Elizabeth Debraggio
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 11
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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. The NYS statistics presented in that chapter were, therefore, averages for all other school districts in the state--including the fiscally-stressed "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 rest of the state. This analysis uses revenue data from the New York State Education Department's (NYSED) annual fiscal profiles to compare the educational resources available to NYC relative to other districts in New York State and probe the differences in greater detail. Specifically, the authors examine the change in total revenue, total state revenue, local revenue, and total expenditures excluding debt service and transportation expenses for New York City, the other Big Four, two wealthy downstate counties (Westchester and Nassau), and the remaining schools districts in New York State. An appendix contains supplemental tables.
