For a second straight year, school enrollment is dropping
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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’d argue that schools, in an attempt to appease everyone, are designed for no one… modern democracy in action.
I'm not following how those amendments establish a public school system or control it.
But regarding your last sentence, I agree. The concept of "no child left behind" necessarily means you optimize for spending your finite resources in the areas they will have the least return on investment.
The 13th Amendment gave slaves rights as citizens. The 14th Amendment gave freedmen and non-assimilating immigrants rights to claim access to public services (including education) where they’d previously been denied. The 15th amendment guaranteed every man a vote in who gets to administer those public services (unfortunately took another 50 years to include women)… fast forward 100 years and LBJ signed Elementary and Secondary Education Act (among other civil rights legislation) because these constitutional rights were being trodded over in the worst of ways. Title I of ESEA set forth a federal tax base to ensure equal access where states (that previously made most policy decisions) could or would not.
So that kinda established a good path that led to todays bad outcomes. I work a lot across U.S. K-12, including with large district superintendents, but I am by no means a policy or reform guru so take this with a grain of salt.
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.
It would be easy for me to identify public schools in PA with key clubs, AP classes, orchestra, all common sports, a series of foreign languages etc.
The note missing from these comments is the connection between local taxes and the quality of the school.
It's the main issue in the school I taught at. Parents didn't care and kids knew and it rubbed off. Until the kid failed, then it was the teachers fault. They see no value in education, very generally. Rural southern school. And until that's fixed, and the social issues at home (kids sleeping in cars, only 15% of our kids had both parents at home, etc) we can't truly make improvement. But nobody wants to tackle the social issues.
> 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...
The Steve Jobs 95 Interview on Education - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-8JiOQOe6U&t=6s
I'm not here to defend the status quo, but reformers should carefully consider "how do we prevent turning American K12 into American higher ed."
I don't think it's been established that competitive incentives are driving the price through the roof. There are other theories, e.g. that massive increases in subsidization via guaranteed loans and other mechanisms are driving the price from the demand-side.
Parents obviously want to minimize the amount they're paying out of pocket, and they'd like to keep some of the voucher money, so high-end schools as well as low-end schools are incentivized to keep their costs down.
It's true that many families will pay more to buy a house in a good school district, but I suspect that the school itself isn't the whole story: rather, many people interpret the school district's reputation as a proxy for the safety of the neighborhood and socio-economic status of its residents, as well as a proxy for their own socio-economic status.
Ulimately, I suspect that with the free market voucher system I described in my parent comment, legacy private schools would continue to charge outrageous tuition. But I think we'd also see some new, possibly virtual "bang for your buck" schools which would compete on price and which would be exclusive due to entrance exams and high academic expectations for enrolled students.
[1] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/education-statistics-facts...
This spherical cow is fully confirmed by the higher ed market /s.
I suppose the money for fancy facilities and armies of recruiting staff grew on a tree in the quad?
> There are other theories, e.g. that massive increases in subsidization via guaranteed loans and other mechanisms are driving the price from the demand-side.
As I stated,
>> When public funding is cut, it's replaced with debt
And, actually, that's the good outcome! The more realistic outcome is folks can't afford the price spiral and decide that Johnny doesn't need much more than a 6th grade education. Which I'm sure will bode well for our country.
Vouchers are a subsidy, are they not? This "other theory" leads to the same conclusion.
And also for health care delivery.
And for the reconstruction of Iraq after Desert Storm.
They vote with their vouchers for truly terrible schools. It siphons a tremendous amount of money from "traditional" public schools and delivers a hugely negative return.
It's a mistake, but it's a mistake we can't help but keep making because we're so determined to make everything function like a pseudo market.
Students in Louisiana's voucher program showed a decline in scores, especially math: https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/education/artic...
Not every hard-right ultra-religious parent has the means to homeschool their kid or to enroll them in private school. Vouchers really help lower that barrier.
So not worse, then.
> Students in Louisiana's voucher program showed a decline in scores, especially math:
Let's see...
> Any changes in the second year of reading were unclear.
Hmm.
> Past research on Louisiana’s school-voucher program came to a bleak conclusion: Students who used the program to transfer to a private school saw their test scores plummet.
> A new study complicates that narrative, finding some good—or at least, less bad—news about the closely watched program.
