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Late last month, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) published the enrollment count for the 2023-24 school year. The report showed that 9 of the top 10 and 38 of the 50 largest districts have lost students since 2019-20, while 31 of the 50 largest districts lost students between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years.
All in all, the loss amounts to a 2.5% drop between fall 2019 and fall 2023. Schools at the pre-K-8 grade level showed the greatest declines where enrollment dropped by 4.5% over the four-year period.
And the exodus is ongoing. According to the latest federal estimates, public schools are projected to lose 2.7 million students, for a 5.5% decline, from 2022 to 2031. That includes a loss of 1.8 million students in pre-K-8, a 5.4% loss, and 883,000 students in grades 9-12, a 5.7% decline.
On a similar note, the Fordham Institute recently reported that nearly 1 in 12 public schools nationwide saw student enrollment declines of about 20% since the year before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Chronically low-performing schools were hit particularly hard. According to the study, they were more than twice as likely to have sizable enrollment drops compared to other public schools.
It follows that the loss of students in the pre-K-12 sector is a harbinger of what’s to come in higher education. In early January, the Hechinger Report disclosed that the public university system is struggling to reduce a deep deficit that threatens to “permanently shutter several campuses after dramatic drop-offs in enrollment and revenue. While much attention has been focused on how enrollment declines are putting private, nonprofit colleges out of business at an accelerating rate—at least 17 of them in 2024—public universities and colleges face their own existential crises.
“State institutions nationwide are being merged, and campuses shut down, many of them in areas where there is already little access to higher education.”
The question then becomes, “Why are people shunning public schools?”
Covid certainly put a hit on the system, as do declining birthrates, but there is another critical factor. An April report from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, which surveyed more than 1,000 Gen Z students between the ages of 12 and 18, found that just 48% of those enrolled in middle or high school felt motivated to go to school. Only half said they do something interesting in school every day. Similarly, a new EdChoice survey finds that 64% of teens said school is boring, and 30% feel it is a waste of time.
The general public isn’t too happy with the current state of government-run schools either. A just-released poll from the Pew Research Center reveals that 51% of Americans say K-12 education is on the wrong track, with 69% saying that it’s because “core academic subjects, like reading, math, science, and social studies” are being neglected. Additionally, 54% say teachers are “bringing their personal, political, and social views into the classroom.”
The Pew results align with a 2023 Gallup poll that revealed Americans have soured on public education. Just 26% of respondents indicate a “Great deal/Fair amount” of confidence in our government-run schools.
It’s not only increasing the number of kids who are ditching school, their teachers are also.
A May 2022 federal survey found that chronic teacher absenteeism (missing 11 or more days of school per year due to illness or personal reasons) during the 2021-22 school year increased in 72% of schools compared to an average pre-pandemic school year. In 37% of schools, teacher absenteeism increased significantly. The situation is particularly grim in Illinois, with just 66% of teachers having fewer than 10 absences in 2022.
It’s worth noting that teachers playing hooky is not a new phenomenon. In 2017, a study released by the Fordham Institute, using data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, delved into the depth of the absentee problem. The analysis showed that on average, teachers miss about eight school days a year due to sick and personal leave, while the average U.S. worker takes only about three-and-a-half sick days per annum. Worse, the study showed that 28.3% of teachers in traditional public schools are chronically absent. Interestingly, the corresponding number in charter schools is just 10.3%.
So, while teachers and students are forsaking school, parents need to step up, but too many are in the dark about the problems. American parents are far more bullish about the quality of learning in schools than their kids, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education. While substantially less than half of all high schoolers say they believe they’re learning a lot daily, over 70% of parents say they are. The divergence in perceptions between adults and children grows over time, driven mainly by a sizable drop in the number of students reporting positive experiences in school after the elementary years.
“The figures point to a failure not only to keep students engaged in school but also to keep families informed about the true state of their children’s learning,” said Rebecca Winthrop, the report’s lead author and a Brookings senior fellow. She added, “Parents themselves find it ‘hard to admit’ that K–12 education isn’t offering all that it should.”
Parents clearly hold the key. They need to take greater charge of their children’s education. Blithely sending children off to public school daily and assuming that they will get an education that will prepare them to be productive citizens and make a living wage may have been justified in the 1950s, but today, it’s a crapshoot. Homeschooling, microschooling, and private schooling are all typically superior to what children experience when they are entangled in the government education complex.
America’s kids and the future of our country depend on a rapid course change. ASAP.
Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.
One factor behind endemic teacher absenteeism is the overweening power of teachers’ unions.
