POLITICS: Face the facts about NYC’s plummeting public-school enrollment

Enrollment in New York City’s regular public schools fell 2% this year, and is sure to keep on dropping — but our political leaders’ most likely response will be deep denial.

Baseline enrollment in the Department of Education system is well into a long-term decline, dictated by a dropping city birthrate and by an ongoing exodus of younger families; the now-ending migrant crisis only concealed the trend.

The obvious, correct response is to right-size city schools: Close down some whole buildings and reduce total staff sizes (teachers and administrators); it’s a chance to leave decrepit buildings and improve the overall quality of the instructional force.

Of course the United Federation of Teachers fears the change: Fewer teachers means less income from their dues — and a balance-of-power shift as retirees’ role in electing UFT leaders increases.

Getting the state to impose ever-smaller class sizes (and therefore force the city to pay more teachers to educate fewer students) was one UFT response; since pre-K staffers are also in the union, the UFT’s salivating at the mayor-elect’s universal day care plans, too.

But it won’t be enough: The number of new students registering for school this summer was down 7% from the year before.

Parents are giving up on the city, and on the DOE: Only charter public schools, which operate outside the bureaucracy and mostly without UFT members — and so reliably actually educate their students — are resisting the decline.

At some point, every other interest that depends on city spending is going to notice how the DOE consumes an ever-larger share of the pie — it’s already more than a third of the city budget! — to serve an ever-smaller population.

Even a proud Democratic Socialist may start asking some tough questions.

Mayor-elect Zohran Mandani would be wise to use this reckoning to upgrade the public schools: If they can’t deliver value, families need to pay out of pocket for their kids to learn — the reverse of making the city more affordable.

If he lets the vested interests continue to milk the system dry, he’s going to run out of taxpayers.