For years, major school districts have insisted that insufficient funding is the central barrier to student achievement. Administrators frequently cite budget constraints, outdated facilities, and staffing shortages as the reasons academic performance continues to lag.
Yet recent investigations into spending practices in Chicago, New York State, and New York City show a very different picture—one in which political initiatives, administrative perks, and loosely monitored programs consume vast sums while academic outcomes decline. The result is a widening gap between what school systems are funded to do and what students actually receive.
Nowhere is this more visible than in Chicago. The Chicago Public Schools Office of Inspector General recently released a sweeping six-year investigation revealing that district employees spent $23.6 million on travel between 2018 and 2024, including hotel rooms nearing $1,000 per night, limousine airport transfers, luxury suites, and out-of-state conferences that doubled as personal vacations.
One teacher stretched a four-day seminar into a weeklong stay at a Hawaiian resort costing $4,700. A principal used district funds to book a Las Vegas Strip suite during an anniversary trip and even added an unauthorized extra day.
In another case, two dozen employees from a single school spent $50,000 attending a single Las Vegas conference. More than $142,000 in district money went toward international trips to South Africa, Finland, Estonia, and Egypt—trips that included game-park safaris, cultural excursions, and hot-air balloon rides.
The OIG report made clear that these trips did not meaningfully contribute to student learning. In fact, when some of the same vendors offered identical training within Chicago itself, “few attended.”
The problem escalated dramatically in the final years of the investigation: although the review covered six years of data, $14.5 million—more than half the total—was spent just in 2023 and 2024. The spike coincided with an influx of federal pandemic-relief funds, which were intended to help students recover academically after the Chicago Teachers Union kept schools closed for 78 weeks, one of the longest shutdowns in the United States.
Instead of supporting tutoring, literacy recovery, or extended learning programs, millions of federal dollars were converted into travel budgets for district staff.
Academic outcomes reflect the consequences of these misplaced priorities. Only about 40 percent of CPS students read at grade level. Just 25 percent meet math benchmarks. In some neighborhoods, these proficiency rates fall into single digits.
Nearly 45 percent of CPS students—and a majority of high-schoolers—are chronically absent, a metric strongly correlated with youth crime, disengagement, and long-term academic failure. As Chicago continues struggling with public-safety challenges, researchers note the obvious link: when students are disconnected from school, community stability deteriorates.
Chicago is not alone. In New York, state budget choices reveal a similar pattern of political or ideological spending overtaking core academic needs. The state’s 2025 “People’s Budget” includes an $8 million initiative aimed at “increasing teacher diversity,” despite New York City’s teaching workforce already being 42 percent Black, nearly double the city’s 22 percent Black population.
The same budget includes $250,000 for “racial and cultural inclusivity,” $3 million for a historical exhibit in the Adirondacks, and $351,500 for statewide conventions for “underrepresented” educators. While these projects reflect political priorities, they arrive amid a serious academic crisis: nearly half of all New York students fail to meet basic reading standards, even though the state spends more per pupil—over $39,000—than any other state in the country.
At the same time, the Trump administration has signaled that states maintaining race-conscious DEI programs may risk losing federal education funding. For New York, that risk totals as much as $2 billion.
Losing those funds would directly jeopardize academic resources such as textbooks, teacher hiring, technology, and enrichment programs. Governor Kathy Hochul has so far chosen to preserve DEI models even if it means placing substantial federal funding at risk, a decision critics argue prioritizes political symbolism over educational outcomes.
These ideological initiatives are occurring alongside major instructional shifts inside New York schools themselves. Across many districts, especially in urban areas, schools have increasingly embraced heavily identity-based curricula and DEI frameworks that emphasize race and oppression at the expense of traditional academic subjects. In some classrooms, Afrocentric or equity-driven lessons now overshadow instruction in constitutional history, classical literature, and foundational civics.
This shift has contributed to a fragmented academic experience across schools, where students receive varying educational quality depending on location, teacher ideology, and district priorities.
Meanwhile, measurable academic decline continues. In 2023, only 46 percent of students in grades 3–8 across New York State reached proficiency in math and just 49 percent in English Language Arts. New York City’s results were even worse, particularly for low-income and minority students. All of this is occurring despite the state’s historic spending levels. New York’s large, centralized urban districts—New York City, Buffalo, Rochester—have struggled the most, weighed down by multi-layered bureaucracies and statewide mandates that reduce local control and slow reform efforts. Chronic absenteeism has surged post-pandemic, with 40 percent of New York City students missing at least 10 percent of the school year in 2023, buildings deteriorating, teachers overwhelmed, and student engagement falling.
