7 ms·

With plunging enrollment, a ‘seismic hit’ to public schools

35 points by lxm 4y ago

recursivedoubts 4y ago
https://archive.ph/l8du8 https://archive.ph/l8du8
HWR_14 4y ago
I wish the article did a better job identifying the contribution of the two causes, because they tell very different stories. Are they claiming people are dropping out of public education in favor of private/home schools or are they dropping out of NYC public schools in favor of Cheaper Place Public Schools?
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  This is New York Times. They want you to be confused.
- DANK_YACHT 4y ago
  The two causes listed were switching to private school and dropping out (meaning stopping education all together). The article mentions that school enrollment is down across the country, not just in large urban areas.
  - JackFr 4y ago
    They mention in passing that Florida, where there was little or no remote learning during the pandemic, experienced no such drop. And yet the article seemed very reluctant to draw conclusions about that. The obvious answer is that for public schools (K-12) the experiment with remote learning was an abject failure if the highest order.
    - DANK_YACHT 4y ago
      No, the article mentioned remote learning explicitly. The article states it drove people to private schooling.
    - alphabettsy 4y ago
      Or that people moved to Florida?
    - adnmcq999 4y ago
      Yeah, my mom is an art teacher in MD. Idk if it’s b/c she’s so bad with tech or because her students are from working class families who probably didn’t have the luxury of wfh. But it was an absolute shit show. Like 10% of her students were even submitting hw
- codefreeordie 4y ago
  I'm sure both happen. Living in Orange County, I hear many people talk about home-schooling and private schools -- much more about education quality than masks or vaccines, but some of both. But then, I am less likely to chat with people who left for cheaper places (or live under a bridge near Disneyland)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- wahern 4y ago
  I think the takeaway, in light of similar articles over the past year, is that nobody knows, yet. It'll take more time (maybe even another year or two) for all the numbers to come in and various patterns--in particular their magnitude relative to each other--confidently identified. I could hazard some educated guesses, as I'm sure you could as well, and we'd probably be right, but it's probably better if we just abstained from too much speculation. It's not like pinpointing the exact causes is going to help those public school districts already in dire financial straits; certainly not in the short-term, at least.
  - codefreeordie 4y ago
    Presumably, the larger political debate around schools and education is playing a role too. It will take time to see how that plays out. The education system has become a hot political issue again for the first time in a long time, and that's got to contribute its bit.
Proven 4y ago
rg3rg3 4y ago
I don't understand why the article makes it sound like a problem that enrollment is tied to funding. If funding is going down because enrollment is down that's not sad. Similarly, if people are increasingly favoring private institutions the question shouldn't be how to win them back but rather how to emulate institutions that they found more acceptable. Personally, neither of my two children have been to a public school in a long time and I can't imagine ever wanting to send them to one even if there are some that are fine. I want a school that focuses on actual education without the politi-creep and which has high enough behavioral standards that I can expect problematic students to be dealt with and removed as obstacles to my children. Not every private school is like that but at least you can shop around for the one that's the closest to your needs so long as you're willing to do the legwork. Public school is where you send your kids if you only care about saving money on their diploma.
jamesgreenleaf 4y ago
If the reason is that students are being homeschooled or going to private schools, then this seems like great news. It's well known that the public school system in the US is just not up to snuff. Not all public schools are bad, but on average their outcomes are worse than the alternatives. There was a guy named John Taylor Gatto who wrote on this subject in some depth, after teaching in the NY public school system for decades, and being named NYC's "teacher of the year" a few times. He has some great talks on youtube, and a few books out if you're interested in the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
- booboofixer 4y ago
  Coming from a country where private schools dominate public schools in terms of the quality of education, i assure you this is not great news. Public schools will be left with underprivileged students and the worst teaching/administration staff and it would become a great source of inequality.
  - wutbrodo 4y ago
    It's already the case in the US that the quality of a private school education is substantially higher than even rich-neighborhood public schools.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > If the reason is that students are being homeschooled or going to private schools, then this seems like great news. It's not (the plunging enrollment is largely due to age demographics, which the article acknowledges, with the rest apparently associated with the pandemic, with the article admitting that no one knows the underlying dynamics really are, but insisting that experts are somehow sure that they are durable), but it wouldn't be great news if it was.. > It's well known that the public school system in the US is just not up to snuff. It's less well-known, but no less true, that (controlling for factors that determine success within the public schools, like parental engagement, parental educational attainment, socioeconomic status, etc.) the alternatives are no better, though they look better before controlling for those things (though less so over time as the demographics in the alternatives become less skewed) because they tend to cherry pick the most advantaged students, largely simply by being non-default choices and therefore cutting off the low tail of the parental involvement distribution.
vwoolf 4y ago
Maybe this will create the voting bloc needed to get charter- and voucher-based schools off the ground, and out of the hands of unions. Public-sector monopolies don't have a great track record.
