Public Schools hit peak enrollment in 2019 and aren't likely to ever surpass the 50.8 million students who were enrolled at that time.
Part of the reason is the doubling of homeschoolers. There were about 2.8% of kids being homeschooled prior to the pandemic and there are now 5.8%. Combined with the ever-falling birthrate, it's enough to cause teacher's unions to break out into a cold sweat.
Fewer students enrolled in K-12 schools theoretically means less funding. But never underestimate teacher's unions or their ability to milk the state and federal government for more money.
The National Center for Public Education Statistics (NCES) has some interesting numbers to chew on. Between the fall of 2019 and fall of 2030, NCES projects 7% fewer students enrolling in public schools. Expenditures will increase slightly from $693 billion in 2018-19 (using constant 2021 dollars) to $698 billion in 2030-31.)
But NCES didn't include the hundreds of billions of dollars thrown to schools during and after the pandemic. There was $69 billion in two 2020 bills, $130 billion in the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and the indirect $350 billion ARP bailout for states to plug whatever budget holes they wished.
It's almost all gone now. And students are still struggling to catch up thanks to the unnecessary closure of schools.
So: Taxpayers are paying more money for a service they use less, even without calculating the COVID-19 spending/shutdown debacle. (Reminder: The New York Times concluded in an analysis this March that "extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.") Yet still the picture looks worse when viewed in light of the still-dominant operating model for these flagging institutions.
That's because the number of kids attending charter schools—"public" in name, but managed by private entities rather than government—has more than doubled since 2010-11, from 1.8 million to 3.7 million in 2021-22. This is despite Democratic politicians, from the president on down, seeking in recent years to restrict charters' proliferation and even roll them back.
Families, it turns out, have been fleeing government-managed schools since long before COVID-19.
"If you subtract the charter school students," former Houston Chronicle columnist Bill King observed in an analysis last week, "enrollment in traditional public schools peaked in 2012 and has since declined by 5%."
The practical implications of that drop in enrollment could be catastrophic. The teachers are pretending nothing is wrong. They feel confident they can stop the charter school revolt by buying enough votes in the legislature to make it go away.
Considering the popularity of charter schools, it's delusional to think that can happen. So the teachers are attacking the problem around the edges. They are fighting to reduce class sizes even though there are fewer students. Of course, this means they would have to hire more teachers.
There has been some pushback from parents. In Chicago, parents rallied early in 2024 after a 5-year plan was released by the Chicago Public Schools that would phase out charter schools over the next 5 years and give the money to neighborhood schools.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher's union organizer, ran on a platform to defund charter schools.
He argued the school choice model creates a "Hunger Games" scenario that sees neighborhood schools losing out to better-funded charter schools.
Rather than accept the challenge to improve public schools, the teachers want to use the politicians to slit the throats of their competition.
An underrated instance of recent teachers-union muscle-flexing on the Democratic Party was Harris's selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her vice presidential running mate over the onetime heavily favored Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Walz, a former teacher, was a dues-paying member of both the AFT and NEA, and as governor opposed school choice and favored extended school lockdowns. Shapiro, unforgivably, has supported school vouchers.
So complete has been the teachers union dominance of the Democratic Party that The Nation this week published what amounted to a victory lap. "After decades of serving as a punching bag for the party's neoliberals," the progressive magazine declared in the subhed, "public schools and the people who work in them are back in fashion."
A taxpayer revolt is inevitable. Education is too important to be left to political and ideological fanatics like the teacher's union. When parents wake up and realize they have other alternatives to public schools, the teachers will no longer be able to hide the decline and be forced to reckon with reality.
