These days, lower student enrollment is a fact of life in school districts across the country, and researchers are intent on finding out precisely why student head counts are lagging what they were projected to be before the start of the pandemic five years ago.
Researchers in recent years have been able to partially explain the enrollment drop, as Education Week has reported. Much of it is demographic, with an aging population and people having fewer kids. Another large part of it has to do with students leaving public schools for private schools or home school—especially as states dramatically expand private school choice programs. More recently, districts have reported a pronounced drop in the number of new immigrant students, and slower immigration in the years beforehand has also contributed.
But some of the decline since the pandemic is unexplained. There’s still a lot that’s unknown—both the reasons for a drop that’s exceeded pre-pandemic projections and where exactly the enrollment losses are most pronounced.
One recent study—focused on Massachusetts schools—aims to add context about the grades and demographics for which schools have experienced the biggest and most sustained losses, said Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of education and economics at Boston University, during a recent webinar presenting the findings.
The results—that most of the sustained enrollment losses are concentrated among high-income districts, white and Asian students, and middle schoolers—are likely applicable nationwide, and districts should consider the long-term implications as they make long-range plans, he said.
“The pandemic seems to have catalyzed changes in how families evaluate schooling options, and these are not purely temporary disruptions,” Goodman said during the Nov. 13 webinar hosted by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
Goodman and co-author Abigail Francis, a graduate student, used enrollment data from Massachusetts because it is more current than national data, which lags, he said. Researchers compared pre-pandemic enrollment projections with actual enrollment.
In Massachusetts, public school enrollment is down about 2% overall from what researchers estimated it would have been at this time before the pandemic happened, which already anticipated dwindling numbers, Goodman said.
Many of the students who withdrew from Massachusetts public schools moved to private schools, the data show. Private school enrollment that had been declining pre-pandemic has now “mostly stabilized,” Goodman said, and enrollment is about 16% higher than what was predicted pre-pandemic.
Home-schooling enrollment has also increased.
And that’s in a state that doesn’t have a private school choice program that makes public funds available for families to use for private or home school.
In the fall of 2020, home-schooling rates jumped by more than 100%, researchers found. Home-schooling figures have dropped since, but it’s still about 50% above the trend that was predicted pre-pandemic.
But more interesting than overall trends, Goodman said, are some of the patterns of the enrollment decline, which he described as “striking.”
The top 20% of the highest-income school districts lost about 6% of their students, “with no signs of recovery,” Goodman said, while middle- and low-income districts are about 1% below pre-pandemic projections—meaning the majority of public school losses in the state come from the wealthiest 20% of districts.
“This, at this point, is largely a high-income district phenomenon,” Goodman said.
Similarly, most of the enrollment losses are concentrated among white and Asian students, and nearly all of the overall enrollment losses are in grades 5-8.
The report hypothesizes that concerns about student behavior and safety, which have increased since the pandemic, are “particularly acute” in middle school.
“The subset of parents turning to private schools and home schooling may be doing so in part to find their children a safer and less disrupted learning environment,” the report says.
Pre-kindergarten and kindergarten enrollment that had dipped immediately following the pandemic has rebounded to about what was expected pre-pandemic, and high school headcount was mostly unaffected, Goodman said.
He expects these trends to continue, calling them “at least semi-permanent.”
“The exodus of high-income families may change the political dynamics of support for public education in ways that we should be paying attention to,” he said.
