The Daily News reports that Mayor Bloomberg yesterday argued that one reason schools in the city are so overcrowded is that they are getting better and parents want their kids to be there. Anecdotally, I agree with that. I know many families that would have left the city in the past but started putting down strong roots as crime dropped and the city generally became more livable back in the '90s.

But the mayor's numbers don't suggest this is really happening the last few years. There's always a catch any time you rely on DOE's statistics, but if you add up the general ed and special ed enrollments going back the last few years, you see it is actually dropping, not going up.

2006-07 -- 1,002,097
2005-06 -- 1,008,208
2004-05 -- 1,029,541
2003-04 -- 1,044,867
2002-03 -- 1,048,989

I'd suggest that the real reason there is overcrowding is the same reason we gave control of the schools to the mayor in the first place. For years, the school system was managed on the fumes of political inertia. The system has always had extremely reliable long-term enrollment projections (based on birth rates, immigration patterns, building permits, etc.,) down to specific parts of the city. But the grownups did virtually nothing to allocate the bulk of the system's capital resources in ways that prepared for the students that we always knew existed. Instead they carved up the capital budget based on political considerations, often multi-borough coalitions that pooled their votes in support of one another's pet projects.

Don't believe Bloomberg if he tells you that crowded high school hallways are a fluke. We knew these kids existed years ago. We decided as a city to screw them. This was no accident.