A lot of these enrollment metrics have been driven by early childhood education, so I wouldn't put that much stock in this being some sort of wider trend in terms of desire to enroll a child in school. But there absolutely is a trend in terms of the LACK of desire to be in a school as an adult; it has gotten harder and harder to recruit, and, speaking quite candidly, the job of being a teachers has actually just gotten worse. Naturally, this correlates with a reduction in the quality of the folks that we get to be in our classrooms (even at institutions like mine that pay top dollar for teaching talent).
Even from where I am sitting it is extremely hard to confidently extrapolate what the long-run equilibrium of this will be. There's a camp that believes that this could have been a watershed moment for online instruction, but if you followed the play-by-play on the ground, it was almost the complete opposite: folks have been so disappointed by what counted as online instruction that in-person, good-ol-fashioned teaching has never been so highly sought. My guess is we will normalize with COVID protocols, staffing, and the rest fairly soon, and we'll returns to previous trends. The worst kept secret in primary education is that even at the high-school level for the most part we're little beyond a glorified day-care, and that the folks' who ought to matter most (the students) are pretty voiceless. This all combines for a fantastic recipe for why there is so much stasis in education, and unfortunately I think the smart money is on betting this won't change much at all, even after COVID.
I would like to understand what schools actually do these days? I have to send my kids to separate Math lessons, - so they do not really teach Math. I have to send them to separate English lessons, - so they don’t teach English well either. All schools seemingly focus on is SEL, with highly questionable content. So now I need to monitor what schools tell my kids in class and then try to mitigate the damage. So what do we need these schools for, exactly?
> this could have been a watershed moment for online instruction
There are some private schools that are 100% virtual that are doing this incredibly well, but I don't know any public schools that fall into that category.
Related: 'Public Schools Are Causing Irreparable Harm to Themselves' published in Reason Magazine
> It hardly matters if proponents of education choice want to kill public schools if those schools commit suicide in mid-argument. Choice advocates at least have alternatives to offer: anything families want that suits the needs of their children in achieving an education. That could include traditional public schools, but only if the staff of those institutions don't first reduce them to hollow shells. It certainly allows for private schools, charter schools, homeschooling of all sorts, microschools, learning pods, and whatever else the human imagination might conceive.
> Unsurprisingly, public support for school choice is rising. EdChoice, which tracks opinion on a monthly basis, reports: Support for education savings accounts is at 70 percent in October, up five points from September; for school vouchers at 64 percent, up six points; and for charter schools at 67 percent, up six points. All of these approaches allow families flexibility in choosing how resources for education are used, rather than being taxed to fund take-it-or-leave-it district schools that just might decide to close their doors one day out of five without offering so much as a discount.
I’m a teacher. I’ve seen similar numbers reported elsewhere.
Key take away appears to be that “many families simply opted out of remote learning in the non-compulsory grades of pre-K and kindergarten”.
The declines are real, but mostly because families are delaying their initial start rather than students unenrolling from the upper grades (though enrollments have shifted from public to private/charter).
Online learning is utterly useless for pre-K and K (source: first-hand with my child). Doesn't make sense to do it. They'll be back once pandemic is over, hopefully.
Three authors to write a number without a denominator:
New York City's school enrollment dropped by about 38,000 students last school year and another 13,000 this year.
38k sounds like a lot, until you look up the total enrollment which is close to a million, so a change of 4%, about inline with the national trend.
Roughly 938,000 students are enrolled in New York City's public schools, down from about 955,000 last school year, when the system saw a significant decline related to the coronavirus pandemic.
I can’t imagine ever having kids… but if I did I wouldn’t be able to put them in public school. It’s a circus. It’s daycare for the 80%. It’s not education.
I’d homeschool for sure. It’s a big commitment but I feel that’s the way to truly be a responsible parent.
This is a popular trope heavily marketed in certain circles but it’s not even remotely true and it’s deeply disrespectful to the teachers working in an underfunded but critical position.
