Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed executive budget for fiscal year 2027, released January 20th, earmarks nearly $40 billion in state funds for K–12 education. Her proposal appears with New York leading the nation in per-pupil spending for the nineteenth consecutive year.
Albany cites these nation-leading expenditures as evidence of the state’s “longstanding commitment” to giving students “the opportunity to excel.” But big spending has not meaningfully improved the metric that matters: student achievement.
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Per-pupil spending in New York State already exceeds $36,000 annually. If Hochul’s budget passes, New York will have increased state school aid by about $10 billion over the past five years. It will bring total state school aid to $39.3 billion—the largest in New York’s history, and a $1.6 billion increase over last year alone.
If record investment translated into academic mastery, New York students’ proficiency rates would be increasing. Instead, they remain stubbornly low. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 31 percent of New York eighth-graders were proficient in reading; only 26 percent were proficient in math.
Student performance has lagged for years. New York’s NAEP reading- and math-proficiency rates for eighth-grade students have remained below 35 percent for over a decade, even as per-pupil spending continues to rise.
For a state that claims to prioritize education, these outcomes are hard to defend. While demographic differences help explain New York’s performance relative to other states, they don’t explain why the state’s investments aren’t improving student performance.
Other states demonstrate that stronger outcomes are possible at lower cost. In Massachusetts, 40 percent of eighth-graders were proficient in reading and 37 percent in math, the highest proficiency rates in the nation. Massachusetts spent just shy of $23,000 per pupil in fiscal 2023, roughly $7,000 less than New York. That same year, New York spent $1,344 per student on school administration, compared with Massachusetts’s $1,023.
Research shows that education spending doesn’t necessarily improve academic performance. A recent Brookings Institution analysis compared state education spending with student outcomes and showed that, after accounting for income and demographics, spending levels alone don’t explain differences in student achievement.
The gap between New York’s spending and achievement is more than a fiscal concern; it affects the trajectories of thousands of young New Yorkers. With less than a third of eighth-graders are proficient in reading and math, many enter high school already behind. Leaving so many students unprepared for high school and beyond is a failure—especially given how much the state spends.
Improving outcomes will require greater clarity about what education spending is supposed to produce. When funding decisions are not linked to academic results, systems have limited incentive to examine whether resources are improving instruction or student learning.
New York needs to focus on student outcomes. The question shouldn’t be how much the state spends but whether students are reaching grade-level proficiency in reading and math. The state will fulfill its promise to families only when it evaluates its education system by what students have learned—not by how much it spends.
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