- andyferris 4y ago
  Personally I’d argue that in Western countries other than the US the public-sector monopolies can often do pretty well. I’d suggest wondering why this isn’t the case in the US, and fix that instead.
  - wutbrodo 4y ago
    There's a serious government competence problem in the US (just look at our infra costs), but our unserious political culture can't get past "more gov't vs less gov't" to actually start to understand and tackle the issue.
    - OldTimeCoffee 4y ago
      > (just look at our infra costs) It's the private sector completing these jobs, not government employees. Those jobs are routinely bid out to contractors, who complete the job with a profit margin. It's both sides of the coin coupled with a relentless need to profit off everything possible at every opportunity.
      - wutbrodo 4y ago
        > It's the private sector completing these jobs, not government employees. They're government projects. The details of how they staff them are part of "why is the gov't so incompetent" question. Comparable-scale private projects don't exhibit the same horrendous inefficiency relative to other countries: Apple's $256B of spending per year isn't a large multiple as inefficient as Samsung. As far as the reason, people have been trying to take a rigorous look for years and years and have come up with every reason under the sun, spanning the political spectrum: onerous environmental review, lack of nationalized benefits pushing into labor costs, unproductive construction unions, lack of oversight of private contractors, etc etc etc etc. But since the blame is bipartisan, our political culture doesn't know how to handle it. There's no constituency for basic competency in government if it can't be monocausally forced into the box of an existing generic political slapfight (as in your comment).
mjevans 4y ago
The article does talk about some of the factors, the ones that effect the most vulnerable in (US at least) society. At a macro level many basic needs are not being met in the US. As a nation __sufficient__ housing construction has not happened in many decades. Worse it is conflated with being the main investment vehicle for the people lucky enough to have gotten in early, a profit making center for others, and various 'neighborhood character' centered motives prevent the housing around cities from growing the way the jobs had prior to the pandemic. That's what's driving the relocation; the homelessness; the migration of people from areas their families and (probably already strained) support structures (which we can hope exist; this isn't always the case). Area too expensive to live in? Blame housing. Can't find workers at a price you want to pay? Probably also housing. It shocks and saddens me that a real solution to the housing crisis hasn't even been discussed as a political talking point my entire adult life. Not even during the (previous?) recession literally caused by housing issues.
- DANK_YACHT 4y ago
  The article makes no mention of relocation as a driver of the decline in enrollment.
  - mjevans 4y ago
    It does, in fact, mention families moving to other, 'rural resort' locations among other factors.
  - et-al 4y ago
    > At the same time, some families are leaving their local public schools not because they are abandoning the system altogether but because they have moved to other parts of the country that are more affordable. > Rendered homeless in late 2020, [three children] had struggled for months to keep up academically, shuffling for almost a year between motels, relatives and Ms. Parish’s 1997 Honda before they quietly stopped attending school entirely.
- panic 4y ago
  AB-2053 in California looks promising: https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/ https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/
mjevans 4y ago
I'd like to revisit a classic CGP Gray video for talking points on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M What roles does (Public) Education fulfill in society and to parents? * A free society and elected government function best when the people who make decisions about the future of that society are properly educated and capable of high level decision making. Public Schools and Education are generally critical (decades to forever) health factors in such societies. * Better educated laborers are able to further the knowledge of intelligent life, and make better things possible. The video talks about how education has traditionally generally worked, how educational videos can be the basis for learning a subject, and how an AI can feed that to students as a personal "Digital Aristotle for Everyone". '... I doubt that schools will go away. After all, they aren't just about learning but also freeing parents to work in the economy, while their feral children are are turned into civilized adults. Schools will be radically different, and there will be far fewer teachers working in them doing far less. While that's not great news for teachers, it is awesome news for students and society.' -- paraphrased a little, CGP Gray in the linked video. * Free parents to work in the economy. I'll extend this with anecdotal evidence from relatives during the pandemic. It generally gives parents and kids a break from each other so they don't go mutually insane and so that both can progress forward with things they need to accomplish in work and life. * Raise children to be adults. Schools can also serve as a baseline for being a model citizen. I'd really like for them to elevate from my childhood experience: thinly disguised prison babysitting warehouses that happened to pass time with education that never finishes a 20 year old textbook intended to be accomplished over a semester, with the same history and social subjects repeated ad-nauseam because different schools combined and people moved or never completed a course level. * Teach people to work together. Schools _tried_ to do this, but never had the human resources to do it properly. A re-structured system where everyone is completing their own knowledge tracts at their own pace, but gets to work together on long term projects, as if it were a mini job. APPLIED science, technology, engineering, math; and even geography and history. Provide a historic context, teach how we understood the technology and society worked at the time, give the kids actual jobs and guidance in the planning. Maybe have them also grow some crops in a greenhouse with similar conditions over the year. Really inter-mesh and wave everything together. Combine that teaching AI for subjects and "teachers" / babysitters as the historic boss figures the kids have to give reports to and get orders from. We'll know school's been done right when 10 year olds think it's FUN to toss their school work at a spreadsheet or database the same way Eve Online and Factorio addicts do.