Beyond the obvious politics, the other thing to remember is that student performance very closely tracks the parents’ socioeconomic status. This is most known for explaining the gaps on international testing but it also leads to people misinterpreting school data and drawing the wrong conclusion. My son’s school is notably bimodal because it has both recent immigrants who tend to be poor and affluent professionals, and people sometimes look at the averages and conclude that the school is bad when it’s really just rediscovering that being poor in America sucks.
I felt the same way before having kids. We live in Brooklyn, which offers Pre-K for all, and we decided to try for it if for no other reason than free daycare. We had a great experience in Pre-K, our daughter learned a lot, made a bunch of friends, and we all gained a community. We had the same experience in Kindergarten before Covid hit. We unenrolled her for first grade, homeschooled instead of doing the school's remote option[^1], and also had a great experience. That said, after a year at home and the birth of our second daughter, we were all ready for her to return to public school for second grade, and we are all are thankful she's back.
Parenting is a continual exercise in evaluating tradeoffs. With all due respect, folks don't know what they'll do as a parent until they're a parent.
Only poor kids get the daycare experience actually. Many public schools have incredible facilities, teachers, honors and AP classes, extracurriculars… the question is why not supply that for everyone regardless of socioeconomic background.
I went to a northern suburban public middle school and it basically felt like college. We were encouraged to explore our interests and there were classes catering to basically everything—loads of foreign languages, 3D art, wood shop (in 7th grade, not even high school), cooking, and so on. Few students acted out.
Then I moved to the south for high school. Want to continue learning the foreign language you’ve studied since 6th grade? Nope. We only offer that for upperclassmen because young students don’t have the mental maturity for language learning(what?). Want to explore art? Nope. You’re painting by numbers. Fights everyday. Straight up gangs and kids selling drugs when the teacher is looking away. Teachers chatting on the phone with friends all class everyday and just playing random movies unrelated to the subject.
My public education in middle school was far beyond what I got in high school. I’d dare say I regressed since I was doing less advanced subjects in high school. But my point is—great public schools exist. It’s all in where you live.
One of my former coworkers who went to private schools said the same thing. All I could think to myself was that we have the same job and title except my education cost $300k less after going to public school and a public university. If it's a circus I guess I'm just a stupid monkey who didn't get an education dancing my way to becoming a neurosurgeon...
It is not just daycare. I live in Chicago and CPS is generally regarded as never closing for the simple fact that its the easiest way to feed children.
> I wouldn’t be able to put them in public school. It’s a circus. It’s daycare for the 80%
As someone with kids in both public and private school, let me assure you that both are 80% daycare. And someone without kids might not understand this, but daycare is highly educational. Children don't learn by sitting through a lecture, they learn through the process of someone taking care of them.
Also while we're both throwing around totally unsubstantiated statistics about other fields of work, I would suggest that white collar work is also 60% daycare for the worker, since jobs are a in large part an income redistribution technology.
The social skills kids pickup in daycare and school is fundamentally important in a child's development. Yes, you can have kids hanging about with your friends kids but the ability to interact with strangers, and people outside your bubble is incredibly important.
I'm sorry you went to a bad public school but there are hundreds of millions of us who went to public schools and turned out just fine. If you didn't go to a bad public school and have formed a blanket opinion that poors == bad then you're proving my point.
Any parent who have home schooled during the pandemic will tell you that most teachers are worth their weight in gold. It's not remotely anywhere near as easy as you think it is.
Perhaps a lot of school is social, extracurricular activities, etc. but if you strip all of that away you are left with the core educational content. That core is what was being taught remotely where the parents could observe. Some parents were perhaps delighted with what their kids were learning. Others may have discovered it fell below what they felt was acceptable.
It doesn't seem surprising that a percentage of those parents would seek out alternatives that they felt were a better fit for their kids.
