This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.
With state data projecting at least 10% drops in student enrollment over the next decade in some California counties, superintendents are worried.
“Some of them are scratching their heads, saying ‘This is something we didn’t expect, and it is hard to know if this is our new enrollment trend,’” said Suzanne Speck, executive vice president of Sacramento-based School Services of California. Registrations are pouring in for a webinar the consultant group is holding next month on declining student enrollment. “So much has been on their plates for the last 30 months.”
New data shared exclusively with The 74 suggests the challenges caused by a shrinking K-12 population won’t be ending anytime soon. Conducted by Tyton Partners, a consulting firm that examines pandemic-related shifts in education, the survey shows that between spring 2021 and spring 2022, there was a 9% drop in families saying their children are enrolled in traditional public schools — a plunge that translates into over 4 million students. Charters and private schools, meanwhile, saw increases in the survey, as did homeschooling.
The figures amount to a threefold increase over the drastic 3% decline K-12 schools saw two years ago. According to the U.S. Department of Education, that was the largest single-year drop since 1943.
Experts were quick to signal caution about Tyton’s numbers — parent surveys are not the same as official data — but said both are important for understanding the massive changes the K-12 system has weathered since March 2020.
“These are wakeup calls,” said Jenn Bell-Ellwanger, CEO of the Data Quality Campaign. “Is there something bigger happening here that we need to understand?”
The results, she said, should prompt district leaders to “interrogate” their own enrollment data, especially at key transition points like kindergarten and middle school. If families aren’t coming back, she said, officials should ask why.
States will begin posting official figures later this fall. A few, including Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina, post enrollment more than once a year, but their spring 2022 counts show negligible changes — nowhere close to a 9% nosedive.
State figures don’t separate district and charter schools — all are public. But even when the Tyton researchers grouped both sectors together, there was still an 8% drop in parents saying their children were enrolled in a district school.
The researchers’ task “was to get a parent perspective as opposed to a policy perspective,” and to offer results that were more uniform across the country, said Nicholas Java, a director at Tyton.
Tyton works with organizations throughout the education sector, including nonprofits, corporations and major philanthropies like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. Walton and Stand Together Trust, which support alternative models to traditional education, helped fund the parent survey. Tyton was also among the first to collect data on families’ use of pods and microschools.
Ultimately, most states are unlikely to see such dramatic declines. But trends in several large districts show that a nearly double-digit decrease over a short period of time isn’t far-fetched. Enrollment has fallen almost 10% in New York City schools since the beginning of the pandemic and dropped almost 6% in Los Angeles Unified last school year. The Chicago Public Schools is also expecting to lose more students and is on track to fall out of its spot as the nation’s third-largest district.
