A new report from the Brookings Institution suggests that the pandemic may have created a new generation of lost kids from classrooms, according to an article in The Hechinger Report.
Many students still aren’t back in school years after the Covid outbreak. They are not in private schools or being homeschooled. Many are simply not enrolled anywhere, according to the Brookings’ analysis of federal data. Some are older teens, nearly at the end of their high school years, but many are younger. No one knows whether these kids are getting an education.
Before the pandemic, the share of students in traditional public schools held steady, near 85 percent between 2016 and 2020. After the pandemic, public school enrollment plummeted to below 80 percent and hasn’t rebounded.
Charter school enrollment rose from 5 percent of students in 2016-17 to 6 percent in 2023-24. The number of children attending virtual schools almost doubled from 0.7 percent before the pandemic in 2019-20 to 1.2 percent in 2020-21 and has remained high.
Private school enrollment has stayed steady at almost 9 percent of school-age children between 2016-17 and 2023-24, according to this Brookings estimate.
Interestingly, high-poverty districts had the largest share of students outside the traditional public-school sector. In addition to private school, students were enrolled in charters, virtual schools, specialized schools for students with disabilities or other alternative schools or were homeschooling.
More than 1 in 4 students in high-poverty districts are not enrolled in a traditional public school, compared with 1 in 6 students in low-poverty school districts.
Before the pandemic, U.S. schools were already headed for a major contraction. The average American woman is now giving birth to only 1.7 children over her lifetime, well below the 2.1 fertility rate needed to replace the population. Fertility rates are projected to fall further. The Brookings analysts assume more immigrants will continue to enter the country, despite current immigration restrictions, but not enough to offset the decline in births.
Even if families return to their pre-pandemic enrollment patterns, the population decline would mean 2.2 million fewer public school students by 2050. If parents keep choosing other kinds of schools at the pace observed since 2020, traditional public schools could lose as many as 8.5 million students, shrinking from 43.06 million in 2023-24 to as few as 34.57 million by mid-century.
The public school landscape is shifting. Get ready for mass public school closures.
The Hechinger Report
