Chris Papst’s “Failure Factory: How Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future” is a brilliant, groundbreaking exposé of the Baltimore City Schools. It is comparable to Lincoln Steffens’ classic, “The Shame of the Cities.” That 1904 work helped launch the progressive movement, which reformed state and local government for over a decade.

Mr. Papst’s eight-years of investigative reporting enabled him to expose the depth of corruption and dishonesty at the heart of the nation’s third most expensive big city school system (when measured per student). He discovered that the Baltimore City school bureaucracy gave up on trying to educate the students. Instead, they passed students who had learned nothing, while taxpayers funded a massive, failing bureaucracy.

Big city education shares a level of fraud and corruption comparable to what we see in health care. At Gingrich 360, we are applying the Papst approach to other big city schools, starting with New York City. The findings are startling.

A series of schools are dramatically underperforming in New York City. Forty percent of New York City students from 3rd grade to 8th grade are not proficient in English and math (roughly 200,000 students). Yet, the high school graduation rate is 84 percent. How can students who fail to learn reading or arithmetic graduate from high school?

This will only get worse now that New York City has handed its classrooms to a socialist. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the mayoral election essentially puts the inexperienced Democratic Socialist in charge of the nation’s largest school system.

Throughout the campaign, Mr. Mamdani offered no clear plans to address the struggling K-12 schools. Instead, he doubled down on his pledge to give the United Federation of Teachers even more power over an already bloated bureaucracy.

In 2025, New York City is projected to spend about $42,000 per student. Yet with 40 percent of students failing to reach proficiency in math and English, that’s $13 billion wasted this year alone. Cheating taxpayers of billions of dollars – and denying students the skills they need for the rest of their lives – should be a major scandal. Imagine the scandal if McDonald’s, Amazon, or Walmart took people’s money but failed to provide them with goods 40 percent of the time.

Mr. Mamdani plans to cut gifted and talented programs, doubling down on so-called equity policies that reward mediocrity over merit. These grading policies make it almost impossible for students to fail. Missing assignments or failed tests can still earn students grades as high as 55 (instead of zero) – just 10 points below passing. Students can, and do, skip months of class and still pass.

Mr. Mamdani’s education agenda will push high achieving, motivated students out of the public school system, lower the bar for basic proficiency scores, leave graduates unprepared for today’s economy, and continue the cycle of poverty.

Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism is devastating to the students who aren’t learning – and costly to taxpayers who are paying for no-show students. Roughly one-third of students (308,000) miss more than 18 days per school year. Despite their chronic absence, taxpayers continue to fund the school system as if these students were there.This amounts to 5.6 million lost school days per year and costs an estimated $1.5 billion annually.

If these billions of dollars went into an apprenticeship training program for students who were not academically inclined, these students could instead learn about valuable trades. If money were deducted from the school system’s budget every time a student was absent, the system would have a radically greater interest in getting absentee students back into the classroom.

It’s clear from our research that the New York City school system is the same type of failure factory as the Baltimore City school system. The far-left wing that has captured the Democratic Party is now in control of children’s future and has no vision for education. This is devastating for the city, its residents, and the children who are being cheated out of a better future.

A research intern at Speaker Gingrich’s organization, Gingrich 360, Darek Silva, contributed to this report.