mk81 4y ago
Animats 4y ago
Well, of course. The US passed "peak baby" in 2008.[1] That group is now passing through school age. [1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/united-states-births-declined-during-the-pandemic.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/united-states...
osigurdson 4y ago
>> “When you lose kids, you lose money" That's interesting because at some level money is not being lost as taxation is going to be the same. It would seem that funds must be accumulating somewhere.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  For any public school (elementary, middle, or high school), they get funding per pupil. When that school loses students, it loses money. Now, if the district or state has fewer pupils, they may decide to change the formula, but that's probably a few years after the school has already been hit financially.
lettergram 4y ago
> No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out. That may be part of it, but has anyone been to a school board meeting this year? It’s been obvious what’s happening, and everyone I know IRL knows what’s going on. Everyone I know with kids is split on ideological grounds, but about half moved to home schooling. Basically, the theme is parents want to assert their rights over their children. The state and school appears (to some) to be overstepping and attempting to take parental rights. There are three factors claimed by the homeschooling crowd. 1. Masking and vaccine mandates for children https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-california-scott-wiener-sexually-transmitted-diseases-fbd45e3e638b44f6287b099663e712dc https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-california-scott-wie... 2. Teaching children about sex and identitarinism https://timcast.com/news/illinois-school-district-to-start-teaching-students-about-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-in-preschool-training-older-kids-to-take-action-against-transgender-sports-bills/ https://timcast.com/news/illinois-school-district-to-start-t... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10814979/Wisconsin-school-district-files-Title-IX-complaint-against-3-middle-school-students.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10814979/Wisconsin-... https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2022/05/10/gop-leaders-point-to-north-texas-school-board-wins-as-strike-against-crt/ https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2022/05/10/gop-lea... https://theroanokestar.com/2022/05/07/judge-loudoun-co-school-board-guilty-of-gagging-parents/ https://theroanokestar.com/2022/05/07/judge-loudoun-co-schoo... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/loudoun-county-trans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/loudoun-county-tr... https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/17/mom-assignment-school-board-cuts-her-off/ https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/17/mom-assignment-school-boa... 3. Racism in the classroom https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-board-recall-election-san-francisco-three-members/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-board-recall-election-sa... https://news.yahoo.com/atlanta-elementary-school-accused-segregating-175627598.html https://news.yahoo.com/atlanta-elementary-school-accused-seg...
mjfl 4y ago
My parents put my younger sister in Catholic school because they had in person instruction while public schools had remote learning for a full 2 years after they made this decision. Because of this, my sister is roughly 2 years ahead of her public school peers in terms of social development, and learning as well, because it turns out remote learning is pretty terrible. It was a great investment.
somenameforme 4y ago
Some context that's missed in the title. "Plunging enrollment" and a "seismic hit" is their way of describing an overall 2% decline in enrollment. The article states that there are around 50 million students in the US public education system, and total enrollment has declined by 1.2 million. The article also provides very little in the way of non-anecdotal data. Digging through the article we get: - Big declines: California, Denver, Albuquerque, Oakland - Increases: Florida, "rural resort areas" (which have seen "surging enrollment"), private schools. Given we're talking about a 2% decline, and the sort of places we're seeing declines in contrasted against where we're seeing gains, I think there's an explanation here that is so obvious that it goes without stating. Oddly enough that explanation is entirely ignored by the article. My perception of US public schools has shifted radically over the past 10 years, and especially in the past couple of years. It had nothing to do with COVID except insomuch as COVID may have facilitated greater awareness of the educational curriculum.
- akomtu 4y ago
  I see two obvious explanations at least: housing and education. Housing includes the cost of raising kids: few can afford this in places like CA. Education includes the ideology push that parents are fed up with.
- armitron 4y ago
  California public school system is so atrociously bad that everyone with the means to do so should consider alternatives. You are doing a tremendous disservice to your kids otherwise. I took my kids and left the state years ago and there hasn’t been a single day where I don’t feel certain I made the right decision.
  - jasonboyd 4y ago
    Atrociously bad by what metric? I was born and raised in Florida, as was my wife. We are both frequently impressed by how advanced our kids are, scholastically speaking, compared to where we were at that age in Florida. Edit: We now live in California and our kids have only attended (public) school in California.
parkingrift 4y ago
My theory is that parents weren’t quite aware of the level of bottom catering until their children were “learning” from home for months on end. Those with means decided to take matters into their own hands.

