With plunging enrollment, a ‘seismic hit’ to public schools | Hacker News Reader

With plunging enrollment, a ‘seismic hit’ to public schools

nytimes.com

35 pointslxm68 comments

The article does talk about some of the factors, the ones that effect the most vulnerable in (US at least) society.

At a macro level many basic needs are not being met in the US. As a nation __sufficient__ housing construction has not happened in many decades. Worse it is conflated with being the main investment vehicle for the people lucky enough to have gotten in early, a profit making center for others, and various 'neighborhood character' centered motives prevent the housing around cities from growing the way the jobs had prior to the pandemic.

That's what's driving the relocation; the homelessness; the migration of people from areas their families and (probably already strained) support structures (which we can hope exist; this isn't always the case).

Area too expensive to live in? Blame housing. Can't find workers at a price you want to pay? Probably also housing. It shocks and saddens me that a real solution to the housing crisis hasn't even been discussed as a political talking point my entire adult life. Not even during the (previous?) recession literally caused by housing issues.

One thing I don’t see talked about much regarding new housing is skilled trades. Where I live there aren’t enough doing skilled trades to produce the number houses that people want to build. That compounds the problem

AB-2053 in California looks promising: https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/

Typical California. The problem is excessive regulation and zoning laws preventing private developers from building. And California proposes more government... This only works in Singapore because it has the world's most competent and least corrupt civil service.

The article makes no mention of relocation as a driver of the decline in enrollment.

> At the same time, some families are leaving their local public schools not because they are abandoning the system altogether but because they have moved to other parts of the country that are more affordable.

> Rendered homeless in late 2020, [three children] had struggled for months to keep up academically, shuffling for almost a year between motels, relatives and Ms. Parish’s 1997 Honda before they quietly stopped attending school entirely.

It does, in fact, mention families moving to other, 'rural resort' locations among other factors.

>housing construction has not happened in many decades

Yes, it has. I see houses being built all of the time. It fact there is one being built in front of where I live now.

Cool, now think of all the housing construction you see, and consider that the US would need to build roughly 5 million more units to keep up with demand[0]. The US does not build housing efficiently or at a scale that meets demand.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/09/14/america-is-short-more-th...

The singular of anecdote is not data.

Single family in suburbs?

Some context that's missed in the title. "Plunging enrollment" and a "seismic hit" is their way of describing an overall 2% decline in enrollment. The article states that there are around 50 million students in the US public education system, and total enrollment has declined by 1.2 million. The article also provides very little in the way of non-anecdotal data. Digging through the article we get:

- Big declines: California, Denver, Albuquerque, Oakland

- Increases: Florida, "rural resort areas" (which have seen "surging enrollment"), private schools.

Given we're talking about a 2% decline, and the sort of places we're seeing declines in contrasted against where we're seeing gains, I think there's an explanation here that is so obvious that it goes without stating. Oddly enough that explanation is entirely ignored by the article.

My perception of US public schools has shifted radically over the past 10 years, and especially in the past couple of years. It had nothing to do with COVID except insomuch as COVID may have facilitated greater awareness of the educational curriculum.

I see two obvious explanations at least: housing and education. Housing includes the cost of raising kids: few can afford this in places like CA. Education includes the ideology push that parents are fed up with.

California public school system is so atrociously bad that everyone with the means to do so should consider alternatives. You are doing a tremendous disservice to your kids otherwise. I took my kids and left the state years ago and there hasn’t been a single day where I don’t feel certain I made the right decision.

Funding and proper use of funds, educator salaries, and a few other things should certainly be looked at. You can take your kids out of public school if you have the means, but they will be working with / living around people that went to public schools. I think the public school system needs better funding / resources and should be supported.

Atrociously bad by what metric? I was born and raised in Florida, as was my wife. We are both frequently impressed by how advanced our kids are, scholastically speaking, compared to where we were at that age in Florida.

Edit: We now live in California and our kids have only attended (public) school in California.

Did you self-select into a public school that only has rich students? The average for California is depressingly bad: e.g. https://edsource.org/2022/californias-detailed-test-data-giv...

The response by the state is to propose lowering standards for basic math classes, while removing the option of higher level math classes for advanced students.

