The New York City Board of Education spends $22,500 each year on each of the more than one million students in the system. The New York City Public Schools have a 40% dropout rate. Only 60% of the students entering the ninth grade graduate four years later. Of that 60% only 1/4 are college ready. That means that only 15 out of every 100 students that enter ninth grade in the NY Public Schools are ready to enter college four years later. 15 out of a 100 is less than 1 in 6.
Therefore, if a family in NY has four children, the New York City Board of Education will spend more than one million dollars on their education from Kindergarten through the 12th grade, but in all probability none of them will be college ready. Yes, this is a shame. But it is even a bigger shame that no one seems to be aware of this. I read the newspapers in New York everyday and I watch the news on television every night, but I have never heard these facts reported.
I can hear them now at the New York City Board of Education. “The union is to blame. The parents are the problem. So many of our students come from broken homes. The kids won’t listen, etc. etc. etc.” Everyone else is to blame except the people running the system and writing checks each year that total over 25 billion. I have just one question. Where is the money going?
Yes, the teachers could do better, and the parents and the community and the children themselves. But how can the officials at the Board of Ed and the mayor and the rest of the city’s elected officials not act like we are facing a calamity of horrific proportions. How can they behave as if they do not realize that we are in the midst of what can only be described as a holocaust? The city’s greatest resource is not its location, not its banking, publishing, fashion or media industries, nor its tourist trade. It is its people. It is the many thousands upon thousands of its darling little angels who smilingly enter kindergarten and first grade eager to learn only to eventually be sorely let down and terribly betrayed.
Yes, the Board of Ed bears the greatest responsibility for this debacle, but it is up to all of us to do our part. Anyone who writes me with a specific question about their child or a child that they know and would like to know how to greatly enrich their educational experience, I will communicate with you one on one to get the job done. In the meantime please pass on this vital information about how the NYC Board of Ed is falling flat on its face. Many of the dropouts and those who graduate unable to go to college end up in the prison system, where $30,000 plus is spent per year to incarcerate them. Yes, there is poverty in the inner cities, but this poverty is feeding a vast network of people making money off others misfortune as they fail miserably to get the job done. It is up to us to get the job done. . .