A separate but related trend in New York City involves the decade-long implementation of restorative justice (RJ) as the district’s primary disciplinary framework. Originally promoted as a humane alternative to suspensions, restorative justice sought to keep students in classrooms, reduce punitive measures, and improve school climate through dialogue circles, mediation, and community-based conflict resolution.
Over the past ten years, New York City has invested $97–100 million in RJ initiatives. In one budget cycle alone, city officials planned more than $21 million in RJ spending. The largest RJ-related organization involved in these efforts is the Restorative Justice Initiative (RJI), which conducts facilitator training, school workshops, community healing sessions, and youth-advocacy programs.
However, data suggest that RJ as implemented has not produced the promised improvements. A 2025 report from the Manhattan Institute found that restorative-justice reforms undermined teacher authority, weakened classroom order, and contributed to rising safety issues.
Chronic absenteeism rose from 26.5 percent in 2018–19 to 34.8 percent in 2022–23. School disruptions increased, and New York Police Department “school incidents” climbed during the same period, even as RJ spending expanded. Teachers reported that disruptive students were often sent to “meditation rooms” or asked to participate in dialogue circles instead of receiving meaningful consequences. Former students described RJ circles in which participants ignored facilitators, fell asleep, or used the sessions as a way to avoid class entirely.
Many RJ supporters argue that the failures reflect improper implementation rather than flaws in the model itself. Indeed, some RJ programs nationwide have been effective when rigorously designed and consistently enforced.
But in New York City, many implementations appear superficial—sometimes little more than “checkbox circles” conducted for compliance rather than genuine conflict resolution. Without accountability, follow-through, or the option of traditional discipline when necessary, RJ alone has been unable to stabilize classroom environments.
While critics have occasionally described RJI as a partisan or extremist organization, public evidence does not support those claims.
A review of RJI’s public documents, website, annual reports, and available city contracts reveals no foreign-policy activism, no partisan endorsements, and no political activity related to issues such as Israel or Palestine. Its publicly stated mission centers on conflict-resolution, equity work, trauma-informed practices, and community building. No independent reporting or procurement records suggest otherwise. The failures documented in RJ programs stem from weak execution, lack of oversight, and a mismatch between RJ philosophy and real classroom conditions—not from political extremism.
Despite these shortcomings, the problems facing Chicago, New York State, and New York City do not stem from insufficient funding. On the contrary, these systems collectively represent some of the most well-funded school environments in the country.
The core issue is how money is prioritized. Chicago funneled pandemic-recovery funds into luxury travel while academic outcomes collapsed. New York State directs millions toward demographic-based staffing initiatives and cultural programming while half its students fail reading tests. New York City has devoted nearly $100 million to an unproven disciplinary model while safety incidents and absenteeism rise.
Evidence from more academically focused models offers a sharp contrast. Charter schools—long the subject of political debate—have repeatedly demonstrated strong gains when instructional time, teacher quality, and rigorous expectations come first. A major Harvard-Princeton study found that winning a lottery seat in a New York City charter school significantly reduced the likelihood of incarceration for male students and reduced teen pregnancy among girls by 59 percent. Charter schools also provide between 30 and 50 percent more instructional time than traditional public schools, the equivalent of up to four additional months of learning each year.
These results highlight what is possible when school systems direct funding toward academics rather than bureaucracy, travel, or ideological initiatives. Charter schools succeed not because they spend more money, but because they spend more of it on instruction, teacher training, curriculum, and student achievement.
Public-school systems nationwide face significant challenges, but the examples from Chicago and New York show that the greatest obstacle is not a lack of resources. It is the misallocation of the resources they already have. Districts with billions in funding continue to struggle academically because too many decisions prioritize political objectives, administrative preferences, or untested programs rather than measurable learning gains.
Reform efforts in the coming years will likely focus on redirecting funds toward evidence-based interventions, restoring traditional disciplinary options alongside any restorative practices, increasing transparency in travel and procurement, and protecting federal funding by aligning state programs with federal requirements. Without such reforms, school districts risk deepening existing inequities and leaving another generation of students behind.
The pattern is now clear: when budgets grow while academic outcomes fall, the issue is not the money—it is what districts choose to do with it.
