No, this post isn’t a commentary on THAT essay about New York City public schools. It’s on this one!

On May 11 in the Wall Street Journal, Jeff Yass laid out a simple proposal for what New York City should do with the roughly $42,000 it spends per student per year on public education: Split it in half, give a mom $21,000 to spend on whatever school she chooses for her child, and put the other $21,000 into a savings account she controls.

We think this would be a fascinating and important real-life experiment—one we hope someone actually runs as a small randomized controlled trial with 100 New York City families.

We ran scenarios with three families, priced against real NYC providers at today’s rates, to consider how far the repurposed money could go.

The first $21,000 is straightforward. Does that amount buy real private-school tuition in New York City right now? We paired each family with an existing school and its actual 2026–27 tuition for a student in 6th grade, one in 8th grade, and one in 10th grade.

(Would new school options appear if this policy were actually enacted? Probably. In Florida, an average of 100 new private schools have launched each of the last five school years since that state expanded its own education savings account program).

The other $21,000 is the more interesting half of New York’s per-pupil total. In our version of Yass’s proposal, it goes into an Education Savings Account, a proven structure already running in several states. Parents get wide latitude on how to spend it: summer camp, tutoring, music lessons, ADHD coaching, therapy, sports, to name a few options. That is, all the things affluent New York parents already buy for their kids at prices those providers actually charge.

To us, that’s the key idea worth testing. There’s so much cash available here that you could entirely rewire a kid’s 3 p.m.-to-bedtime life! Families across the socioeconomic spectrum want the exact same thing for their kids: skilled, experienced adults who can guide them in afterschool sports or tutoring, not bored teenage coaches or undependable volunteer math tutors. A $21,000 ESA would let regular people buy services for their kids at market rates instead of accepting whatever the system offers. The experiment is to see if the marketplace that already works for the top third of NYC families could work for everyone else, and to measure the precise payoff on overall teen wellbeing.

Now, granted, since Yass’s proposal dropped in May, that other essay got traction. In fact, for the P.S. 307 that Nikole Hannah-Jones made famous, per-pupil spending was, according to the National Review, “$44,000 per student—and, when including other wraparound services, a whopping $58,000 per student.” And despite annual declines in NYC public school enrollment, a political lobby manages to preserve total spending, meaning that per student amount will only grow.

But sticking with the $42,000 per-student average, what would you guess it buys in NYC at today’s prices, if split between tuition and outside enrichment? Let’s look at our three cases.

Case 1: Priya

Priya (12) is a 6th grader in the Bronx. Her mom is a nurse and her dad a hospital tech. They enroll her in St. Athanasius School, a K–8 Catholic parish school where the 2026–27 tuition is $6,350—well below the $21,000 per year target.

The Flex $21,000. Priya does well academically but struggles socially. She eats lunch alone most days and has no close friends. Her mom has watched this for two years and hasn’t known what to do. Here are some out-of-school add-ons:

• A weekly therapist-led social skills group at Cope With School NYC: $3,600 a year.
• Improv classes, three courses a year, through Magnet Theater’s Youth Improv Program, ages 12–17. NYC improv courses generally run $99 to $475. So, for the year, let’s call it $1,350.
• A recreational co-ed volleyball league through Big City Volleyball, two seasons a year: $700.
• Afterschool robotics at the STEM and Robotics Center, $95 to $102.50 a month. Let’s say $900.
• 16 therapy sessions with a social anxiety specialist, at NYC’s going private-pay rate for teens of $200 to $300 a session. We’ll put this at $4,800. (Therapy-patient alliance is critical for improvement, so with the spending power to choose among therapists instead of accepting whomever is willing to take the low Medicaid reimbursement rate, Priya has a better shot at making progress.)
• Biweekly teen cooking classes at the Institute of Culinary Education, $90 to $150 a class. Let’s assume $2,100.
• A four-week overnight session at Timber Lake West summer camp in the Catskills: $6,295.
• Transportation and incidentals: $500.
• A navigator: someone reliable, four hours a week for 30 weeks of the year, riding with her, helping her get comfortable getting around on her own. That’s 120 hours. At $25 an hour: $3,000.

Subtotal: $23,245—a bit over the $21,000 enrichment allocation.

Total: Priya’s family is still banking $12,405 of the full $42,000 into a 529 account to save for college. Would she be better off?

Case 2: Jaylen

Jaylen (15) is a 10th grader in Brooklyn. His mom works in healthcare administration and his dad in landscaping. They enroll him in Brooklyn Amity School, a K–12 independent school where the 2026–27 grade 10 tuition is $19,430, plus a $600 book fee and $1,950 lunch fee. All-in cost is $21,980—a bit over the $21,000 allocation.