35 points by lxm 4y ago

https://archive.ph/l8du8 https://archive.ph/l8du8

I wish the article did a better job identifying the contribution of the two causes, because they tell very different stories. Are they claiming people are dropping out of public education in favor of private/home schools or are they dropping out of NYC public schools in favor of Cheaper Place Public Schools?

xyzzyz 4y ago
This is New York Times. They want you to be confused.
DANK_YACHT 4y ago
The two causes listed were switching to private school and dropping out (meaning stopping education all together). The article mentions that school enrollment is down across the country, not just in large urban areas.
- JackFr 4y ago
  They mention in passing that Florida, where there was little or no remote learning during the pandemic, experienced no such drop. And yet the article seemed very reluctant to draw conclusions about that. The obvious answer is that for public schools (K-12) the experiment with remote learning was an abject failure if the highest order.
  - DANK_YACHT 4y ago
    No, the article mentioned remote learning explicitly. The article states it drove people to private schooling.
  - alphabettsy 4y ago
    Or that people moved to Florida?
  - adnmcq999 4y ago
    Yeah, my mom is an art teacher in MD. Idk if it’s b/c she’s so bad with tech or because her students are from working class families who probably didn’t have the luxury of wfh. But it was an absolute shit show. Like 10% of her students were even submitting hw
codefreeordie 4y ago
I'm sure both happen. Living in Orange County, I hear many people talk about home-schooling and private schools -- much more about education quality than masks or vaccines, but some of both. But then, I am less likely to chat with people who left for cheaper places (or live under a bridge near Disneyland)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
wahern 4y ago
I think the takeaway, in light of similar articles over the past year, is that nobody knows, yet. It'll take more time (maybe even another year or two) for all the numbers to come in and various patterns--in particular their magnitude relative to each other--confidently identified. I could hazard some educated guesses, as I'm sure you could as well, and we'd probably be right, but it's probably better if we just abstained from too much speculation. It's not like pinpointing the exact causes is going to help those public school districts already in dire financial straits; certainly not in the short-term, at least.
- codefreeordie 4y ago
  Presumably, the larger political debate around schools and education is playing a role too. It will take time to see how that plays out. The education system has become a hot political issue again for the first time in a long time, and that's got to contribute its bit.

