And how much does ESL even cost? If it comes remotely near explaining why NYC needs three times as much money as Japan to do a worse job, that seems like a huge downside to immigration that nobody is talking about.
On the one hand, Tokyo is much older than NYC.
On the other hand, the Japanese have a penchant for tearing down and rebuilding things (partially policy-driven).
But thankfully the war ended before it was completely destroyed, as it would have continued being hit otherwise.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Postwar_rec...
A lot of countries have significantly newer schools, because a lot of the physical building were destroyed like everything else during the wars, or most people moved into newly developed suburbs and new towns. NYC notably doesn’t includes its suburbs so its share of old buildings is a problem that suburban districts do not have.
If it delivers much worse results at much higher costs for everyone else, that seems like a terrible trade off.
Given that the US can barely handle the meager social security of those with work disability, it's hard to imagine that we could afford widespread, more expensive specialized institutions. And Japan is not exactly doing hot with spending given that they run a 263% debt to GDP ratio.
Japan has a different set of problems, but delivering efficient and cost effective, high quality education is something they get right. And insofar as special needs people are evenly distributed among various countries populations, we should be able to learn from what they do.
And, I live in Florida now, and the public schools here also have lunch at 10 am because they don't want to fund building a new cafeteria. It's real. But, we don't have "woke" problems anymore, I guess.
The school system spends a lot of money on inefficient heating, poor insulation, inefficient water fixtures, repairs etc. because there is no capital budget to replace schools or even these individual systems wholesale. Even finding a site to place a replacement school building is difficult in a city as crowded as New York and with NIMBYs; and then usually a new school isn't replacing buildings because all the buildings are over capacity, sometimes even 200% or 300% capacity with children in trailers on the playground and some lunch periods at 10am because there is no room in the cafeteria.
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One other thing is that NYC spends a lot of money doing things like extensive ESL education. In fact it is pretty rare for an NYC school to have zero ESL resources given the extensive immigration into NYC. This kind of remedial resource is generally not provided in a country like Japan, where only specific schools would have these kinds of resources.