Public school enrollment continues to falter nearly four years after pandemic
Jeremiah Poff
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Public school enrollment has continued to decline more than three years after schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic as families have continued to seek out private school and homeschool options.
Public schools in the United States lost more than 1 million students between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years, and while the decline has since stabilized, those students have not returned to public school classrooms.
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The trend holds true across states and geographic regions. In Illinois, public schools lost more than 100,000 students between the 2019-2020 school year and the 2022-2023 school year. In Virginia, public schools are still more than 30,000 students below 2019 enrollment levels, and in California, which has seen a sharp population decline, public schools have lost more than 200,000 students since the pandemic began.
The drop in enrolled students has immediate impacts on the functions of schools and school districts, as states use enrollment data to allocate funding to schools.
The declines have coincided with an increase in private and homeschool enrollment, which accounts for where some of the former public school students have gone.
After seeing an initial decline in enrollment for the 2020-2021 school year, Catholic schools rebounded and have added more than 70,000 students over the past two years. Overall private school enrollment also remained steady during the pandemic, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
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The biggest increase in enrollment was in homeschooling, which soared during the pandemic’s early months. The last estimate by the NCES in 2019, before the pandemic, placed the number of homeschooled students at roughly 1.5 million. The Washington Post reported earlier this year that that number could be as high as 2.7 million students.
But not all the declines in public school rosters can be exclusively linked back to families choosing to unenroll from public schools and move to private options — there are also fewer children. Since 2007, the U.S. birth rate has declined by 22% according to an Axios review of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.