As back-to-school week wheezes into gear for the nation's 54 million or so children between the ages of five and 17, a startling, post-COVID reality is becoming more apparent, even if the implications are still too big to process. It is this: Though the U.S. population continues to grow, the number of kids attending public K-12 schools will likely never again reach its 2019 peak.
The rise of homeschooling—from around 2.8 percent of the school-aged population pre-pandemic to around 5.8 percent now (reliable statistics are hard to come by)—is a chief contributor to that decline, along with ever-decreasing birth rates. Between fall of 2019 and fall of 2030, the National Center for Public Education Statistics (NCES) projected this past February, public school enrollment will decrease by 7 percent, from 50.8 million to 47.3 million.
So surely government spending on those schools, which typically amounts to around 20 percent of state/local budgets, will decrease too, right? Ha ha, no.
The NCES estimates that taxpayer expenditures on K-12 schools will tick up slightly from $693 billion in 2018-19 (using constant 2021 dollars) to $698 billion in 2030-31. Per-pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, will therefore continue its long-term trend of increasing, from $13,700 to $14,800.
The reality is even less fiscally sane than those numbers suggest. First of all, the NCES did not factor into its projections the direct federal injection of $200 billion worth of federal COVID-relief money—$69 billion in two 2020 bills, $130 billion in the American Rescue Plan (ARP)—nor the indirect $350 billion ARP bailout for states to plug whatever budget holes they wished. This taxpayer blowout, extracted with strategic intentionality by the same Democratic Party-supporting teachers unions that kept schools closed in America much longer than those in most other countries, produced the largest one-year per-pupil spending hike in two decades.
So: Taxpayers are paying more money for a service they use less, even without calculating the COVID-19 spending/shutdown debacle. (Reminder: The New York Times concluded in an analysis this March that "extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.") Yet still the picture looks worse when viewed in light of the still-dominant operating model for these flagging institutions.
That's because the number of kids attending charter schools—"public" in name, but managed by private entities rather than government—has more than doubled since 2010-11, from 1.8 million to 3.7 million in 2021-22. This is despite Democratic politicians, from the president on down, seeking in recent years to restrict charters' proliferation and even roll them back.
Families, it turns out, have been fleeing government-managed schools since long before COVID-19.
"If you subtract the charter school students," former Houston Chronicle columnist Bill King observed in a trenchant analysis last week, "enrollment in traditional public schools peaked in 2012 and has since declined by 5%."
That decline is almost guaranteed to accelerate. In the past three years, spurred on by the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin, a dozen states have adopted something close to universal school choice for K-12, allowing taxpayer money to flow into private institutions. More states, including the giant prize of Texas, look likely to join.
It is notable that all of these school-choice states are run by Republicans, just as all of the biggest school-lockdown states were run by Democrats. Education policy has become so polarized as to be unrecognizable from even a dozen years ago.
Back then, President Barack Obama, with his pro-charters education secretary Arne Duncan and their "Race to the Top" initiative, talked enough about introducing competition and firing bad teachers that New York Times columnist David Brooks (prematurely) called him "the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency."
That past is a different planet. Now, hating on charter schools (except when relying on them to do the things your one-size-fits-all system cannot) is an opening bid for national Democratic ambitions, the current president is literally in bed with the teachers unions, and the 2024 party platform states flatly that: "We oppose the use of private-school vouchers, tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships, and other schemes that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education."
The Republican platform, meanwhile, supports universal school choice in every state, expanding 529 Education Savings Accounts, and closing down the Department of Education.
What are teachers unions getting for their 99 percent-plus political-donation spending on Democrats? On the local level, Democratic-dominated polities like the state of New York are still pushing through mandatory class-size reductions, which—surprise!—requires hiring more teachers even as the student population declines. And certainly, muscle-flexing groups like the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) will find it advantageous in contract negotiations to be bargaining with a former CTU lobbyist they helped elect.
There is still loose change to be found in the national couch cushions as well. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) have been among the loudest voices pushing the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris administration to wipe out student loans, an effort that has produced a dedicated Teacher Loan Forgiveness program. They still want federal action to loosen testing requirements, strengthen union organizing, and enact a Paraprofessionals and School-Related Personnel Bill of Rights.
An underrated instance of recent teachers-union muscle-flexing on the Democratic Party was Harris's selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her vice presidential running mate over the onetime heavily favored Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Walz, a former teacher, was a dues-paying member of both the AFT and NEA, and as governor opposed school choice and favored extended school lockdowns. Shapiro, unforgivably, has supported school vouchers.
So complete has been the teachers union dominance of the Democratic Party that The Nation this week published what amounted to a victory lap. "After decades of serving as a punching bag for the party's neoliberals," the progressive magazine declared in the subhed, "public schools and the people who work in them are back in fashion."
Well, except among their customers. No amount of political backslapping and Democratic influence-buying can overcome the cruelty of math. When public school buildings become too empty, they have to shut down. When the federal spigot runs dry—as it was supposed to this month, though some drops will stick around until next year—state and local governments will be gazing out over a fiscal cliff.
"Throughout the country some of the largest enrollment declines have come in districts that embraced remote learning," reporter Alec MacGillis wrote in a deep-dive ProPublica piece about school closings last month. "In these places, a stark reality now looms: schools have far more space than they need, with higher costs for heating and cooling, building upkeep and staffing than their enrollment justifies."
Public schools had just one job, and they screwed it up. Just wait until all taxpayers—not just the defecting families—begin to notice.
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