There is a fascinating, ongoing natural experiment related to education reform & school choice happening on the ground, right at this time.
Consider the post-katrina education in New Orleans. Sarah Carr (reporter & author) does a good job of summarizing the landscape, which include wins, [1] and concerns [2]
It started with the massive failure of education post-katrina. Public schools were left hollow, unable to restart. Entrenched interests simply walked away from their power bases.
Career bureaucrats were left with students.. and not much else: No obvious way, or know-how, to re-start the assembly line of public education. Thus, said govt pragmatists were left no choice (and critically - faced no repercussions) , except to haphazardly adopt school choice as the education standard for the city.
They talk about aggregate enrollment, but never whether share of the school age population enrolled is dropping or not.
The population with a given birth year falls with later birth years through the whole Gen Z age cohort, so a downward trend in school enrollments is to be expected, to a certain extent.
Yes but not continuously, they have a bunch of fixed costs and they can’t fire 1/30th of a teacher for every student who doesn’t enroll. At some level of shrinkage the overall costs go down, but it’s not easy with a slow slide downward over the course of years.
We pulled my son (type 1 diabetic) out of public school and into homeschooling a month prior to the public schools going all virtual due to the pandemic last year. He's finally vaccinated, but we're in no hurry to send him back (he loves that he can get his work done in 2-3 hours - this is a 9 year old self-directed kid, admittedly a rare breed.) Our daughter is in a small charter high school (~400 students) that decided they were going to be "flexible" about mask wearing to appease parents who didn't want their rights infringed. Last week her school went full virtual again until the new year because several staff members (including the principal) contracted COVID and exposed (according to their contract tracing) most of the staff & half of the students.
As a parent the only plus I see from an in-person education is the socialization aspect (which can be both positive and negative.) I'm fortunate enough to work from home, so I don't need school to be my babysitting service. Despite living in a good town with "highly rated" schools, I've found the middle schools & up education system to be quite lacking.
So, public schools are free daycare. Yeah, education is great, but almost everyone is two-income (or single parent working). So schools provide childcare.
The public schools weren't providing daycare. I can tell from my facebook feed loaded with affluenza sufferers that Zoom classes were not cutting it.
Parents went where there was daycare (private).
Other alternatives: people stayed home with gov't assistance, and did the childcare themselves and homeschooled.
Depends where you live. My public school education was amazing and I had better instructors than I did at both my name brand undergrad and highly regarded grad schools.
But I grew up in a place most of those on this site would not want to live (including me, though I appreciate growing up there) and as such the teachers were paid enough to buy modest homes on their own salaries without a spouse/roommate.
For us, private is too expensive and public has become an indoctrination mill instead of an institution focused on teaching a kid the fundamentals, so it's probably going to be home schooling or moving to another country where we can afford a private school.
> In 2019-2020, public school enrollment dropped by 3 percent nationwide
Later
> The National Association of Independent Schools comprises private, non-parochial schools. They report a net enrollment growth of 1.7% over the two pandemic years.
[+] [-] ChicagoBoy11|4 years ago|reply
A lot of these enrollment metrics have been driven by early childhood education, so I wouldn't put that much stock in this being some sort of wider trend in terms of desire to enroll a child in school. But there absolutely is a trend in terms of the LACK of desire to be in a school as an adult; it has gotten harder and harder to recruit, and, speaking quite candidly, the job of being a teachers has actually just gotten worse. Naturally, this correlates with a reduction in the quality of the folks that we get to be in our classrooms (even at institutions like mine that pay top dollar for teaching talent).
Even from where I am sitting it is extremely hard to confidently extrapolate what the long-run equilibrium of this will be. There's a camp that believes that this could have been a watershed moment for online instruction, but if you followed the play-by-play on the ground, it was almost the complete opposite: folks have been so disappointed by what counted as online instruction that in-person, good-ol-fashioned teaching has never been so highly sought. My guess is we will normalize with COVID protocols, staffing, and the rest fairly soon, and we'll returns to previous trends. The worst kept secret in primary education is that even at the high-school level for the most part we're little beyond a glorified day-care, and that the folks' who ought to matter most (the students) are pretty voiceless. This all combines for a fantastic recipe for why there is so much stasis in education, and unfortunately I think the smart money is on betting this won't change much at all, even after COVID.
