Local parents fleeing government-run schools aligns with national trends

Maybe it’s the unnecessary school shutdowns. Or maybe it’s the extremist, race-based curriculum. Nonetheless, parents around the country—including Santa Clara County—are opting out of public schools and increasingly choosing private and charter schools. Matt Welch explores the exodus in Reason magazine.

This fall may be the biggest moment of truth for public education since the 1970s.

After seeing enrollment in government-run K-12 schools decline by 3 percent in COVID-marred 2020–21 (including 13 percent for kindergarten and pre-K), all while homeschooling tripled, the $122 billion question facing this new school year is whether that defection is an aberration or inflection point. Given the amount of time that families have now had to plan around school-opening policies that have been among the most cautious in the developed world, would they choose their neighborhood school, or seek alternative solutions with more predictable schedules?

An early bellwether came clanging in last week, suggesting that the mass opting-out will be no mere blip. "Sadly, since the onset of the pandemic, our school roster has declined by 120 students who have left our school," Principal Elizabeth Garraway of Brooklyn's P.S. 118 Maurice Sendak elementary school emailed to parents in affluent Park Slope. "Due to the drastic decline in our numbers, our budget to pay teacher salaries was drastically reduced."

A joint Stanford Graduate School of Education/New York Times study of 70,000 public schools in 33 states three weeks ago showed that those offering remote-only learning at the beginning of 2020–21 experienced a 3.7 percent decline, while those with in-person schooling went down 2.6 percent. "In other words," Stanford education professor Thomas S. Dee told the university's publicity department, "going remote-only actually increased the enrollment decline by about 40 percent."

If the New York example plays out nationwide—and keep in mind, the 2020–21 K-12 decline happened absolutely everywhere—then the impact on public education, local and state governance, and politics itself could be profound. About one out of every five state-government dollars is spent on primary and secondary education. Spending formulas tied to enrollment will see major declines; those that aren't will face political pressure from taxpayers rightly wondering why the bill is so high for a service fewer people want. The trend toward tethering education spending to students rather than school buildings will continue shooting upward.

All of which would be another reason to view 2020–21 to be the apex of teachers union power, to be followed by inexorable descent. They got their work-at-home carveouts, their school closures, their preferred party running the federal government, their vaccine fast-tracking, their fingerprints all over the "science," and their hundreds of billions in federal largesse. And as a result of all that influence, they created a product that's literally repellant to millions of parents, even at the cost of free. Their ranks will almost certainly thin.

Read the whole thing here.

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