy for decades, and the results speak for themselves.
The DOE's windfall stands in sharp contrast to how Mamdani treated public safety. His final budget cut $29 million from the NYPD. He also walked back a promise to add 580 new police officers, a reversal that delighted his allies in the Democratic Socialists of America, who had rallied against the hiring. The progressive caucus on the City Council gave Mamdani overwhelming support after the cops were dropped.
The NYPD cut was sprung on City Council Speaker Julie Menin late on a Monday night, after the budget had already received a green light from both sides. Menin also struck a deal with Mamdani to severely curtail spending on any expansion of housing vouchers, another broken promise that has drawn fire from advocacy groups and even fellow Democrats.
As the New York Post reported during the budget standoff, Mamdani refused to fund the expansion of the CityFHEPS housing voucher program despite pledging to do so on the campaign trail. He continued a court battle against the expansion that his predecessor, Eric Adams, had started. The CityFHEPS expansion could cost the city $3 to $4 billion per year and bring up to 50,000 new families into the voucher program, but Mamdani chose to spend that money elsewhere, including on a DOE budget that no one in City Hall has publicly defended in detail.
Bronx Councilwoman Althea Stevens was the only Democrat to vote against the $126 billion budget. Her objection centered on the distribution of resources:
"Equity cannot simply be a word we use in speeches or campaign slogans. Equity means directing resources where the needs are greatest."
Stevens argued the Bronx did not receive a fair share. Her dissent highlights a deeper problem with the budget process: the details were released after the vote, not before. Council members may not have been fully aware of the additional half-billion dollars flowing to the DOE when they cast their votes on June 29.
That raises a straightforward question of governance. If the City Council did not know the full scope of the DOE increase before approving the budget, who made the decision to add it, and why was it disclosed only after the fact?
City Hall has not answered. The DOE has not answered. The budget documents were released without a press conference, without a briefing, and without explanation.
Mamdani campaigned as a fiscal reformer on education spending. He identified $10 billion in DOE contracts and consultants as a target. He promised new cops. He promised housing vouchers. He promised accountability.
What he delivered was a $38.6 billion education budget for a shrinking school system, a $29 million cut to the police department, a broken housing promise, and a budget process so opaque that the details were buried until after the vote.
The progressive caucus got what it wanted. The DSA got what it wanted. The DOE bureaucracy got what it wanted. Taxpayers got the bill. And 300,000 chronically absent students got nothing that will change the trajectory of their education.
At $49,500 per student, New York City is not underfunding its schools. It is misspending on a historic scale, and the mayor who promised to fix it just made it worse.
When every dollar is supposed to be spent effectively, spending $680 million more than you planned on fewer students than you had is a strange way to start.
