At Reason.com Emma Camp worries that hundreds of thousands of students disappeared from U. S. schools during the COVID-19 lockdowns and have never returned:
During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a staggering number of students went “missing.” Kindergarten enrollment rates dropped, and students already enrolled in classes failed to log in for online learning.
From March to October 2020, the education nonprofit Bellwether estimated, as many as 3 million students nationwide went missing from classrooms. Another estimate from FutureEd, an education think tank, found a sevenfold increase in the number of students missing at least half a school year during the pandemic.
Once in-person school resumed, many students didn’t return to the classroom, nor did they register for homeschooling. No one knows exactly how to get them back.
According to the Associated Press (A.P.), California alone is missing more than 150,000 students, while New York is down nearly 60,000. In all, around 230,000 students in 21 states and Washington, D.C., are missing, which suggests that many more students are absent from classrooms nationwide. When the A.P. and Stanford University researchers analyzed data from pre-pandemic years, they found that almost no students were missing.
Where did the students go?
- They’re being homeschooled
- They’re truant
- They’ve moved to other districts
- They’ve left the United States
- They never existed in the first place
- All of the above
- Other
I’m going for “All of the above”.
Sounds fair enough. Though Average Daily Attendance is used by most places to determine how many employees are needed and funding which gives a slight bump to choice E.
G. other
Add the fact that number of white people is declining, and that whites are already a minority in the under 15 yo cohort. Small colleges are already in trouble because number of 18 yo is declining from year to year.
Open borders immigration is masking the fact that birth rates are below replacement for almost all native Americans.
By the way, 80% of the illegal immigrants (more than 2 million per year) are military age men. This is the historic norm for all of known history everywhere.
Agreed. I doubt every school was doing zero based budgeting equivalence in counting students which they probably did when students came back. WFH means some people moved. Some people figured out they could live on one income and they liked teaching their own kids. Kids being raised by grandparents who had one die can more easily skip school. Doubt that many moved out of US but who knows?
Steve
During the lockdowns construction work, hospitality work, etc. for those here illegally dried up and they weren’t eligible for subsidies. I suspect that some of them returned to Mexico and Central America and that part of the surge at the southern border over the last couple of years has been people coming back.
Occurs to me that incentives created by the 2002 NCLB act have been relaxed and removed over the years and fictitious students may have “aged out “under the cover of the COVID emergency relaxation of regulations.
Well known that schools fudged testing results in order to preserve Federal funding, why not enrollment numbers?
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/no-child-left-behind-an-overview/2015/04