[+] [-] g42gregory|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troupe|4 years ago|reply
There are some private schools that are 100% virtual that are doing this incredibly well, but I don't know any public schools that fall into that category.
[+] [-] mannerheim|4 years ago|reply
> It hardly matters if proponents of education choice want to kill public schools if those schools commit suicide in mid-argument. Choice advocates at least have alternatives to offer: anything families want that suits the needs of their children in achieving an education. That could include traditional public schools, but only if the staff of those institutions don't first reduce them to hollow shells. It certainly allows for private schools, charter schools, homeschooling of all sorts, microschools, learning pods, and whatever else the human imagination might conceive.
> Unsurprisingly, public support for school choice is rising. EdChoice, which tracks opinion on a monthly basis, reports: Support for education savings accounts is at 70 percent in October, up five points from September; for school vouchers at 64 percent, up six points; and for charter schools at 67 percent, up six points. All of these approaches allow families flexibility in choosing how resources for education are used, rather than being taxed to fund take-it-or-leave-it district schools that just might decide to close their doors one day out of five without offering so much as a discount.
https://reason.com/2021/12/06/public-schools-are-causing-irr...
[+] [-] fakename11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] germinalphrase|4 years ago|reply
Key take away appears to be that “many families simply opted out of remote learning in the non-compulsory grades of pre-K and kindergarten”.
The declines are real, but mostly because families are delaying their initial start rather than students unenrolling from the upper grades (though enrollments have shifted from public to private/charter).
[+] [-] satya71|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adolph|4 years ago|reply
New York City's school enrollment dropped by about 38,000 students last school year and another 13,000 this year.
38k sounds like a lot, until you look up the total enrollment which is close to a million, so a change of 4%, about inline with the national trend.
Roughly 938,000 students are enrolled in New York City's public schools, down from about 955,000 last school year, when the system saw a significant decline related to the coronavirus pandemic.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/10/29/22753361/nyc-school-enrol...
What’s the natural variation from year to year and in larger cycles? From the below link, enrollment was sliding before Covid.
https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/historic-decline-p...
[+] [-] notacoward|4 years ago|reply
4% nationally is quite a lot - far more than enough to have serious social, political, and economic effects over the long term.
> enrollment was sliding before Covid
...which the authors acknowledge, right at the beginning. Their point is that it has accelerated.
[+] [-] whalesalad|4 years ago|reply
I’d homeschool for sure. It’s a big commitment but I feel that’s the way to truly be a responsible parent.
[+] [-] acdha|4 years ago|reply
This is a popular trope heavily marketed in certain circles but it’s not even remotely true and it’s deeply disrespectful to the teachers working in an underfunded but critical position.
Beyond the obvious politics, the other thing to remember is that student performance very closely tracks the parents’ socioeconomic status. This is most known for explaining the gaps on international testing but it also leads to people misinterpreting school data and drawing the wrong conclusion. My son’s school is notably bimodal because it has both recent immigrants who tend to be poor and affluent professionals, and people sometimes look at the averages and conclude that the school is bad when it’s really just rediscovering that being poor in America sucks.
[+] [-] gregorymichael|4 years ago|reply
Parenting is a continual exercise in evaluating tradeoffs. With all due respect, folks don't know what they'll do as a parent until they're a parent.
1: https://baugues.com/homeschool
[+] [-] femiagbabiaka|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgotmyoldname|4 years ago|reply
I went to a northern suburban public middle school and it basically felt like college. We were encouraged to explore our interests and there were classes catering to basically everything—loads of foreign languages, 3D art, wood shop (in 7th grade, not even high school), cooking, and so on. Few students acted out.
