Financing Public Education in New York City and the Rest of the State. IESP Policy Brief No. 01-11 (original) (raw)
New York City (NYC) is home to the largest school district in the U.S., with over one million students and more than 1,600 schools. While it is only one of approximately seven hundred school districts in New York State (NYS), the city educates about one-third of the state’s students. In recent work examining school finance during Mayor Bloomberg’s first two terms, Stiefel and Schwartz (2011) compared NYC’s funding sources with those for the rest of the state in entirety. 1 The NYS statistics presented in that chapter were, therefore, averages for all other school districts in the state including the fiscallystressed “Big Four” (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers), rural districts with their own, unique challenges, and relatively wealthy suburban districts. This brief builds upon that research – describing the changes in revenues for the city, other large urban districts, wealthy downstate counties surrounding NYC, and the