> ... while removing the option of higher level math classes for advanced students.

... And in what I'm sure is a complete coincidence, the proportion of "very intelligent" or "disharmonic intelligence profile" or "savant syndrome" kids in youth services/youth care has gone up significantly. They now outnumber kids that committed crimes. They make "the Serway" available in Juvie these days, so obviously some very intelligent teenagers are committing crimes these days (probably because education is actually better in Juvie than in Youth Services)

They're replacing advanced placement classes ... with straightjackets and bars.

Social workers probably consider this a good thing too.

If the reason is that students are being homeschooled or going to private schools, then this seems like great news. It's well known that the public school system in the US is just not up to snuff. Not all public schools are bad, but on average their outcomes are worse than the alternatives.

There was a guy named John Taylor Gatto who wrote on this subject in some depth, after teaching in the NY public school system for decades, and being named NYC's "teacher of the year" a few times. He has some great talks on youtube, and a few books out if you're interested in the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto

> If the reason is that students are being homeschooled or going to private schools, then this seems like great news.

It's not (the plunging enrollment is largely due to age demographics, which the article acknowledges, with the rest apparently associated with the pandemic, with the article admitting that no one knows the underlying dynamics really are, but insisting that experts are somehow sure that they are durable), but it wouldn't be great news if it was..

> It's well known that the public school system in the US is just not up to snuff.

It's less well-known, but no less true, that (controlling for factors that determine success within the public schools, like parental engagement, parental educational attainment, socioeconomic status, etc.) the alternatives are no better, though they look better before controlling for those things (though less so over time as the demographics in the alternatives become less skewed) because they tend to cherry pick the most advantaged students, largely simply by being non-default choices and therefore cutting off the low tail of the parental involvement distribution.

It's obviously true, to the point of tautology, that schools which pick students who will likely succeed will tend to have students who succeed. But I wouldn't say that these schools offer nothing better after controls.

If it takes Timmy, on average, 2 days to learn a lesson and Tom 20 minutes to learn a lesson, then a system that focuses more on the educator of source of problems, instead of the child, is going to trend towards each lesson taking 2 days. And Tom? Well I imagine many of us were Tom. He'll be bored out of his mind, but hopefully can manage to use his vast swaths of free time for something other than shenanigans and being the class clown. By contrast at a school where Tom is the mean student, similar lessons can now trend towards being done in 20 minutes. Tom has a much more interesting time, learns vastly more, and comes out far better at the end.

Yes I'm aware of ideals like differentiated instruction [1] but it not only poses a massive burden on educators, it also fails to solve the problem. Even in its ideal scenario, you end up sacrificing breadth for an ideal of depth that in many cases is somewhat nonsensical. Instead of having since learned geometry, Tom is instead stuck continuing to "learn" basic arithmetic he already knows, but with 'enriched opportunities for educational depth' [with basic arithmetic].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_instruction

Coming from a country where private schools dominate public schools in terms of the quality of education, i assure you this is not great news. Public schools will be left with underprivileged students and the worst teaching/administration staff and it would become a great source of inequality.

It's already the case in the US that the quality of a private school education is substantially higher than even rich-neighborhood public schools.

Public schools have fantastic and cost effective results except where they are sabotaged by politics. Unfortunately destroying public education for explicitly racist reasons is now a central plank in the republican platform.

Extra funding has been provided to Abbott districts in New Jersey for decades, and these largely black districts are better funded than the districts in the wealthiest (and whitest) parts of the state. In spite of this, the performance gap has increased between Abbott and non-Abbott districts.

Also I don't think the word "explicitly" (or "racist," or both) means what you think it means.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district

What a lazy and completely unsupported talking point.

Who shut down the public schools resulting in catastrophic learning loss and depression? I'll give you a hint. It wasn't Florida.

Well, I don't personally identify with either side of the political divide, but it seems like increasing the quality of educational outcomes for our nation's children should be a primary concern with basic bipartisan agreement. Wishful thinking perhaps.

Wishful thinking indeed. School board elections, along with other local elections, are now just gateways for radical idealogs to gain entry level positions in politics. Quality education isn't even on the radar. Not that there is even a baseline agreement on what "quality" means anymore.

