Last week, New York City voters elected Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Much has been said about his ascension, but few have noted the incongruity that even this self-described “democratic socialist” argued for at least one city agency to undergo a tough, DOGE-style scrub: the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE), which is slated to spend over $42,000 per student this year. Name-checking Elon Musk, Mamdani suggested that “concerns of efficiency and waste” ought to be “the bedrock of any progressive politics,” and held up the NYCDOE as exhibit A.

We won’t get into whether I think Mamdani will prove either willing or able to root out waste and fraud (I don’t). But I do think it’s telling that even an avowed socialist can see the bloat in the city’s K–12 vendor agreements and operations. This produced a funny juxtaposition because, also last week, EdNext’s Mike Petrilli urged school reformers to focus on boosting teacher pay.

Mike makes a good suggestion. I’ve long argued for big increases in teacher pay. After all, those unhappy with teacher pay have a point: School spending is up markedly since 2012, but after-inflation teacher pay isn’t. I’ve been frustrated, though, that the ensuing discussion consistently gets hijacked by advocates eager to denounce tight-fisted taxpayers and demand ambitious new outlays. The tax-and-spend contingent insists there’s not enough money to give teachers a meaningful raise.

Look, I’ve been around this block a few times. Given the track record of taxpayers paying more without educators receiving higher pay, I’m dubious that yet more money will yield different results. As I observed years ago in Stretching the School Dollar, new education funding tends to get soaked up by administration, benefits, and pet programs.

“More of the same” isn’t a promising recipe for NYCDOE’s 900,000 students. Academic achievement in New York City has been stagnant for a decade. The district saw a slight bump in 4th-grade math scores last year, but those scores are still lower than they were in 2007. And, while the school system’s median teacher salary was $98,699 during the 2022–23 school year, that number needs to be viewed in light of the cost of living in metro New York.

In The Great School Rethink, I urged would-be reformers to resist the allure of “more” and ask if they can first use existing resources to more effectively tackle familiar challenges. In that spirit, let’s just ask ourselves this: If New York City is going to spend $42,000 per pupil this year, how might it spend those dollars differently? For illustrative purposes, let’s consider a hypothetical 4th-grade classroom with 23 students (in accord with state law regarding class size).

Spending $42,000 per student on 23 students yields a total of $966,000 for our classroom. From that total, we need to set aside a pro-rated contribution for non-instructional district expenses (including operations, early childhood services, contract schools, debt payments, central administration, and superintendents and field staff). These cost the district about $14 billion this year. Let’s take Mamdani at his word and imagine it’s possible to trim these outlays by 5 percent. Our classroom’s share of that $13.3 billion would be about $345,000 (this presumes each student is contributing $15,000 to the cause).

That leaves us with $621,000 per classroom.

Technology (such as laptops and software) can run as much as $350 per student, or $8,000 per class. Let’s double that to $16,000 to be safe. And let’s add $5,000 per classroom for IT support, for a total per-classroom tech price tag of $21,000.

That leaves us with an even $600,000 for our class.

If we paid the average teacher $200,000 (or about $250,000 with benefits), that would leave $350,000 per classroom for other school-level expenses.

In a school with 690 students, that would amount to more than $10 million available for school-level expenses other than technology and classroom teachers.

I dunno. That seems like it might be workable.

If you’re wondering how it’s possible to boost salaries by that much and still have $10 million left over,  it’s because we’ve stuffed schools and school systems full of administrators, coordinators, clerks, support staff, vendor liaisons, and so on. But there’s little reason to believe that all these bodies make schools better. Indeed, one inevitable result of personnel bloat is an increase in meetings, make-work, and kludge. And the cost of all this makes it tougher to pay educators as well as we might like.

The point is that it’d be possible for New York City to double teacher pay, tomorrow, by making different choices. If you’re inclined, you can certainly refine these estimates by favoring teachers in high-poverty schools or those with certain specialties. And I haven’t even touched on the kind of more fundamental staffing rethink that schools should be exploring, the kind modeled by programs like the Next Education Workforce or Opportunity Culture.

Obviously, this is only a paper-and-pencil exercise with all manner of limitations. I get it. And practically speaking, even if the next NYC schools chancellor were inclined to pursue a radical overhaul of the Big Apple’s schools, there are settled layers of contractual, bureaucratic, and political sediment that stand in the way.

Fair enough.

But let’s be frank.  Decades of increases in school spending have led to more bureaucracy, benefits, and staff positions, rather than higher teacher pay. I suspect more spending increases would only deliver more of the same. And I don’t think that’s a good deal for students, taxpayers, or teachers.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”