School Choice Is Popular and Increasingly Commonhttps://reason.com/2024/01/22/school-choice-is-popular-and-increasingly-common/... research from the Brooking Institution, finding that "over a four-year period that includes the pandemic, about 12% of elementary schools and 9% of middle schools lost at least one-fifth of their enrollment." While there were enrollment declines in public schools pre-COVID, the pandemic marked a significant change, resulting in pressures to close public schools and reduce programs.
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"Declining enrollment in traditional public schools may reflect demographic shifts, migration, and school choice to some extent," Eloise Burtis and Sofoklis Goulas of the Brookings Institution point out in an October 2023 paper. "For example, families may have tried out various schooling alternatives during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as homeschooling, and may have found that these options worked well for their children or wanted to avoid a transition to a more typical learning setting after COVID-19."
"At the start of the pandemic, in 2019–20, roughly 84 percent of school-age children were enrolled in traditional public schools," they add. "This number dropped by 2 percentage points to roughly 81 percent in the 2020–2021 school year, and another 2 percentage points to 79 percent in the 2021–2022 school year."
Burtis and Goulas saw gains in kids attending charter schools, virtual schools, and, especially, a grab-bag category "attending private schools, being homeschooled, or out of school entirely."
I kind of expected many/most PS parents would return their kids to PSs. Obviously, many have, as PSs have not totally closed their doors, but it looks like pandemic shutdowns (including union greedbag-ism) have caused a step-increase in the previous trend of increasing private- and home-schooling.