This is why I left California. They way things are going, it won't be long until "decolonizing mathematics" becomes part of the standard curriculum. In the meantime, illiteracy is growing and STEM grades are plummeting.

https://www.city-journal.org/california-public-schools-are-f...

I can't read your comment. The hyperbole is too blinding.

"This system works great except when it doesnt"

If public schools, run by the government, don't work great when politicians get involved than that means they are not a good option.

> This system works great except when it doesnt

Is a meaningless tautology.

There are plenty of well run public schools throughout the world. Politicians are involved in all of them by definition. If you have a failing political system your public schools won't do well, but neither will your private schools.

> Is a meaningless tautology.

I was summarizing your post.

> on average their outcomes are worse than the alternatives.

Very much not true.

The worst alternative by far are online charter schools

"CREDO’s 2015 study in coordination with Mathematica Policy Research and the Center on Reinventing Public Education revealed that students of online charter schools had significantly weaker academic performance in math and reading, compared with their counterparts in conventional schools." - https://credo.stanford.edu/our-impact/

"We found that students who switched to virtual charter schools experienced large, negative effects on mathematics and English/language arts achievement that persisted over time and that these effects could not be explained by observed teacher or classroom characteristics" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X2090981...

Those studies seem to point out the differences between virtual and brick-and-mortar charter schools. It's not surprising to me that virtualized classrooms have worse outcomes. We're all very aware now of the limitations of video chat.

That's rather my point, yes? Public schools are not the worst teaching alternative.

They compare online charter schools with in-person conventional schools. Hardly a fair fight. The biggest disaster of all is online conventional schools.

> The biggest disaster of all is online conventional schools

Do you have any evidence that online charter schools are worse than online conventional schools?

Because pre-COVID the evidence from online charter schools that they are, overall, a disaster, as in (quoting https://www.edweek.org/technology/cyber-charters-have-overwh... )

] Statistically speaking, the gains that online charter students saw in math were so limited, it was “literally as though the student did not go to school for the entire year,” said Macke Raymond, the director the Center for Research on Education Outcomes

As far as I know, students in public schools who switched to online during COVID still had a gain in math education.

You'll see from the same source that the student:teacher ratio for online charters was 30:1 "compared to 20:1 for brick-and-mortar charters and 17:1 for traditional public schools. At the high school level, more than one-third of the online charters surveyed reported typical class sizes of 50 or more."

Conventional schools did not fire half of their teachers when switching to online.

For your statement to be true would mean the negative effects were wide-spread, severe, and obvious, and it would mean that doubling the number of teachers per student makes no difference - contra all evidence.

>Do you have any evidence that online charter schools are worse than online conventional schools?

I wrote exactly the opposite. Perhaps your poor reading comprehension makes you a less than ideal candidate for critiquing education?

That was a typo, which I did not catch during proof reading.

"Assume good faith." - my intent is easy to understand from the rest of my comment, and citation.

I'll ask again, where is your evidence that online conventional schools are a bigger disaster than cyber charters?

Remember, jamesgreenleaf in the g'parent at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31419272 said outcomes are worse in public schools than the alternatives. My point is that's simply not true, given how bad cyber charters are.

My parents put my younger sister in Catholic school because they had in person instruction while public schools had remote learning for a full 2 years after they made this decision. Because of this, my sister is roughly 2 years ahead of her public school peers in terms of social development, and learning as well, because it turns out remote learning is pretty terrible. It was a great investment.

I wish the article did a better job identifying the contribution of the two causes, because they tell very different stories. Are they claiming people are dropping out of public education in favor of private/home schools or are they dropping out of NYC public schools in favor of Cheaper Place Public Schools?

I think the takeaway, in light of similar articles over the past year, is that nobody knows, yet. It'll take more time (maybe even another year or two) for all the numbers to come in and various patterns--in particular their magnitude relative to each other--confidently identified. I could hazard some educated guesses, as I'm sure you could as well, and we'd probably be right, but it's probably better if we just abstained from too much speculation. It's not like pinpointing the exact causes is going to help those public school districts already in dire financial straits; certainly not in the short-term, at least.

