Spending More To Teach Less

This week’s Independent Budget Office report on soaring Department of Education spending was even worse than it seemed — because it failed to flag what rising DOE outlays on charter schools should mean for the rest of the budget.

The IBO rightly noted how de Blasio’s new contract with the United Federation of Teachers has goosed the DOE payroll, along with a rise in total staff that’s to hit nearly 10 percent in 2018, for an average yearly rise in “personal services” of 3.8 percent.

And the agency also correctly pointed out that a huge chunk of the “retroactive” payouts under that contract is deferred until 2019-2021 — and so doesn’t yet show.

But it missed one big issue: In noting the $1.2 billion rise in payments to non-DOE schools (a category that mainly covers charters, along with a few private schools that handle special-ed kids the regular public schools can’t), the IBO failed to point out that virtually every child attending a charter is one the regular schools don’t have to educate.

In other words, the DOE ought to see about the same savings in its main budget as it’s “losing” when it sends the cash to charters.

In fact, as a past IBO report noted, the DOE on average shells out less for a charter student than it does for one in the traditional schools. So, at least in theory, every dollar it spends to support a charter student should save it more than a dollar in other costs.

And since charters now account for 10 percent of the city’s public-school population, the savings should add up.

Instead, DOE spending on operations (which doesn’t include payroll) is set to rise from $16.7 billion in 2013 to $20.8 billion in 2018, an average jump of 4.5 percent a year.

Bottom line: Even aside from the generous pay hikes he’s handed the UFT, the de Blasio Department of Education is spending billions more to educate ever-fewer kids.