> The research shows that, for students who received a voucher at the middle or end of elementary school, there were no statistically significant effects on their math or reading test scores by the third year in the program. That’s a boon for voucher advocates who have argued against judging a program by its initial impacts.
> The research shows that, for students who received a voucher at the middle or end of elementary school, there were no statistically significant effects on their math or reading test scores by the third year in the program. That’s a boon for voucher advocates who have argued against judging a program by its initial impacts.
They deliberately cut the results off in the second year because the study was conducted by those whose livelihoods are threatened by vouchers.
What evidence is there that vouchers are helpful?
Who benefits? (the answer here isn't "everybody")
> James also said that school choice has “not proven effective at improving education.” That is also highly misleading. Ten of the 16 random assignment evaluations on the topic find that private school choice programs increased math or reading test scores overall or for student subgroups at a fraction of the cost. Only two of the 16 random assignment studies, both of which examined the highly regulated Louisiana voucher program, found negative effects on test scores. And four of the six rigorous studies on the topic found that private school choice increased educational attainment overall or for student subgroups. None of the six studies found that school choice reduced educational attainment.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/setting-record-straight-scho...
> Who benefits? (the answer here isn't "everybody")
Of course not everybody. Public school teachers and administrators will suffer tremendously should school choice be more widely adopted.
> Who benefits? (the answer here isn't "everybody")
In areas that have done charter schools, the result is that poor-performing school administrations/companies (in terms of standardized tests) lose their charter and effectively "close down." Better performing ones are allowed to replace them.
The students benefit because they end up with better quality educations. They're no longer forced to go to terrible schools that keep getting money thrown at them despite having deeply-rooted problems: problems that the school has no incentive to fix due to the way the current public schooling system works.
> The students benefit because they end up with better quality educations.
Citation needed. In fact, in many cases, students end up worse off.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.96.3.847
> The District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) has operated in the nation's capital since 2004, funded by a federal government appropriation. Because the program was oversubscribed in its early years of operation, and vouchers were awarded by lottery, we were able to use the “gold standard” evaluation method of a randomized experiment to determine what impacts the OSP had on student outcomes. Our analysis revealed compelling evidence that the DC voucher program had a positive impact on high school graduation rates, suggestive evidence that the program increased reading achievement, and no evidence that it affected math achievement.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pam.21691
> We use the introduction of a means-tested voucher program in Florida to examine whether increased competitive pressure on public schools affects students' test scores. We find greater score improvements in the wake of the program introduction for students attending schools that faced more competitive private school markets prior to the policy announcement, especially those that faced the greatest financial incentives to retain students. These effects suggest modest benefits for public school students from increased competition. The effects are consistent across several geocoded measures of competition and isolate competitive effects from changes in student composition or resource levels in public schools.
1. The state has to remain in the school business as a back-up for schools that fail, kids who get kicked out, and regions that have insufficient capacity because it's not profitable to run schools there. The public schools need to provide excess capacity so the private ones can operate at capacity and take financial risks. As a result, the state bears the risk.
2. A fleet of SUV's hit the road at 6:00 AM every day to carry kids to the far flung schools that their parents managed to get them into.
3. A shortage of available capacity, turnover in administration and ownership of schools, statistical variance, and opaque metrics make it impossible for parents to actually make an informed choice based on the quality of schools. It will be a crap shoot.
Nope, people will probably figure out the "best schools" via their private social networks and cloistered communities, and find ways to pull up the ladders behind them.
Religious hospitals and medical clinics can do the same thing in rural areas.
#3 I think would solve itself. Wow is US News college rankings big business and important. And uppity New Yorkers seem to know quite well what the pecking order is in elite preschools (I'm facepalming that this is true)
Class paranoia is too strong. Something would serve it.
Vouchers would likely involve a lot of fraud, the charter school system already has. A shift to full vouchers would be an expensive cost, one that democrats won't get past republicans.
Also, it would remain to be seen if K-12 schools stay in business long enough to gain a reputation without becoming franchises of one or two giant nationwide corporations.
I think the problem is that, at least at the high school level, a school under 1000 kids starts to suffer in terms of services: not enough smart kids, not enough activity participants, not enough special needs for the special teacher. Perhaps "specialty" schools would help a bit ...
They'll only be used by rich people to avoid subsidizing public education.
