At the Wall Street Journal Ben Chapman and Andrea Fuller report that U. S. public schools have lost roughly a million students since 2020:
Public schools in the U.S. have lost more than a million students since the start of the pandemic, prompting some districts across the country to close buildings because they don’t have enough pupils or funding to keep them open.
The school board in Jefferson County, Colo., outside Denver, voted in November to close 16 schools. St. Paul, Minn., last summer closed five schools. The Oakland, Calif., school board last February voted to close seven schools after years of declining enrollment and financial strife.
Declining birthrates, a rise in home schooling and growing competition from private and charter schools are contributing to the decline in traditional public-school enrollment, according to school officials.
Districts in cities including Denver and Indianapolis have developed plans to shut down underused schools, and superintendents say more closures are inevitable unless enrollment drops are reversed.
“We are subsidizing and adding funds to those schools as much as we possibly can, but it’s just not sustainable,†said St. Paul Public Schools Superintendent Joe Gothard.
Nationwide, public-school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students to 49.4 million between fall 2019 and fall 2020—a decline of roughly 3%, according to data from the U.S. Education Department. The following school year, enrollment failed to return to prepandemic levels and remained roughly flat.
The authors seem to be making some pretty strong assumptions here. I’d like to see some harder statistics. So, for example, although Catholic schools have increased their enrollments this year they are still below their pre-pandemic enrollments. If that’s true in other private schools as well as in homeschooling, clearly something else must be going on.
College enrollments are down by 650,000, and 71% of that decrease is men.
The root cause is below replacement birth rates. This is a problem in every developed and most developing countries. Only sub-Saharan Africa has above replacement birth rates.
Some countries in Europe have birth rates as low as 1 child per woman per lifetime. That means the population drops by one-half every generation. This is not a problem as long as per caput GDP remains high. Japan is in that situation: actual declining population numbers but high per caput GDP.
In the US, the white population is actually declining, with deaths exceeding births. However, all races show below replacement total fertility: Hispanics have the highest TFR, but it is only 1.88; whites have the lowest at 1.55.
https://www.newgeography.com/content/007528-us-total-fertility-rates-toward-europe
The situation in the US is masked by very high immigration, recently about 3 million per year, if illegals are counted.
World population will probably peak out around 2030 at 8.5 billion or so. Paul Ehrlich should be happy but he isn’t. He, Bill Gates, Schwab, Davos, WEF all want a rapid decline.
Can you maintain a modern, high-technology society if the actual numbers of people, especially skilled people, is declining? Our children and grandchildren will find out.
Can you maintain a modern, high-technology economy without cheap energy? That answer is known–No. The proof is playing out in Europe right now, and soon will be playing out in the US.
I have school-age kids and a college-age kid now, so I’m a bit plugged into education, at least where I live.
Here in Colorado the statistics are pretty clear – the school districts that closed the longest during Covid have had the greatest losses in enrollment.
My own district – one that opened up quickly, is down 200 students from the 2019-2020 year out of a total student body of 26k, which is in line with normal year-on-year variability. There was a drop in 2020-2021 of about 1k students, but enrollment has sprung back.
The story mentions Jefferson County schools – that’s where I attended school back in the day – and they were at 84k in 2019-2020, dropped 4k to 80k in 2020-2021, and dropped again to about 78k this year.
Meanwhile, exurban school districts increased enrollment during this time, charter schools increased enrollment, and private schools probably increased enrollment. We don’t really know for certain with private schools because the last best data is from 2020, but there’s some anecdotal evidence. There are probably more homeschoolers and remote schoolers (online programs), but I don’t have good statistics for those.
And as a parent, most of us do not want to switch schools constantly and the kids certainly do not like that. I can see how many who moved their kids to a different school during the pandemic (I’m one of them) would not want to move their kids back and go through all the adjustments again, particularly when the parents have lost faith in the district administration. It’s often easier to keep kids in their new school situation, whatever that may be, which I think does a lot to explain cratering enrollment in many districts.