Proven 4y ago

rg3rg3 4y ago

I don't understand why the article makes it sound like a problem that enrollment is tied to funding. If funding is going down because enrollment is down that's not sad. Similarly, if people are increasingly favoring private institutions the question shouldn't be how to win them back but rather how to emulate institutions that they found more acceptable. Personally, neither of my two children have been to a public school in a long time and I can't imagine ever wanting to send them to one even if there are some that are fine. I want a school that focuses on actual education without the politi-creep and which has high enough behavioral standards that I can expect problematic students to be dealt with and removed as obstacles to my children. Not every private school is like that but at least you can shop around for the one that's the closest to your needs so long as you're willing to do the legwork. Public school is where you send your kids if you only care about saving money on their diploma.

jamesgreenleaf 4y ago

If the reason is that students are being homeschooled or going to private schools, then this seems like great news. It's well known that the public school system in the US is just not up to snuff. Not all public schools are bad, but on average their outcomes are worse than the alternatives. There was a guy named John Taylor Gatto who wrote on this subject in some depth, after teaching in the NY public school system for decades, and being named NYC's "teacher of the year" a few times. He has some great talks on youtube, and a few books out if you're interested in the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto

booboofixer 4y ago
Coming from a country where private schools dominate public schools in terms of the quality of education, i assure you this is not great news. Public schools will be left with underprivileged students and the worst teaching/administration staff and it would become a great source of inequality.
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  It's already the case in the US that the quality of a private school education is substantially higher than even rich-neighborhood public schools.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> If the reason is that students are being homeschooled or going to private schools, then this seems like great news. It's not (the plunging enrollment is largely due to age demographics, which the article acknowledges, with the rest apparently associated with the pandemic, with the article admitting that no one knows the underlying dynamics really are, but insisting that experts are somehow sure that they are durable), but it wouldn't be great news if it was.. > It's well known that the public school system in the US is just not up to snuff. It's less well-known, but no less true, that (controlling for factors that determine success within the public schools, like parental engagement, parental educational attainment, socioeconomic status, etc.) the alternatives are no better, though they look better before controlling for those things (though less so over time as the demographics in the alternatives become less skewed) because they tend to cherry pick the most advantaged students, largely simply by being non-default choices and therefore cutting off the low tail of the parental involvement distribution.

vwoolf 4y ago

Maybe this will create the voting bloc needed to get charter- and voucher-based schools off the ground, and out of the hands of unions. Public-sector monopolies don't have a great track record.

andyferris 4y ago
Personally I’d argue that in Western countries other than the US the public-sector monopolies can often do pretty well. I’d suggest wondering why this isn’t the case in the US, and fix that instead.
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  There's a serious government competence problem in the US (just look at our infra costs), but our unserious political culture can't get past "more gov't vs less gov't" to actually start to understand and tackle the issue.
  - OldTimeCoffee 4y ago
    > (just look at our infra costs) It's the private sector completing these jobs, not government employees. Those jobs are routinely bid out to contractors, who complete the job with a profit margin. It's both sides of the coin coupled with a relentless need to profit off everything possible at every opportunity.
    - wutbrodo 4y ago
      > It's the private sector completing these jobs, not government employees. They're government projects. The details of how they staff them are part of "why is the gov't so incompetent" question. Comparable-scale private projects don't exhibit the same horrendous inefficiency relative to other countries: Apple's $256B of spending per year isn't a large multiple as inefficient as Samsung. As far as the reason, people have been trying to take a rigorous look for years and years and have come up with every reason under the sun, spanning the political spectrum: onerous environmental review, lack of nationalized benefits pushing into labor costs, unproductive construction unions, lack of oversight of private contractors, etc etc etc etc. But since the blame is bipartisan, our political culture doesn't know how to handle it. There's no constituency for basic competency in government if it can't be monocausally forced into the box of an existing generic political slapfight (as in your comment).

