Dr. Joshua Goodman: School enrollment
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Public school enrollment is still down and hasn’t recovered since the pandemic, with researchers predicting the trend will continue.
On December 3, 2024, SciLine interviewed: Dr. Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of education and economics at Boston University. See the footage and transcript from the interview below, or select ‘Contents’ on the left to skip to specific questions.
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Introduction
[0:00:19]
JOSHUA GOODMAN: My name is Josh Goodman. I’m a professor of education and economics at Boston University, and I use large data sets to study the impact of education policies on students’ outcomes.
Interview with SciLine
How did public school enrollment change during the pandemic?
[0:00:36]
JOSHUA GOODMAN: In the fall of 2020, the first school year after the pandemic began, public school enrollment across the United States dropped by about 3% compared to the previous year, which is the largest single year-to-year drop the U.S. has seen since the beginning of World War II.
What are the main reasons enrollment hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels?
[0:01:00]
JOSHUA GOODMAN: There are two main reasons that enrollment is still down. One of them is related to the pandemic, and one isn’t. The reason related to the pandemic is that there is still a set of families who either left or never entered public schools as a result of the pandemic and have continued to stay away from the public schools since then, because the alternatives they found—whether home schools or private schools—continue to be appealing for them. There’s a second reason which would have happened even if the pandemic hadn’t occurred, which is that we’ve had slowing birth rates, so that the number of school-aged children in the U.S. has started to decline. So, for example, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that about 10 years from now, in 2035 the population of five- to 17-year olds will be about 8% lower than it is now, and so that just makes it difficult to find students for many school districts.
Do you expect the trend of enrollment declines to continue?
[0:02:02]
JOSHUA GOODMAN: I do expect the enrollment declines to continue, at least in some places, largely because these demographic trends, this declining birth rate, means that there are simply fewer students to enroll in schools at all. That’s true in many places in the U.S., although there are states and districts that are growing, and so those places may continue to see enrollment growth.
What long-term impacts could declines in enrollment have on the future of public education?
[0:02:31]
JOSHUA GOODMAN: So, I think enrollment declines can be seen in part as dissatisfaction with the state of public schools, and I am particularly concerned that, as some set of parents leaves public schools—particularly some of the high-income families that chose private schooling or homeschooling during the pandemic and have stayed away since then—it shrinks the number of families who are available to advocate politically for improvements to schooling in terms of funding or school operations. And so, it shrinks public support for schools, which is, I think, a problem for schools politically. And then, just mathematically, shrinking student populations make school finances harder. It gives more challenges to schools in terms of how to allocate resources with smaller budgets.
What difficult choices might school districts with declining enrollment face?
[0:03:26]
JOSHUA GOODMAN: Enrollment declines are challenging for schools to deal with because most state and district funding formulas mean that the amount of money schools receive is directly tied to the number of students they enroll, which makes a lot of sense. The challenge is that when you lose particularly a small number of students, a lot of the costs that schools have, including teachers and school buildings, are hard to reduce by small amounts. So for example, if every classroom in a school loses one student, it doesn’t mean that there’s any one teacher who can be fired, right? If a school building loses 10% of its students, it doesn’t cost 10% less to run that school building. So school districts are going to be faced with difficult choices about how to shrink the teacher workforce, how to close school buildings, and other kinds of decisions like that that are tricky in the face of enrollment declines.
What are the factors involved in school building closures?
[0:04:29]
JOSHUA GOODMAN: There’s no question that school closures are very disruptive for the students and families and teachers who are teaching in those buildings. The challenge for school districts is that if you’re running a building that is well enrolled under capacity—so that maybe only half the classrooms are filled—it costs just as much to open that building as it would if that building were completely full. And so, in the long run, the district could educate the number of students it has at much lower costs if it were able to close that building. And so, it’s a really difficult tradeoff between short-term disruption to kids’ and families’ lives and the long-term sense of allocating your resources to places where they can make the biggest difference.
What does your research indicate about the growing demand for homeschooling and private schooling?
[0:05:25]
JOSHUA GOODMAN: So, when the pandemic started in the fall of 2020, at the same time as public school enrollment was dropping, we saw a huge surge in the number of families either choosing private schools for their children or choosing to homeschool their children. And different families made those choices for very different reasons. It seems like the set of families who chose to withdraw their children from public schools and send them to private schools tended to be higher-income families who could afford the tuition at those private schools. Those families tended to be more likely to be white, and they tended more often to make that choice in school districts that had moved to remote learning. So it seems like there was a set of higher income families who were frustrated by school closures and remote learning and turned to private schools as a solution to that frustration. On the other hand, there was a set of families which turned to homeschooling, and interestingly, that set of families was more likely to be low-income students and their families, more likely to be Black families, and the families who made those choices were more likely to do so in districts that had actually returned to in-person schooling. So, it seems like there was a set of families who were concerned about the threat of the COVID-19 virus itself and chose to protect their children by withdrawing them from schools entirely. And it’s perhaps not surprising that that happened more frequently in low-income and Black communities, which were particularly hard hit by the virus in the early part of the pandemic.
For students who switched to alternative schooling during the pandemic, how many have since returned to public schools?
[0:07:11]
JOSHUA GOODMAN: We don’t have great nationwide numbers on how many of the students who switched to other forms of schooling returned to public schools afterwards. But we do, for example, in a study of mine, have data from the state of Michigan that shows that in the fall of 2021, about a—you know, the second school year after the pandemic—of the students who had left the prior year because of the pandemic, about half of them had returned to the public schools the next year. But what’s interesting is that that number was very different depending on where the child had left to. So, for example, parents who had pulled their children out of public schools to send them to homeschools were fairly likely, about 50% of those kids, returned to the public schools. On the other hand, for students who left to go to private schools, only about 20% of those students returned the following year to come back to the public schools. So it seems like when parents and students made a commitment to a different non-public school, they tended to stick with that decision and stay away from public schools, whereas the families who chose homeschooling were more likely to return.
Does your research suggest that the age of students influenced whether their parents withdrew them from public school?
[0:08:29]
JOSHUA GOODMAN: I think one interesting pattern we found in our research is that the extent to which families pulled their kids out of public schools differed a lot by the age of their child. So, for example, it was very common to delay kids entering kindergarten or to pull them out of early elementary school grades, probably because parents felt that it was easier to deal with a young child at home and maybe even easier to do that education on their own. With high school students, we actually see very little change in public school enrollment. And that might be because parents felt like they couldn’t replace the school environment with something at home for a high school student. Interestingly, here in Massachusetts, we’ve seen continuing declines in public school enrollment concentrated among middle schoolers, and we’re not exactly sure why that is, but it seems like middle school is a particularly sensitive time where parents have been very concerned about the state of both their children and public schools more generally, and so I’m keeping an eye on middle school enrollment in our state and across the country.
