In our recent comparison of New York and Florida, written in response to left-wing Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s strange trolling of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, we briefly touched on how the Sunshine State is eating the Empire State’s lunch on education. Florida isn’t alone in this respect.
Much has been made of the extraordinary “Mississippi Miracle” in the Deep South, and for very good reason. Meanwhile, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos offered the following assessment of the Big Apple’s government-run school system: “If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system, packages would take six weeks to arrive, we’d charge you a $100 delivery fee and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item.”
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Ouch.
Mamdani may have to toggle away from offering specious “rebuttals” to long-deceased conservative leaders and return to his bread and butter: railing against and alienating successful people.
The mayor can fume, but Bezos isn’t wrong. Bethany Mandel highlights the achievement gaps separating New York and Texas in education, writing, “NYC spends roughly $43 billion a year to educate about 850,000 students, putting the rest of the country’s spending to shame: That’s over $44,000 per child per year. The result of that astronomical figure? Two-thirds of fourth graders can’t do math properly, and nearly three-quarters can’t read at grade level. Along with poor academic outcomes, those billions are buying increasingly unsafe schools: Student assaults are rising even as city schools suspend fewer students.”
How does that stack up against Lone Star land? Mandel examines the state’s back-to-basics takeover of blue Houston’s failing schools as a trenchant juxtaposition:
“In Houston, Texas, just two years into a dramatic state-led intervention, student gains in the Houston Independent School District are the envy of urban districts across the country. The turnaround began in 2023, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration took over HISD after years of chronic academic failure, including a persistently underperforming high school that failed to meet state standards. Two years later, the results are impossible to ignore. According to HISD’s latest academic report, the number of A- and B-rated campuses has more than doubled, rising from 93 schools before the takeover to 197 schools today. Meanwhile, D- and F-rated campuses collapsed from 121 schools to just 18, and the district no longer has a single F-rated campus remaining. Reading scores on the state’s STAAR standardized test increased by nearly 14% districtwide. And for minority students, the numbers are just as impressive: Black and Hispanic students posted reading gains of more than 15%. Economically disadvantaged students and emergent bilingual students also posted double-digit STAAR gains.”
New York City’s per-pupil spending level is roughly triple that of Texas’s, often yielding empirically inferior outcomes across multiple metrics. Once again, spending and results are not the same.
But overspending can, in fact, drive and deepen negative outcomes. When policies and politicians demonize and drive away successful people and enterprises, everything gets worse. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) has learned this the hard way in New York, even if Mamdani hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s a memo he may never receive or accept, frankly.
By contrast, attracting capital, rewarding success, and welcoming thriving businesses have allowed Texas to vault ahead of California, leaving New York in the dust on another key front.
“Texas is the new capital of the Fortune 500 — taking California’s crown,” blares a headline in Fortune magazine.
The details: “Everything’s bigger in Texas — including the companies. The Lone Star State is now home to the most Fortune 500 companies, dethroning California as the capital of the Fortune 500. The state’s 57 Fortune 500 companies ranked roughly $2.8 trillion in revenue last year, compared to California’s 56 businesses and roughly $2.7 trillion revenue. New York comes in third with 53 companies and $2.2 trillion. In recent years, Texas’ anti-regulation and low-tax policies have attracted companies including Tesla, McKesson, and Oracle to move their home bases to the state.”
Might California finally learn its lesson? Don’t hold your breath. Indeed, the downward “vilify, tax, chase away” spiral may only deepen, with multiple tax hikes, extensions of “temporary” tax hikes, and a catastrophic new punitive measure on the horizon. The preemptive impact of the latter misadventure is already being felt, on top of all the existing negative trends.
CALIFORNIA’S THIRD WORLD VOTE COUNTING MESS
Under California’s one-party rule, one governance hallmark has been doubling down on dysfunction and failure. Destructive policies stay in place because entrenched interests want them to, even if they’re objectively disastrous. In that sense, the state’s shambolic election system is a microcosm of how the state is run writ large.
No wonder people are leaving in droves, and California is poised to lose even more population, and therefore political clout, after the next census is completed. Elections have consequences, they say. So do bad policy decisions, which eventually reap electoral consequences, even if they arrive beyond the borders of California’s failing experiment.
