We Have Already Passed Peak Public School
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.
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