The New York Times has an article reporting on the plunging enrollment in public schools.
In New York City, the nation’s largest school district has lost some 50,000 students over the past two years. In Michigan, enrollment remains more than 50,000 below prepandemic levels from big cities to the rural Upper Peninsula.
In the suburbs of Orange County, Calif., where families have moved for generations to be part of the public school system, enrollment slid for the second consecutive year; statewide, more than a quarter-million public school students have dropped from California’s rolls since 2019.
And since school funding is tied to enrollment, cities that have lost many students — including Denver, Albuquerque and Oakland — are now considering combining classrooms, laying off teachers or shutting down entire schools.
Read the whole thing.
Public schools — and very soon, colleges — were already destined to see declines in enrollment thanks to lower birth rates and a slowdown of immigration under the Trump administration and during the pandemic. But obviously the pandemic-era school closures and political fights about curricula have accelerated trends that were already in motion, toward home-schooling, pod-schooling, unschooling. The pandemic also reversed the trend of falling enrollment in Catholic schools. I would bet that with sufficient digging we would also find a marked increase in tolerated truancy.
Despite my own problems with the philosophy and practice of state-funded, Deweyite education, I used to think that public schools were the bedrock social institution in American life. Most parents send their kids to public schools, most parents report at least some approval of their local schools.
But I think that’s over now. It isn’t just the pandemic but a broader trend in America away from one-size-fits-all solutions. Mass media and public schools were the major tools of mutual assimilation in America, not just between natives and immigrants but across religious and class lines. But perhaps all the talk of diversity as a master value is inspiring parents to actually preserve some cultural diversity by withdrawing from America’s homogenizing institutions.