mjevans 4y ago

The article does talk about some of the factors, the ones that effect the most vulnerable in (US at least) society. At a macro level many basic needs are not being met in the US. As a nation __sufficient__ housing construction has not happened in many decades. Worse it is conflated with being the main investment vehicle for the people lucky enough to have gotten in early, a profit making center for others, and various 'neighborhood character' centered motives prevent the housing around cities from growing the way the jobs had prior to the pandemic. That's what's driving the relocation; the homelessness; the migration of people from areas their families and (probably already strained) support structures (which we can hope exist; this isn't always the case). Area too expensive to live in? Blame housing. Can't find workers at a price you want to pay? Probably also housing. It shocks and saddens me that a real solution to the housing crisis hasn't even been discussed as a political talking point my entire adult life. Not even during the (previous?) recession literally caused by housing issues.

DANK_YACHT 4y ago
The article makes no mention of relocation as a driver of the decline in enrollment.
- mjevans 4y ago
  It does, in fact, mention families moving to other, 'rural resort' locations among other factors.
- et-al 4y ago
  > At the same time, some families are leaving their local public schools not because they are abandoning the system altogether but because they have moved to other parts of the country that are more affordable. > Rendered homeless in late 2020, [three children] had struggled for months to keep up academically, shuffling for almost a year between motels, relatives and Ms. Parish’s 1997 Honda before they quietly stopped attending school entirely.
panic 4y ago
AB-2053 in California looks promising: https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/ https://www.californiasocialhousing.org/

mjevans 4y ago

I'd like to revisit a classic CGP Gray video for talking points on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M What roles does (Public) Education fulfill in society and to parents? * A free society and elected government function best when the people who make decisions about the future of that society are properly educated and capable of high level decision making. Public Schools and Education are generally critical (decades to forever) health factors in such societies. * Better educated laborers are able to further the knowledge of intelligent life, and make better things possible. The video talks about how education has traditionally generally worked, how educational videos can be the basis for learning a subject, and how an AI can feed that to students as a personal "Digital Aristotle for Everyone". '... I doubt that schools will go away. After all, they aren't just about learning but also freeing parents to work in the economy, while their feral children are are turned into civilized adults. Schools will be radically different, and there will be far fewer teachers working in them doing far less. While that's not great news for teachers, it is awesome news for students and society.' -- paraphrased a little, CGP Gray in the linked video. * Free parents to work in the economy. I'll extend this with anecdotal evidence from relatives during the pandemic. It generally gives parents and kids a break from each other so they don't go mutually insane and so that both can progress forward with things they need to accomplish in work and life. * Raise children to be adults. Schools can also serve as a baseline for being a model citizen. I'd really like for them to elevate from my childhood experience: thinly disguised prison babysitting warehouses that happened to pass time with education that never finishes a 20 year old textbook intended to be accomplished over a semester, with the same history and social subjects repeated ad-nauseam because different schools combined and people moved or never completed a course level. * Teach people to work together. Schools _tried_ to do this, but never had the human resources to do it properly. A re-structured system where everyone is completing their own knowledge tracts at their own pace, but gets to work together on long term projects, as if it were a mini job. APPLIED science, technology, engineering, math; and even geography and history. Provide a historic context, teach how we understood the technology and society worked at the time, give the kids actual jobs and guidance in the planning. Maybe have them also grow some crops in a greenhouse with similar conditions over the year. Really inter-mesh and wave everything together. Combine that teaching AI for subjects and "teachers" / babysitters as the historic boss figures the kids have to give reports to and get orders from. We'll know school's been done right when 10 year olds think it's FUN to toss their school work at a spreadsheet or database the same way Eve Online and Factorio addicts do.

mk81 4y ago

Animats 4y ago

Well, of course. The US passed "peak baby" in 2008.[1] That group is now passing through school age. [1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/united-states-births-declined-during-the-pandemic.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/09/united-states...