Presumably, the larger political debate around schools and education is playing a role too. It will take time to see how that plays out. The education system has become a hot political issue again for the first time in a long time, and that's got to contribute its bit.

The two causes listed were switching to private school and dropping out (meaning stopping education all together). The article mentions that school enrollment is down across the country, not just in large urban areas.

They mention in passing that Florida, where there was little or no remote learning during the pandemic, experienced no such drop. And yet the article seemed very reluctant to draw conclusions about that.

The obvious answer is that for public schools (K-12) the experiment with remote learning was an abject failure if the highest order.

Yeah, my mom is an art teacher in MD. Idk if it’s b/c she’s so bad with tech or because her students are from working class families who probably didn’t have the luxury of wfh. But it was an absolute shit show. Like 10% of her students were even submitting hw

No, the article mentioned remote learning explicitly. The article states it drove people to private schooling.

Or that people moved to Florida?

I'm sure both happen. Living in Orange County, I hear many people talk about home-schooling and private schools -- much more about education quality than masks or vaccines, but some of both. But then, I am less likely to chat with people who left for cheaper places (or live under a bridge near Disneyland)

This is New York Times. They want you to be confused.

My theory is that parents weren’t quite aware of the level of bottom catering until their children were “learning” from home for months on end. Those with means decided to take matters into their own hands.

https://archive.ph/l8du8

I don't understand why the article makes it sound like a problem that enrollment is tied to funding. If funding is going down because enrollment is down that's not sad. Similarly, if people are increasingly favoring private institutions the question shouldn't be how to win them back but rather how to emulate institutions that they found more acceptable. Personally, neither of my two children have been to a public school in a long time and I can't imagine ever wanting to send them to one even if there are some that are fine. I want a school that focuses on actual education without the politi-creep and which has high enough behavioral standards that I can expect problematic students to be dealt with and removed as obstacles to my children. Not every private school is like that but at least you can shop around for the one that's the closest to your needs so long as you're willing to do the legwork. Public school is where you send your kids if you only care about saving money on their diploma.

>> “When you lose kids, you lose money"

That's interesting because at some level money is not being lost as taxation is going to be the same. It would seem that funds must be accumulating somewhere.

For any public school (elementary, middle, or high school), they get funding per pupil. When that school loses students, it loses money.

Now, if the district or state has fewer pupils, they may decide to change the formula, but that's probably a few years after the school has already been hit financially.

Well, of course. The US passed "peak baby" in 2008.[1] That group is now passing through school age.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/united-states...

I'd like to revisit a classic CGP Gray video for talking points on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M

What roles does (Public) Education fulfill in society and to parents?

* A free society and elected government function best when the people who make decisions about the future of that society are properly educated and capable of high level decision making. Public Schools and Education are generally critical (decades to forever) health factors in such societies.

* Better educated laborers are able to further the knowledge of intelligent life, and make better things possible.

The video talks about how education has traditionally generally worked, how educational videos can be the basis for learning a subject, and how an AI can feed that to students as a personal "Digital Aristotle for Everyone".

'... I doubt that schools will go away. After all, they aren't just about learning but also freeing parents to work in the economy, while their feral children are are turned into civilized adults. Schools will be radically different, and there will be far fewer teachers working in them doing far less. While that's not great news for teachers, it is awesome news for students and society.' -- paraphrased a little, CGP Gray in the linked video.

* Free parents to work in the economy. I'll extend this with anecdotal evidence from relatives during the pandemic. It generally gives parents and kids a break from each other so they don't go mutually insane and so that both can progress forward with things they need to accomplish in work and life.

* Raise children to be adults. Schools can also serve as a baseline for being a model citizen. I'd really like for them to elevate from my childhood experience: thinly disguised prison babysitting warehouses that happened to pass time with education that never finishes a 20 year old textbook intended to be accomplished over a semester, with the same history and social subjects repeated ad-nauseam because different schools combined and people moved or never completed a course level.

