By: Bill King
There was some slow-down during desegregation, as enrollment in private schools surged. However, growth resumed by the early 1980s at a little less than 2% each year. But by the late 1990s, the growth rate began to noticeably slow, eventually falling to under .5% annually. Public school enrollment peaked in 2019 at 50.8 million. During the pandemic, parents pulled about 1.5 million children out of public schools. For the most part, those children do not appear to have returned. Th e National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) now estimates that public school enrollment will fall by the end of this decade to just under 47 million. It is important to note that the official public school enrollment numbers include charter schools, which have grown over the last twenty years from one million to nearly five million. If you subtract the charter school students, enrollment in traditional public schools peaked in 2012 and has since declined by 5%.
There are several factors affecting public school enrollment. First, as I have previously noted, women everywhere in the world, but particularly in the U.S., are having fewer children. Th e Census Bureau recently reported that the cur-rent fertility rate (children per woman in her lifetime) has dropped to 1.76. A rate of about 2.1 is necessary to maintain a stable population. As a result, the 63.7 million school-age children today is only slightly higher than it was in 2010. Th e U.S. Census Bureau currently projects that the number of school-age children will decline by 6% to 59.9 million by 2050. The reality is that, absent allowing a large increase in immigration, the U.S. will never have more school-age children than it does today.
The second factor is the rapid growth in homeschooling. Over the last two decades, the number of children being home schooled has tripled from one million to three million. Th at has moved the percent-age of children being home schooled from 2%to 5%. One of the barriers to homeschooling was the lack of extracurricular activities, especially athletics. However, there has been a large-scale movement to organize such activities within the homeschooling communities, which appears to be quite successful. Charter schools and homeschooling have combined to drop the percentage of children enrolled in traditional public schools from 84%twenty years ago to 78%today. Th e drop would have been more precipitous had it not been for the fact that private and parochial schools have both been losing enrollment even faster than public schools.
Parochial enrollment has fallen by 40% and private schools by 25%. It appears that charter schools and homeschooling may hurt parochial and private school enrollment as much, if not more, than public school enrollment. There are several important takeaways from this data. First, we should use it to inform our investments in education facilities. Th e truth is we do not need any more schools, at least in the aggregate, than we have today. In fact, we should probably already be closing some schools. Certainly, there will be localities where there is still growth, and which will need to build some new schools. Th e exodus out of cities to the suburbs and exurbs is an ex-ample. But even in those areas, this demographic reality is going to quickly eliminate the need for any
