Why Public School Enrollments Are Dropping

Public school teacher Auguste Meyrat writing at The Federalist highlights a decline in public school enrollments.

[Since the cessatin of the pandemic] many parents have either continued homeschooling or gone on to enroll their children in private or charter schools, apparently fed up with their neighborhood public schools.

A recent report in Education Next from researchers Joshua Goodman and Abigail Francis offers some numbers that support what many of us teachers have observed firsthand. They mainly focus on enrollment in Massachusetts’ public schools, where the total enrollment in 2024 was “4.2 percent lower than it was in fall 2019,” and the numbers in future school years are only going to continue to worsen under these conditions.

Moreover, the drop was steeper among white and Asian students and mainly occurred in the middle school grades (five through eight).

It’s significant that this is happening in Massachusetts, a state with a well-funded school system that routinely leads the country year after year and has set the standard for public education ever since Horace Mann invented the whole concept nearly two centuries ago. If enrollment is declining here, then it’s fair to conclude that this is happening nationwide. Indeed, Goodman and Francis say as much: “Fall 2023 public school enrollment nationwide was 2.8 percent below predicted levels compared to a 2.6 percent drop for Massachusetts by fall 2024.”

So what accounts for the decline? Why is it more pronounced among whites and Asians? And why is it during middle school?

The standard answer for any public school problem is that there's not enough funding, but Meyrat isn't buying that:

It should go without saying that the leftist responses to this question, usually revolving around funding, equity, and accessibility, are utterly misguided. On the whole, public schools are amply endowed — particularly in Massachusetts, which spends more than $24,000 a student — and they are decked out with every instructional resource a teacher could ever want.

Most campuses aren’t the squalid, impoverished, gang-infested dens depicted in movies like Dangerous Minds or shows like Abbot Elementary. Rather, they are generally clean, boring, and look more like corporate offices.

The real reasons for declining enrollment ironically have more to do with the inverse of these complaints: Public schools are now excessively funded and overly obsessed with equity and accessibility, which then prevents them from being reformed. Regardless of the state, most public schools are now failing in three critical areas that parents care about when deciding on their children’s K-12 education: academic rigor, student discipline, and the campus’ moral influence.

This is pretty much right, although the failure to maintain student discipline is actually the root of a decline in academic rigor and concerns about the moral influence on campus. Nor did it start with the covid years. It's been an ongoing problem in public schools for decades. Meyrat continues:

To prevent mass failure, grading systems have been reconfigured in such a way as to discourage studying, practicing, and applying new concepts, and thereby deepening one’s understanding of any given subject.

Even in supposedly advanced classes, students are often awarded perfect grades for projects and games and rarely assessed objectively. When they actually encounter the occasional test or essay, many cheat and use AI. The students who rise above all this mediocrity and really do prove themselves to be formidable scholars are typically the students in affluent households who either have personal tutors or attend test-prep centers after school.

As for the on-level or non-advanced classes, there are hardly any demands. Simply showing up and completing a few busywork activities will allow a student to pass. For the rest of the time, the students in these classes are on their phones goofing off or allowed to roam the halls for hours at a time — something I’ve described elsewhere as “Vegetative Learning.”

The teacher’s job in these classes is to keep the peace, pass on the students, take attendance, and pray that their students already have some kind of rudimentary knowledge of reading and math so they can pass their standardized tests.

Predictably, due to this lack of rigor, there has been a surge in student misbehavior. As the saying goes, “the Devil finds work for idle hands,” and never have students been so idle in their classes as they are after Covid. Not only has this led many of them to become constantly restless and disruptive, but it has also led many to become addicted to their smartphones.

Again, all this is a consequence of the failure of school authorities to maintain a disciplined atmosphere. Students know that if they misbehave and get sent by their teacher to an assistant principal for discipline, that the principal is very likely to return the student to the classroom with a note to the teacher to solve the problem him or her self. With little recourse for handling disruptive students teachers often give up even trying and classrooms devolve into barely controlled chaos.

Assistant principals are in a tough spot because they know that if they discipline disruptive students they may not get support from the building principal when angry parents demand to confront him or her. And the lack of support extends, often, to the school board which doesn't want to deal with irate parents and threatened lawsuits.

This state of affairs derives from a view of school, promoted by inept administrators, as a "happy place" where students are to be coddled and pampered rather than as a "boot camp" where students are to be trained and taught basic life skills.

His concluding paragraphs nicely summarize the current circumstances in many of our public schools:

To make matters worse, the tools to deal with these students (remedial classes, suspension, expulsion, disciplinary campuses, or even juvenile detention centers) have been removed in the wake of the false DEI narratives that have prevailed in education ever since President Obama’s infamous memo to school districts to essentially stop disciplining black and brown kids.

Along with everything else, this misplaced equity agenda has resulted in certain students regularly wreaking havoc on school safety and student well-being with little recourse for teachers and principals to do anything about it.

Finally, the overall culture and spirit of public schools has become increasingly immoral. Many young people from otherwise wholesome households are introduced to a wide variety of obscenity, vice, and nihilism at the typical school.

Bullying and harassment go unchecked, kids routinely swear, everyone cheats on their work, most of the boys are addicted to online pornography, most of the girls consume mindless slop on social media, and most teachers are demoralized by idiotic policies that dictate how they’re supposed to teach.

All true. When minority kids aren't, or can't, be disciplined then it's hard to justify disciplining anybody, and when students can use the most vulgar obscenities in lashing out at teachers, then discipline has collapsed and teacher morale plummets.

This is why so many teachers, after ten or fifteen years of putting up with this, seek out some other, less stressful, line of work. It's why parents who care and can afford it are taking their kids out of public schools and either homeschool their children or find a private school alternative.

Too many public schools are just not "happy places" for either teachers or the students who want to learn.