K-12 student enrollment update: What’s happening in traditional districts?
A previous blog post explored the enrollment increases we have been observing in online schools and courses. Increases in student attending online schools are often in the range of 40%, while state virtual schools have seen an uptick in course enrollments stretching from about 30% to 300%.
We’ve also been interested in understanding what is happening from the traditional school district perspective. Are their student enrollments down? If so, by how much?
National Public Radio has an answer:
“Orange County, Fla., has 8,000 missing students. The Miami-Dade County public schools have 16,000 fewer than last year. Los Angeles Unified — the nation's second-largest school system — is down nearly 11,000. Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina has 5,000 missing. Utah, Virginia and Washington are reporting declines statewide.
Comprehensive national data aren't available yet, but reporting by NPR and our member stations, along with media reports from around the country, shows enrollment declines in dozens of school districts across 20 states. Large and small, rich and poor, urban and rural — in most of these districts the decline is a departure from recent trends.”
These enrollment reductions tend to be around 2% - 5% off the previous year’s student count. This decline is not the same across all grade levels, however. Although many districts are seeing some reduction in enrollments of all student ages, kindergarten declines are driving much of the overall number. NPR’s report goes on to explain:
“In many places, the enrollment drops are especially noticeable in kindergarten and pre-K. For our reporting, we reached out to more than 100 districts and heard back from more than 60. In our sample, the average kindergarten enrollment drop was 16%.”
In another example from the same story, Washington State reported a 14% drop in kindergarten enrollment from districts across the state.
The common explanation is that remote learning isn’t working well for the youngest students. But further analysis suggests that something else may be going on as well, for two reasons.
First, from a remote learning perspective, there isn’t much difference between kindergarten students and first grade. But kindergarten is driving much of the decrease, according to the NPR report and what we are hearing from our contacts.
Second, post-secondary is seeing a large drop in first year enrollments, raising the question as to whether the reduction is more about students entering a school for the first time, instead of being determined just by age. Phil Hill has dug into the data and reports that enrollment from first-year students is down by just over 16%, which—just as in K-12—accounts for much of the overall decrease in college enrollment.
These numbers suggest that for quite a few students (and parents of young students), sticking with a school during remote learning makes more sense than starting a new school with remote learning in place.
These data might suggest that enrollments will rebound fully—or close to fully—once the pandemic is over. But while kindergarten students account for a significant portion of the drop in traditional school enrollment, they are not responsible for most of the increase in enrollment in online courses and schools. Part of the reason for this may be that kindergarten isn’t required in most states, so some parents are likely choosing to have their kindergarten-aged kids not attend any school this year.
What are the implications of these conflicting signals and incomplete information? It’s hard to say, because it’s unclear how sticky these changes will be. How many students who left a traditional public school for an online school, or a private school, will remain in their new school? How many will go back to their previous?
Two predictions seem reasonable, with the usual caveat that nobody knows what is going to develop.
First, it seems likely that a non-trivial percentage of students and families will appreciate the flexibility and other benefits of online or hybrid schools in the states that allow families to choose such schools. In those states, it seems reasonable to expect that traditional school districts will increase their online/hybrid school options to bring those students back. These districts may feel additional pressure to recapture students if state budgets continue to be constrained by COVID-19’s impacts, leading to per-student funding reductions.
The idea that districts will respond to competition and change their practices has long been a key argument for charter schools, even if the evidence for such change is not always clear. But in states with online schools, evidence exists that traditional districts have responded by providing their own online and hybrid options. The clearest example comes from comparing Pennsylvania and Maryland, neighboring states with fairly similar demographics. Pennsylvania has long allowed cyber charter schools, and funded them using a mechanism that has led districts to feel that they were losing money and students. Maryland has not had online charter schools, so students have never had the option to leave their home district for a public online school. Our experience over many years suggests that Pennsylvania districts have responded to the cyber charter competition with their own online and hybrid options, such that students in the state have a far wider array of options than students in nearby Maryland. It’s possible that the pandemic will produce a similar evolution of opportunities across districts in many more states, by introducing many students and families to online options for the first time.
Second, these overall numbers—both the online school and online course enrollment increases, and the decline in traditional public schools—suggest two overall results:
Online learning will see sustained increases in enrollment after the pandemic is over.
Online learning will remain a very small part of the overall K-12 education landscape.
These are not mutually exclusive ideas, given the very small base from which online learning was growing. Also, what we’re seeing is in line with a previous prediction, so I’m being careful about succumbing to confirmation bias as I look at newer data. But the latest numbers do suggest the likelihood of a relatively small, but sustained, increase in students and families choosing online options.