Then I moved to the south for high school. Want to continue learning the foreign language you’ve studied since 6th grade? Nope. We only offer that for upperclassmen because young students don’t have the mental maturity for language learning(what?). Want to explore art? Nope. You’re painting by numbers. Fights everyday. Straight up gangs and kids selling drugs when the teacher is looking away. Teachers chatting on the phone with friends all class everyday and just playing random movies unrelated to the subject.
My public education in middle school was far beyond what I got in high school. I’d dare say I regressed since I was doing less advanced subjects in high school. But my point is—great public schools exist. It’s all in where you live.
[+] [-] jac241|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danans|4 years ago|reply
As someone with kids in both public and private school, let me assure you that both are 80% daycare. And someone without kids might not understand this, but daycare is highly educational. Children don't learn by sitting through a lecture, they learn through the process of someone taking care of them.
Also while we're both throwing around totally unsubstantiated statistics about other fields of work, I would suggest that white collar work is also 60% daycare for the worker, since jobs are a in large part an income redistribution technology.
[+] [-] siquick|4 years ago|reply
I'm sorry you went to a bad public school but there are hundreds of millions of us who went to public schools and turned out just fine. If you didn't go to a bad public school and have formed a blanket opinion that poors == bad then you're proving my point.
Any parent who have home schooled during the pandemic will tell you that most teachers are worth their weight in gold. It's not remotely anywhere near as easy as you think it is.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] troupe|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't seem surprising that a percentage of those parents would seek out alternatives that they felt were a better fit for their kids.
[+] [-] IG_Semmelweiss|4 years ago|reply
Consider the post-katrina education in New Orleans. Sarah Carr (reporter & author) does a good job of summarizing the landscape, which include wins, [1] and concerns [2]
It started with the massive failure of education post-katrina. Public schools were left hollow, unable to restart. Entrenched interests simply walked away from their power bases.
Career bureaucrats were left with students.. and not much else: No obvious way, or know-how, to re-start the assembly line of public education. Thus, said govt pragmatists were left no choice (and critically - faced no repercussions) , except to haphazardly adopt school choice as the education standard for the city.
[1] https://www.econtalk.org/sarah-carr-on-charter-schools-educa...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/how-str...
[+] [-] dragonwriter|4 years ago|reply
The population with a given birth year falls with later birth years through the whole Gen Z age cohort, so a downward trend in school enrollments is to be expected, to a certain extent.
[+] [-] cperciva|4 years ago|reply
Public schools also see their expenses drop when their headcount drops, yes?
[+] [-] pmichaud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GiorgioG|4 years ago|reply
As a parent the only plus I see from an in-person education is the socialization aspect (which can be both positive and negative.) I'm fortunate enough to work from home, so I don't need school to be my babysitting service. Despite living in a good town with "highly rated" schools, I've found the middle schools & up education system to be quite lacking.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|4 years ago|reply
The public schools weren't providing daycare. I can tell from my facebook feed loaded with affluenza sufferers that Zoom classes were not cutting it.
Parents went where there was daycare (private).
Other alternatives: people stayed home with gov't assistance, and did the childcare themselves and homeschooled.
That's about the gist?
[+] [-] hersko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firstplacelast|4 years ago|reply
But I grew up in a place most of those on this site would not want to live (including me, though I appreciate growing up there) and as such the teachers were paid enough to buy modest homes on their own salaries without a spouse/roommate.
[+] [-] lgleason|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clircle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supercanuck|4 years ago|reply
Private School
[+] [-] neogodless|4 years ago|reply
> In 2019-2020, public school enrollment dropped by 3 percent nationwide
Later
> The National Association of Independent Schools comprises private, non-parochial schools. They report a net enrollment growth of 1.7% over the two pandemic years.
[+] [-] kaminar|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]