The stupidity of the teachers’ unions, the school boards, and the city officials who enabled them during the pandemic has led to an unprecedented budget crunch as parents have either removed their children from public schools and enrolled them in private schools or are homeschooling their children.
It was believed that after the historic 2.5% decline in enrollment in 2020-21, numbers would bounce back once the schools reopened. But according to an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) report released Wednesday, the number of students in public schools has continued to fall.
And the reasons couldn’t be more clear. In those school districts where students were allowed back into class and had fewer restrictions, enrollment has recovered and even grown slightly. But those districts that were offering remote learning continued to decline.
Nationwide enrollment in government-run public schools in the 46 states under review declined an additional 0.2 percent in 2021-22, but with a measurable split at the extreme ends of pandemic-related school policies. The most remote school districts lost an additional 1.2 percent enrollment on average in 2021-22, contributing to a two-year decline of 4.4 percent; while the most open districts rebounded by 0.9 percent this year and have lost just 1.1 percent overall since COVID-19 hit.
The highest correlation between the decline of enrollment and location is found among big-city, Democratic Party voters and locally powerful teachers’ unions.
New York City, the largest district in the nation, has lost a staggering 9.5 percent of students since the onset of COVID-19. Los Angeles Unified, the second largest, where unions have had particular success in getting most every restriction and compensation they wanted, the student body shrank 8.1 percent. School Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, in an article earlier this month at The 74 Million, described the confluence of the enrollment drop and the drying out of the nearly $200 billion in emergency federal COVID relief funds to K-12 schools as potentially “Armageddon.”
Unless the long-term trend of Angelenos fleeing the public school system somehow reverses, Carvalho warned, “It’sgoing to be a hurricane of massive proportions.”
In contrast, only two of the top 10 school districts that haven’t lost population since the pandemic hit are both in Florida (Orange and Hillsborough counties). Recall that Gov. Ron DeSantis was smeared as a murderer for opening his state sooner than almost any other.
It’s hard to understate the impact that a loss of 8%-10% of students will have on a school district like New York or L.A. Ten percent fewer students mean ten percent less money. And that means fewer teachers — theoretically. No doubt the unions will come up with formulas to justify hiring even more teachers and raising salaries even higher.
Meanwhile, major cities have a major problem. How many of those kids are falling through the cracks? How many children are being denied the kind of education that would make them independent, productive citizens?
It never had to be this way. This is a catastrophe by choice; teachers, administrators, school boards, and Democratic politicians chose this path rather than doing what was right for the children.
And it’s the kids who will pay the price for it.