The Flex $21,000. Jaylen lights up on a basketball court, but his middle school team churned through coaches and never really nailed the fundamentals. His mom is lukewarm about basketball. She prefers art and music. Jaylen quit trumpet after 5th grade and doesn’t click with the kids in the arts program near their old school. So their deal is to buy some of each:

• Basketball skills training (for the coaching he never really got) at New York Hoops Academy: 45-minute sessions at $75 each, about 36 a year: $2,700.
• Amateur Athletic Union basketball, a season in New York Hoops Academy’s Hoops League, based out of their Brooklyn locations in Fort Greene and Williamsburg: $700 for a 12-week season, uniform and weekend games included. Two seasons a year, fall/winter and spring: $1,400.
• Guitar lessons through the Brooklyn Guitar School, Teen Guitar Ensemble, $149 a month: $1,788 a year.
• Art classes at The Art Annex in Park Slope, in their 6th–12th grade tier, two semesters a year at $435 a semester: $870.
• Math tutoring at a Mathnasium-type NYC center, $400 a month for 10 months of the year: $4,000.
• ADHD coaching over Zoom, with the goal of finishing more homework, $120 a week for 30 weeks: $3,600.
• A navigator: Someone to meet with Jaylen and his mom upfront, to listen to their ideas, create a list of possible expenditures, get them registered, ask for discounts, solve transportation (all the social capital). $100/hour. Five hours up front; 4 check-ins over the year for one hour each. $900.
• A five-day overnight basketball intensive over the summer at Brant Lake Camp in the Adirondacks, ages 9–18: $690.
• A two-week nature-focused overnight summer session at Pok-O-MacCready Camps in the Adirondacks, real hiking, canoeing, rock climbing, and wilderness time: $4,600.
• Transport, gear: $450.

Subtotal: $20,998.

Case 3: Diego

Diego (13) is an 8th grader in Queens. His mom works in a Mexican restaurant. She decides to enroll him in Garden School in Jackson Heights, a PK–12 independent school where tuition is $28,800 a year.

The first hurdle is his academic level. The school wavers on whether he is a strong enough student. But his mom agrees that she will buy private tutoring (with the “flex $21,000”) to catch him up.

The next question is financial aid, which the family qualifies for. His mom has a conversation with the bursar, and the school agrees to discount his tuition to $21,000, providing $7,800 in aid (still below what Garden School typically grants families like Diego’s).

The Flex $21,000. Diego has a reading disability, slow processing speed, and attention-regulation challenges. He has an Individualized Education Plan, but all it prescribes is 40 minutes a day with a group of four in his public school’s resource room, and he has fallen further behind every year.

• A navigator: In this case, a school staff member, delighted by the opportunity to offer Diego help that the school typically couldn’t offer, played the point role. She worked with his mom to connect Diego to trusted resources at no cost to the family.
• An Orton-Gillingham reading tutor, about 50 sessions a year through Central Park Tutors at $200 per hour: $10,000.
• Executive function coaching, biweekly through Themba Tutors at their master’s-level rate of $175 to $215 an hour: $3,600.
• A neuropsych re-evaluation at NYU Langone’s Child Study Center trainee clinic as a supervised, reduced-rate fee of $3,650.
• A recreational swim squad at Commonpoint Forest Hills in Queens: $2,500.
• A weekly art class at Bridgeview School of Fine Arts, also in Queens: $1,170.

Total: $20,920.

Why We’re Actually Presenting This

This isn’t just a journal article. It’s a grant proposal.

We’d like someone to run this experiment in education funding as a randomized controlled trial. If a funder steps up, we think we can find the practitioners to administer the trial, and absent that, do it ourselves. And there is a long line of academic researchers who would jump at the chance to analyze the results.

Using private funds to test education policy ideas is commonplace in developing countries and has a rich history in the U.S. The famed Perry Preschool Project was back by private dollars. The Children’s Scholarship Fund took the same approach in partnership with Harvard’s Paul Peterson to test school vouchers in New York City (and Dayton and D.C.).

Our proposed RCT would involve a group of NYC families at similar income levels with kids around the same age. Half the families would get access to a navigator and the marketplace described above. The other half would not. Both cohorts would be tracked over several years.

We’d expect a modest bump in academic outcomes, if only due to greater access to tutoring, but that’s not main event.

The bigger bet is on flourishing broadly: happiness, mental health, physical fitness, a sense of purpose, and downstream effects on college attendance and career earnings. Those are the outcomes school spending was never designed to impact, because school spending isn’t concerned with teen activities from 3 p.m.-to-bedtime.

Think of it as a variant of the Harlem Children’s Zone wraparound model. HCZ’s bet was that a nonprofit could build and provide every service a struggling family needs under one roof.

Our model has the same logic but, based on Yass’s proposal, a different delivery mechanism. Instead of building a single provider that specializes in everything, we’d test whether the existing marketplace—the one already meeting the needs of the top third of NYC families—can do the same with a different clientele.

Mike Goldstein and Sean Geraghty are the co-founders of the Center for Teen Flourishing.