Vouchers don't improve student achievement (Stanford): https://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/28/vouchers-not-improve-st...
Students who received vouchers in Louisiana learned less than their peers: https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/education/artic...
Looks like that study wasn't peer-reviewed, and compared voucher students with those of the general population. A later study compared voucher students with those who applied for vouchers but didn't win the vouchers, and the bad effects largely disappeared: https://www.chalkbeat.org/2017/6/26/21107301/students-given-...
With school choice, bad schools are finally allowed to die and be replaced with good schools.
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).
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...
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.
For example, between 2010 ad 2020, the population of 15 to 19 year olds increased 9% to 22m. The next cohort sizes drop down to 20m in 2010, so as the bumper crop of kids born between 2000 and 2005 age out of school, the overall population of school-age kids will shrink.
Age 15 to 19
2010 20,219,890
2020 22,040,343
Diff +9%
Age 10 to 14
2010 20,528,072
2020 20,677,194
Diff +.07%
Age 5 to 9
2010 20,549,505
2020 20,348,657
Diff -1%
I’d homeschool for sure. It’s a big commitment but I feel that’s the way to truly be a responsible parent.
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.
Oh man... Are those words ever true.
I lived through civil war, Was a child refugee, switched countries and continents, lost parents and loved ones, had first job first love first wife,and generally had a fairly interesting life... And ALL of that was "Phase 1". Nothing compared to complete transformation of life priorities prerogatives options perspective free time disposable income attention sleep et cetera that having a child did.
It's astonishing to me how ... Pervasive and common, and yet unique and personal and shocking the experience is! :-)
But I will be first to admit that pre-children me and post-children me will have multiple areas of vehement disagreement and inability to understand each other :->
As a parent, yes I think it's possible and eminently achieveable,if that is and remains your goal.
BUT! Some stereotypical parenting behaviours that I found ridiculous before, now make a lot more sense.
Silly illustrative example - I spent years trying to persuade my friends against SUVs and large vehicles. Braking distance visibility handling price etc, I vehemently made my arguments. Now I cheerfully drive a minivan because it makes my life manifestly better and I couldn't care less about image or non-parent perception or judgement :-)
More importantly, There are also a lot of relationship paradigms that make a lot of sense when you are a young independent couple, that completely break down when you are sleep deprived not for a day or week or even a month but seminpermanently, while having the biggest demands and constant responsibility for your actions and behaviour, and influence on and safety of another human being! Add lack of free time and lack of disposable income and your preferences are definitely nudged in certain direction. And don't get me wrong, it's not that you are forced to behave a certain way... It's just that things that were impractical or undesirable before, are now practical and desirable. It's transformarive, in a way that I 100% know I would not be able to even explain let alone convince my pre-children self.
That being said, for empirical counter example - Musk still be Musk :-)
That’s part of the issue - it’s not the same across the entire country or even within small municipalities. If you live in a community where the school system is good - that can work.
But that was pre-COVID and pre- all the other shit that is surely about to come crashing down like a house of cards. Masks? No masks? Metal detectors at school? Do we need armed police? When are we going to knee jerked our kids back home to remote zoom “learning”? It’s traumatic and absolutely has a detriment to mental health and learning potential/performance. It sucks to be a student right now.
Then in a more broad sense: the American dream is on the verge of collapse. Inflation is here. Homes are unaffordable. People are fed up and don’t want to take low income jobs. Boomers set us up for their notion of the American dream - go to college, get a solid job, pay your dues and you’ll get yours. But it’s a fallacy.
So what is our education system preparing people for? It’s all going to change. It already has.
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.
This is a quite shallow dismissal. I'm the father of five and my wife is a teacher. The truth is, many public schools have deteriorated into free day care, and the poorer the area the school serves, the more this rings true.
> student performance very closely tracks the parents’ socioeconomic status.
Perhaps, but this is often an urban/suburban issue where wealth is concentrated in a (usually) suburban school, and that in turn leads to the school being better resourced.
That was also my experience growing up in school. And it was also my partner's.
That is way too many experiences to dismiss.
She cares for the students. They are all very underprivileged. The school system is driving her out.
