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.