osigurdson 4y ago

>> “When you lose kids, you lose money" That's interesting because at some level money is not being lost as taxation is going to be the same. It would seem that funds must be accumulating somewhere.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
For any public school (elementary, middle, or high school), they get funding per pupil. When that school loses students, it loses money. Now, if the district or state has fewer pupils, they may decide to change the formula, but that's probably a few years after the school has already been hit financially.

lettergram 4y ago

> No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out. That may be part of it, but has anyone been to a school board meeting this year? It’s been obvious what’s happening, and everyone I know IRL knows what’s going on. Everyone I know with kids is split on ideological grounds, but about half moved to home schooling. Basically, the theme is parents want to assert their rights over their children. The state and school appears (to some) to be overstepping and attempting to take parental rights. There are three factors claimed by the homeschooling crowd. 1. Masking and vaccine mandates for children https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-california-scott-wiener-sexually-transmitted-diseases-fbd45e3e638b44f6287b099663e712dc https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-california-scott-wie... 2. Teaching children about sex and identitarinism https://timcast.com/news/illinois-school-district-to-start-teaching-students-about-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-in-preschool-training-older-kids-to-take-action-against-transgender-sports-bills/ https://timcast.com/news/illinois-school-district-to-start-t... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10814979/Wisconsin-school-district-files-Title-IX-complaint-against-3-middle-school-students.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10814979/Wisconsin-... https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2022/05/10/gop-leaders-point-to-north-texas-school-board-wins-as-strike-against-crt/ https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2022/05/10/gop-lea... https://theroanokestar.com/2022/05/07/judge-loudoun-co-school-board-guilty-of-gagging-parents/ https://theroanokestar.com/2022/05/07/judge-loudoun-co-schoo... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/loudoun-county-trans.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/loudoun-county-tr... https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/17/mom-assignment-school-board-cuts-her-off/ https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/17/mom-assignment-school-boa... 3. Racism in the classroom https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-board-recall-election-san-francisco-three-members/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-board-recall-election-sa... https://news.yahoo.com/atlanta-elementary-school-accused-segregating-175627598.html https://news.yahoo.com/atlanta-elementary-school-accused-seg...

mjfl 4y ago

My parents put my younger sister in Catholic school because they had in person instruction while public schools had remote learning for a full 2 years after they made this decision. Because of this, my sister is roughly 2 years ahead of her public school peers in terms of social development, and learning as well, because it turns out remote learning is pretty terrible. It was a great investment.

somenameforme 4y ago

Some context that's missed in the title. "Plunging enrollment" and a "seismic hit" is their way of describing an overall 2% decline in enrollment. The article states that there are around 50 million students in the US public education system, and total enrollment has declined by 1.2 million. The article also provides very little in the way of non-anecdotal data. Digging through the article we get: - Big declines: California, Denver, Albuquerque, Oakland - Increases: Florida, "rural resort areas" (which have seen "surging enrollment"), private schools. Given we're talking about a 2% decline, and the sort of places we're seeing declines in contrasted against where we're seeing gains, I think there's an explanation here that is so obvious that it goes without stating. Oddly enough that explanation is entirely ignored by the article. My perception of US public schools has shifted radically over the past 10 years, and especially in the past couple of years. It had nothing to do with COVID except insomuch as COVID may have facilitated greater awareness of the educational curriculum.

akomtu 4y ago
I see two obvious explanations at least: housing and education. Housing includes the cost of raising kids: few can afford this in places like CA. Education includes the ideology push that parents are fed up with.
armitron 4y ago
California public school system is so atrociously bad that everyone with the means to do so should consider alternatives. You are doing a tremendous disservice to your kids otherwise. I took my kids and left the state years ago and there hasn’t been a single day where I don’t feel certain I made the right decision.
- jasonboyd 4y ago
  Atrociously bad by what metric? I was born and raised in Florida, as was my wife. We are both frequently impressed by how advanced our kids are, scholastically speaking, compared to where we were at that age in Florida. Edit: We now live in California and our kids have only attended (public) school in California.

parkingrift 4y ago

My theory is that parents weren’t quite aware of the level of bottom catering until their children were “learning” from home for months on end. Those with means decided to take matters into their own hands.