The latest on enrollment numbers

We’ve been working on our latest Digital Learning Snapshot (see previous Snapshots here), and have some preliminary findings to report.

Online school enrollment numbers in school year 2020-21
As long-time readers of the Snapshot and the prior Keeping Pace reports may recognize, for many years we have been reporting on how many students are enrolled in fully online schools which enroll students from across entire states. We choose this data point for two reasons. First, it’s a valuable number that reflects the status of the highest-impact form of digital learning, from a student perspective. Second, we can get these numbers within a reasonable time frame from state agencies.

During the pandemic, of course, most school districts offered remote learning for their own students, and for many students remote learning was the only option for extended periods. Those data are not included in this discussion because they were mostly temporary.

We continue to focus our reporting on the online schools that are serving students statewide, building on our pre-pandemic data sets. In our last Snapshot we reported that 32 states allowed such online schools, and collectively they enrolled about 375,000 students, in school year 2018-19. Those numbers were flat for the year ending in 2019-20, and then grew by 75% in school year 2020-21, to 656,000 student enrollments, as hundreds of thousands of students left their prior district of enrollment and moved to online schools.

The number of states allowing statewide online schools is growing as well. In school year 2022-23, 35 states will have online schools serving students statewide, with Rhode Island and West Virginia being the latest.

The number of online students in district-run online schools is not known. A reasonable guess, however, is that the total number of students in permanent online schools (including district-run schools, but not including temporary remote learning) increased between 2x and 3x during the pandemic to somewhere between 750,000 and one million students.

An estimate regarding current (fall 2021) enrollment numbers
We’ve expected that online school enrollment numbers would go down in fall 2021, and that appears to have occurred—although no states are yet reporting numbers. The drop is almost certainly not as big as the pandemic increase, however. In other words, online school enrollment numbers are likely to be significantly higher than pre-pandemic.

One indicator of enrollment numbers for fall 2021 comes from the public reporting from Stride, the largest corporate provider to online schools. (Pearson is second, and together schools that partner with Stride or Pearson account for more than half of all online school enrollments.) Stride reports (see slide #8 on the linked page) that “general education” demand (meaning enrollments in the schools it partners with) was down 10% compared to the prior year, during peak COVID-19, and that enrollments in its managed schools were up by 36,800 students compared to pre-pandemic numbers.

It's clear that during this current school year, education is still being heavily impacted by ongoing pandemic impacts. Schools are closing or shifting to remote learning again due to COVID-19 outbreaks, and labor shortages are having widespread impacts. Therefore the open question at this point is whether enrollment numbers in online schools will fall further in 2022-23, towards their pre-pandemic baseline, or if the current enrollment numbers represent a new baseline from which slow but steady growth is likely to resume.

A note on district-run online schools
Finally, we are looking at district-run online schools, although data are lacking. In school year 2021-22, many districts—likely more than 1,000—are reporting that they are creating or significantly growing their own online schools for their own students. We believe that in fact many of these district-run schools have an onsite component, such that we would label them hybrid schools. Currently there is little data regarding how many students are enrolled in these district-run online schools, and only limited data on how many districts (and which ones) are offering these online schools. We hope to find, and report on, additional data in this area as they become available.