Why Is Enrollment Plunging in the Public Schools?
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a decline in public school enrollment has accelerated. Some of the millions of “missing kids” are in private schools or charter schools, but some may have disengaged from schooling entirely. Prof. Faidra Monachou recently co-authored a report on the decline and the consequences for the school system.
What is the scale of the decline in public school enrollment since the pandemic?
Between 2019-20 and 2023-24, traditional public schools lost about 1.83 million students. After a modest rebound in 2022-23, the share of students outside traditional public schools grew again in 2023-24. This decline varies by race, district poverty level, and state.
In predominantly Black districts, the share of students outside traditional public schools has been both the highest and the fastest growing, rising from 25.4% in 2015-16 to 34.1% in 2023-24, a trajectory unaffected by the pandemic. Predominantly White and Hispanic districts have also seen smaller but noticeable increases since 2020. In high-poverty districts, the share of students outside traditional public schools reached 26% in 2023-24. Medium- and low-poverty districts also recorded increases, though to a lesser extent.
In districts serving fewer students, budget pressures can limit the resources available in classrooms, as funding is tied to enrollment. Those who leave may enter settings that vary in quality and oversight.
The picture also varies across states. The share of students missing from both public and private records ranges from zero to 12%. The median state leaves about 5.5% of the school-age population unaccounted for. Between 2019-20 and 2021-22, the last two years with complete private school data, this translated into about 2.05 million additional “missing” students—a 450% increase.
What is the effect of the decline on the system as a whole?
Enrollment declines affect district operations, from staffing to facilities to budget planning. With fewer students, resources become tighter while fixed costs such as buildings and transportation remain, making long-term planning more difficult. These effects may be uneven. For example, in high-poverty districts, where enrollment losses are greatest, the impact can be more disruptive because these schools already face existing challenges. The same decline that a better-resourced district can absorb may lead to difficult trade-offs elsewhere.
Enrollment shifts can affect students both inside and outside public schools. In districts serving fewer students, budget pressures can limit the resources available in classrooms, as funding is tied to enrollment. Those who leave may enter settings that vary in quality and oversight.
Districts may fear that large enrollment declines increase the likelihood of permanent school closures. In practice, closures remain uncommon. Our analysis suggests that steep declines make closure more likely but not inevitable: many schools with declining enrollment remain open, while some that closed were not losing students. In other words, declining enrollment can raise the risk, but closures remain rare and are usually the result of several factors combined.
Some of the decline reflects movement to charter schools or private schools, but some of the students seem to have disappeared from the system altogether. What are the possible explanations for that?
Some enrollment losses in traditional public schools can be explained by families moving to private schools or charter schools, as well as by demographic changes such as declining birth rates. But the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of students are not accounted for in the available data. We see this gap when we compare district-level counts of school-age children with the number of children who appear in official records across different types of schooling.
The possible explanations for these “missing students” range from being homeschooled to disengaging from formal schooling altogether. The biggest challenge is that the available federal data report only total headcounts and do not follow students as they move across systems or states. This makes it difficult to understand whether children are re-enrolling elsewhere or not.
This uncertainty can have important consequences for public school districts. Without better data on where students go, districts and states cannot plan effectively. Without knowing the full range of alternative schooling arrangements, we cannot tell whether today’s enrollment patterns will last or how they affect student development and academic progress inside and outside public schools. With more transparent information and better tools, education leaders can make informed decisions and direct interventions where they are most needed.