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Commentary By Nicole Gelinas

Fake Outrage over City Council’s ‘Tiny’ School Budget Cut May Spark Bad Precedents

Education, Cities, Education Pre K-12, New York City, Pre K-12

With school enrollment plummeting and the city needing to conserve cash for future deficits, Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council nodded at fiscal responsibility last month, slightly paring back education spending. Now this tiny cut is causing chaos.

You’ve got to wonder: If the city can’t achieve this modest trim, what will happen when we have a real budget crisis? 

The June budget agreement Adams and the council reached seemed like a good sign for New York’s future: The council is progressive, yes, but it also understands reality.  

With public-school enrollment down 6.3% over the past two years — a loss of 73,000 students — the council agreed to Adams’ proposal to pare education spending by $215 million. 

Against a $31 billion education budget, the cuts represented about seven-tenths of a percentage point of projected spending.  

With Adams’ education department having the whole summer to ensure the cuts didn’t affect the classroom, students and parents in a well-run district would never have even noticed the reduced budget. 

Yet the teachers union manufactured an “uproar.” The United Federation of Teachers organized a protest of “hundreds” of teachers and parents and launched a “Fund Our Schools” campaign.

Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post

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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post