Why New Data Finds Continued Public School Enrollment Slide

As the new school year begins next month, it has become ever clearer that American public schools are facing a noticeable decline in enrollment. Even several years after schools reopened in the wake of the Covid shutdowns, 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?

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.

More than anything else, the school shutdowns during Covid revealed just how easy schooling had become in most of America. In their remote classes, students merely had to log in and show a pulse to earn an A in the class, and this only became marginally more demanding when they returned to the classroom. To prevent mass failure, grading systems have been reconfigured in such a way 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.

This latter problem presents some unforeseen challenges for teachers and administrators. At best, the devices serve as a pacifier for students, keeping them relatively quiet and still for so many hours at a time. More often they stunt students’ cognitive and emotional development, undermining their self-control and self-awareness. Consequently, every campus now has a volatile group of students who pose a real danger to their peers, constantly terrorizing classes, and getting nowhere with their learning.

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.

Normally, this could be counteracted by some good friends and a strong church community, but the screens have severely impaired kids’ social skills, and religious practice is the one thing that public school educators actively discourage. Thus, many classrooms gradually become morally desolate wastelands where children lose their innocence and grow to hate their lives.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher and freelance writer in the Dallas area. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written for essays for The American Mind, The Stream, Religion and Liberty, The Blaze, and elsewhere. He is also the host of “The Everyman Commentary Podcast.” Follow him on X.