Blue State Blues: Record Number of Students Flee Nation's Largest Public School Districtshttps://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/gwendolynsims/2021/10/31/blue-state-blues-record-number-of-students-flee-nations-largest-public-school-districts-n1528266This week the three largest public school districts in the U.S. announced that they are in the middle of a massive and continuing problem: record low enrollment numbers.
The New York Times reported that since the fall of 2019 enrollment in New York City’s (NYC) public school system—the nation’s largest district—has dropped by about 50,000 students or 4.5%. The numbers are even worse in the nation’s second-largest public school district, where the Los Angeles Times reported the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) lost a record of more than 27,000 students or 6.0% of its enrollment since 2019. The third-largest district’s numbers are just as bad in Chicago’s public schools (CPS), where WTTW reported enrollment is down nearly 25,000 students or 3.0% over the same time.
What exactly is to blame for the record drop in enrollment across these districts? The districts are quick to blame the COVID-19 pandemic; that’s not the only reason fewer parents want their children to attend these public schools, but you’d never know that to listen to them.
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Lastly, on the surface, urban parents may not seem to have many issues in common with parents in the suburbs and rural areas of the country, but one issue they all share is wanting what’s best for their children. Each of these districts has imposed the very same woke racist curriculum, draconian mask regulations, and intrusive vaccine mandates that parents all over the country have been fighting against. Many urban parents, especially minority parents, don’t necessarily agree with the radical left’s teaching of Critical Race Theory or “ethnic studies” that portray their children as oppressed victims and white children as oppressors; thus many are choosing charter schools and homeschooling. “Alongside this general decline in enrollment, the last two decades have seen growth in the proportion of students enrolling in charter schools and a relative decline in the proportion of students attending non-charter schools in LAUSD,” Professor John Rogers of UCLA told the Los Angeles Times.
I think a big problem not mentioned in the article - maybe I missed it - Is that since spring 2020 parents have seen up close and personal the sausage-making of public "education" and have been alienated by it.