I've heard this from close friends and family who taught. All were teachers, all loved teaching, all taught underprivileged kids at challenging schools, and all of them quit teaching before turning 30. Each quit due to the lack of support they receieved from uncaring, petty, and inept school administrations. Teachers can't teach when they don't feel physically safe, or are abruptly reassigned to different classes mid-year, or know their performance evaluations will be sabotaged by jealous senior teachers or administrators who are poor performers themselves yet impossible to fire. These experiences took place in the US, both in large costal and small Midwestern urban school districts.
Per-student spending has more than tripled since the 1960s and stands at over $15k/yr on average[1]. New York spends more than $38k/yr (!) per student, which boggles the mind.
Of course, much of that money is absorbed in the ever-expanding bureaucracies of the system's program offices, services, departments, etc. Go find your local school district's website, download their most recent audit, and look at the proportion of employees who are teachers. When I performed the exercise, I found that fewer than 50% of employees were actually teachers.
I think it's high time we started funding students, rather than systems. The last thing anybody needs is yet another hulking bureaucracy sucking the life force out of our institutions.
[1]: https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-spending-student-...
> since the 1960s
Right. The 60s.
The 60s are ALWAYS used as the reference point in these conversations. Every. Single. Time.
The ESEA, a cornerstone of the War on Poverty, was passed in 1965. Most other federal/state mandates that brought nearly everyone into the public education fold were passed after 1960. What it meant to educate the populace changed dramatically between 1960 and 1980. Huge swathes of people previously excluded were brought into the fold. Of course costs went up -- those people were excluded precisely because they're not the low-hanging cheap-to-educate fruit.
> fewer than 50% of employees were actually teachers.
Teachers are not the only class of employees who spend most/all of their time in direct contact with students. See above.
I'm not interested in the percent of employees who are teachers. I'm interested in the percent of employees who are not either in direct contact with students or providing essential services (janitorial, transportation, food services, etc.)
The US spends an unusually large share on private education, but even public education expenditures are greater than that of the UK, France, Korea, and Japan, about the same as the Netherlands, and not that far behind Germany
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/5e4ecc25-en/index.html?i...
If you rolled back to 60s level spending, even inflation adjusted, we'd be down the bottom of that distribution.
Note that I specified teachers. A lot of that money goes to things like administrative overhead (often required by lawmakers) and support services for students — a single aide for a special needs kid costs far more than $15k. We run a lot of social programs through schools here which would be separate services in other countries which complicates these comparisons.
I mention that because I know a number of teachers here in DC. The public school pay here is high compared to the national average but not when you look at the cost of living, and most jobs which require multiple degrees but have inflexible schedules and long hours pay considerably more.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/heres-how-much-teachers-arou...
What you really need is a comparison which is adjusted for both cost of living and alternative careers for comparable education. I described this as an underpaid profession because the combination of high demand, rigid schedule, and low respect is the primary reason I’ve known people to leave it.
The underfunding plays into two of those problems because teachers are asked to handler more, larger classes which ensures that everything is always close to the breaking point. The “slack” which that forces to be cut are things like personalized attention and more involved lessons.
As for retirement, most public school systems have extremely generous pensions. Illinois, for instance, has over ten thousand former employees with six figure pensions - not just administrators, but teachers, too.
Do you have any evidence American teachers work harder than teachers in other OECD countries? For instance, US class sizes are just under the OECD average, although this is skewed by China's unusually large class sizes, at about the middle of the pack and behind countries such as Japan, Germany, France, and Australia, and the countries with smaller class sizes aren't that much smaller. [1]
[0]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
[1]: http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-school/EDIF%2020...
In the meantime, college tuition and medical costs have tripled in only 20 years.
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.
I've been homeschooling my oldest this year. I first started teaching him to read last year while he was in Pre-K at a parochial school, and decided to just continue teaching him this year rather than do the public school thing. It's honestly been a joy.
I love his curiosity and his joy learning new things and his excitement when he does it. Yes, there are days where he's just in "a mood" and doesn't want to do school, but those are also times where I can talk with him father-and-son about integrity and hard work and discipline, and empathize with him over the fact that, in fact, some of the things we have to learn are boring. The time I spend teaching him is something I wouldn't trade for the world. I'm just lucky I have the opportunity - I wish all families could.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Public schools also see their expenses drop when their headcount drops, yes?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Homeschooling is also a factor, but there have been kids that have simply disappeared from school: I've seen it first hand, and have contacts that tell me it's systemic throughout my state.