NYC public schools continue to let students down — even years after being identified as failures

For more than a decade, New York City has introduced new ways to identify and improve struggling schools. Yet many of these same schools never stopped struggling.

According to a new report, many of the city’s lowest-performing schools today are the very same schools the state was trying to improve more than a decade ago.

The report traced schools across six different accountability systems, dating back to 2012. It found that roughly one-third of the city’s chronically struggling schools have remained “identified for improvement” for more than 10 years.

Rather than asking which schools struggled this year, it asks a more important question: Which schools are still struggling more than a decade later? According to the report, many of them still are.

This despite years of reforms, additional funding, and repeated attempts to improve student outcomes.

A child who entered kindergarten when a school was first identified for improvement could have graduated from high school before it was ever turned around.

The report names 906 public schools where a majority of students failed math, English language arts or both.

These schools enroll more than 409,000 students, roughly 43% of all NYC public school students — nearly one out of every two students in the NYC DOE system. In more than 500 schools, a majority of students are failing both ­subjects.

By connecting schools across multiple accountability systems over multiple years, the report shows that many of those identified as “failing” are in fact the same schools, year after year. Every few years, the city or state introduced another strategy to “improve” struggling schools. The state’s accountability systems changed; some schools were merged or renamed.

Yet many of the same schools continued to be “identified for improvement” under successive state accountability frameworks. And the city has not lacked school improvement plans. What it has lacked is evidence that those plans produced any lasting academic gains.

Schools repeatedly identified for improvement often became eligible for additional city, state and federal funding, new improvement initiatives and new accountability requirements.

That’s part of why the city now spends more than $42,000 per student, more than double the national average.

Too often, additional funding has been layered onto struggling schools without equally strong accountability to confirm those investments actually improve student achievement.

Too often, additional funding has been layered onto struggling schools without equally strong accountability to confirm those investments actually improve achievement.

For example, PS 123 Mahalia Jackson in Harlem received more than $11.4 million last year, about $43,335 per student, roughly one-third above the citywide average. Yet only about one in four students was proficient in math, and one in three in reading.

Mayor Mamdani recently secured a two-year delay in implementing Albany’s class-size mandate.

But if we find that schools already complying with the mandate aren’t producing stronger academic outcomes, the state should explain why spending billions more should bring different results.

If we keep pouring funds and improvement efforts into troubled schools, the DOE should have to demonstrate every year that more students are learning.

And teachers must take responsibility, too: An overwhelming majority of NYC teachers receive Effective or Highly Effective ratings each year, under the current teacher evaluation system results.

When nearly every teacher in a low-performing school is rated effective, it’s fair to ask whether the current accountability system is measuring the right things.

Student outcomes, not simply dollars spent or improvement plans launched, must be the standard.

Too many NYC schools never stopped struggling. And too many students are waiting, in vain, for their schools to change.

Jennifer Weber is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.