By Tom Woods
September 22, 2026
One of my favorite anecdotes about the education racket comes from Lawrence Lindsey's 1990 book The Growth Experiment (page 210, to be precise).
The question was: how many bureaucrats operate in the New York City public school system ? It took two dozen phone calls to find someone who both knew the answer and was authorized to disclose it: six thousand.
It would help to have something to compare that number to, so the author contacted the Archdiocese of New York, whose Catholic schools educated one-sixth as many students - so they should have had one thousand bureaucrats if the proportion held.
The person answering the phone didn't know the answer, so the author thought: here we go again. But then came, "Wait a minute, let me count." The answer was twenty-six.
The problem has only intensified since Lindsey's book (this chart takes the year 2000 as a baseline):
The issue is not "lack of funding." These institutions are swimming in your money.
Now you may have seen the New York Times article in which Nikole Hannah-Jones, the left-wing writer behind the notorious 1619 Project, reveals that she deliberately sent her own daughter to a terrible New York City school because "we thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. We believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same."
Her daughter is now vastly behind her high school peers, after having been educated at a school where the teachers told everyone she was doing great, but they weren't even bothering to check her work.
Now even if we accept Hannah-Jones's self-serving explanation of what she did - she and her husband bought a $1.5 million brownstone in 2018, so they certainly had the means to help their own daughter - she never pauses to wonder where all the money was going or what exactly was making these schools so bad.
There wasn't a lot of "white supremacy" at PS 307, so it's hard to blame that.
But incidentally, and here's the point people commenting on her article are missing: this "disadvantaged" school she sent her children to - care to guess how much its per-pupil funding is?
Remember, these schools are said to fail because they are inadequately funded. So you're probably thinking they have dirt floors, no money for chalk, etc.
What if it turns out they're funded to the tune of, say, $25,000 per student ? That would be outrageous, and would make it hard to make those "underfunded" claims stick, wouldn't it?
Well, I tricked you: PS 307 actually gets $52,349 per student:
The American public school is the closest thing we have to an established church in terms of people's devotion and intolerance of dissidents, but I for one am a proud heretic.
For how to live without this institution, check out my free book Education Without the State: nostateeducation.com