These unions have plain become too big for their britches and out of touch with students, parents, and taxpayers such that teachers face little or no consequences when they simply don’t do their jobs. We saw this with COVID. In fact, the unions go to bat for teachers even when they egregiously do wrong, like abuse kids.
I think the biggest problems we have in my school is a lack of consequences for discipline issues. We have had some students with severe discipline problems. They are allowed to carry on with negative actions with no consequences for a ridículos amounts of time. This drags down the rest of the class. That includes fighting, inappropriately touching, throwing] desks and chairs on the floor, interrupting teachers, stalking and harassing other students, having a student taje swings ar me. and having students run out of the classroom. And this an elementary school. Too many times, we get no support from parents. Eventually there are consequences. But it takes a lot of time. I am not in a union. But I know for a fact it’s not just a teacher issue. It is a parental, school systems policy and admin decisions in the schools. Parents sometimes are clueless about how their children are in school and refuse to listen to facts.
The parents of these children are, most likely, unaware of what their kids are up to outside of school, as well. Figure out a way to get moms back in the home instead of in the rat race and many of these problems will go away. Who knows, that may even increase the birth rate. I grew up in the 50’s/60’s when most moms were at home. Since then I’ve watched the birth rate drop, the crime rates increase, the education standards fall through the floor and the level of public discourse is in the gutter. The foundational construct of civilization, the nuclear family, is crumbling before our eyes and we call it progress. We won’t admit our mistakes until we are on the brink of The New Stone Age. But then it will be too late to do anything but wait to see who comes out on top. It’s about time we drop one of those sapiens off “homo sapiens sapiens”. We’ve earned it.
Nothing new about this. I’m a baby boomer.
– just 48% of those enrolled in middle or high school felt motivated to go to school.
I was certainly in the majority there, and I’m surprised to see it isn’t larger.
– Only half said they do something interesting in school every day.
That almost never happened.
– Similarly, a new EdChoice survey finds that 64% of teens said school is boring,
It was, mostly. Stupifying. I noticed in 1st Grade how much duller the books they had me read, than the ones my grandmother used. She gave me Milne, Baum, and Kipling.
= 30% feel it is a waste of time.
Felt like it.
Later, when I discovered that girls don’t have cooties, their presence was the one motivator, because school was where they were.
But I was enlightened in 4th grade. My 3rd grade teacher was excellent, and had a bunch of books in her room, we were allowed to take them home. One was an edited Sherlock Holmes. I loved it. My grandmother found out, and gave me her Adventures. Then my 4th grade teacher told my mother to take it away from me because it was too advanced for my age. Fortunately, Dad called BS on that.
It was not until I took Latin that I got the difference between an adjective and an adverb; my English teachers didn’t do grammar.
School is not going to be fun, especially at the early levels. C S Lewis has an essay “Parthenon and Optative” which goes into it. If the teacher tries to inspire kids about the former, not teaching the latter, they won’t learn Greek.
Note, this was all before 1971. And not in the backwoods, or inner city, but the suburbs of NYC.
Stop trying for the “bright shining faces” and just teach. Destroy every vestige of John Dewey’s work.
Why are you talking about your experiences 50+ years ago? Hardly relevant to the issue.
You have an excellent memory. I took Latin for one year in high school. I think that one class was the only one available. It was discontinued before I graduated. I have to say it was probably the most beneficial class I took in all of high school. Admittedly, I am no wordsmith and can butcher a paragraph with the best of them but as far as reading comprehension goes I find I struggle a lot less than many of the people I’ve known. Many thanks to Mrs. Rowan, the teacher, for making life a little easier.
Its no longer Education its Brainwashing/Indoctrination by the left
What puzzles me about the practice of teaching preschoolers the intricacies of sexual conduct is why so early? What good does it do to teach Johnny what’s up Mary’s skirt when he’s 5 years old. Or, that one day, Johnny might be more interested in knowing about Billy’s anatomy? I knew girls and boys were different by the time I started school and I knew girls had cooties. That was good enough for me until the cootie thing went away and girls became more “acceptable”. This interest culminated in a real-world education in the back of a ’63 Chevy on a Saturday night. Now it appears boys and girls are playing “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” in the closet of their kindergarten class, encouraged by their pink, blue and orange haired “teacher”. There’s something very wrong about this movement to sexualize kids before they can even construct a sentence.
Trump has tackled everything in his path so far. When he catches his breath he MUST tackle the teachers union, abolish Dept. of Education and SCHOOL VOUCHERS.
The numbers have really dropped because of the fact that they have taken God out of our public schools.Now many are home schooling, or sending their kids to private Christian schools.