* Teach people to work together. Schools _tried_ to do this, but never had the human resources to do it properly. A re-structured system where everyone is completing their own knowledge tracts at their own pace, but gets to work together on long term projects, as if it were a mini job. APPLIED science, technology, engineering, math; and even geography and history. Provide a historic context, teach how we understood the technology and society worked at the time, give the kids actual jobs and guidance in the planning. Maybe have them also grow some crops in a greenhouse with similar conditions over the year. Really inter-mesh and wave everything together. Combine that teaching AI for subjects and "teachers" / babysitters as the historic boss figures the kids have to give reports to and get orders from. We'll know school's been done right when 10 year olds think it's FUN to toss their school work at a spreadsheet or database the same way Eve Online and Factorio addicts do.

> No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out.

That may be part of it, but has anyone been to a school board meeting this year? It’s been obvious what’s happening, and everyone I know IRL knows what’s going on. Everyone I know with kids is split on ideological grounds, but about half moved to home schooling.

Basically, the theme is parents want to assert their rights over their children. The state and school appears (to some) to be overstepping and attempting to take parental rights.

There are three factors claimed by the homeschooling crowd.

1. Masking and vaccine mandates for children

https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-california-scott-wie...

2. Teaching children about sex and identitarinism

https://timcast.com/news/illinois-school-district-to-start-t...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10814979/Wisconsin-...

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2022/05/10/gop-lea...

https://theroanokestar.com/2022/05/07/judge-loudoun-co-schoo...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/loudoun-county-tr...

https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/17/mom-assignment-school-boa...

3. Racism in the classroom

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-board-recall-election-sa...

https://news.yahoo.com/atlanta-elementary-school-accused-seg...

Maybe this will create the voting bloc needed to get charter- and voucher-based schools off the ground, and out of the hands of unions. Public-sector monopolies don't have a great track record.

Public schools aren't a monopoly! Quoting Murphy v. State of Arkansas (1988) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_in_the_United_St... "parents have a constitutional right to send their children to private schools and a constitutional right to select private schools that offer specialized instruction."

The track record of charter- and voucher-based schools is not better than that of public schools. In some cases, like online charters, it is far worse.

Charter school teachers can and do unionize. ("When charter schools unionize, students learn more, study finds" - https://www.chalkbeat.org/2017/9/25/21100993/when-charter-sc... ).

Education leans towards being a natural monopoly because of the good economy of scale. It is cheaper to run a large high school than a many smaller schools, and that larger school can offer a wider diversity of courses, making it a broader match to the community's needs. A larger school system can also share administrative costs, have a permanent substitute teacher pool, etc.

I don't see how charter- and voucher-based schools change that calculus, which means they will merge.

Private sector monopolies have an even worse track record than public-sector monopolies like the USPS has for local mail delivery.

Personally I’d argue that in Western countries other than the US the public-sector monopolies can often do pretty well.

I’d suggest wondering why this isn’t the case in the US, and fix that instead.

There's a serious government competence problem in the US (just look at our infra costs), but our unserious political culture can't get past "more gov't vs less gov't" to actually start to understand and tackle the issue.

> (just look at our infra costs)

It's the private sector completing these jobs, not government employees. Those jobs are routinely bid out to contractors, who complete the job with a profit margin.

It's both sides of the coin coupled with a relentless need to profit off everything possible at every opportunity.

> It's the private sector completing these jobs, not government employees.

They're government projects. The details of how they staff them are part of "why is the gov't so incompetent" question. Comparable-scale private projects don't exhibit the same horrendous inefficiency relative to other countries: Apple's $256B of spending per year isn't a large multiple as inefficient as Samsung.

As far as the reason, people have been trying to take a rigorous look for years and years and have come up with every reason under the sun, spanning the political spectrum: onerous environmental review, lack of nationalized benefits pushing into labor costs, unproductive construction unions, lack of oversight of private contractors, etc etc etc etc.

But since the blame is bipartisan, our political culture doesn't know how to handle it. There's no constituency for basic competency in government if it can't be monocausally forced into the box of an existing generic political slapfight (as in your comment).

>Comparable-scale private projects don't exhibit the same horrendous inefficiency ... Apple's $256B of spending per year

Literally Apple's HQ was $2 billion over budget. Private enterprise has these exact same problems. Government isn't any more or less incompetent than your average US business, unless you completely ignore how your average business operates.

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