If public schools are unable to address students’ needs, more families might choose to leave, and the resulting enrollment declines could make it even more difficult for schools to serve the students who stay.

The headlines are ubiquitous: The New York Times has reported on a “kindergarten exodus” (Goldstein & Parlapiano, 2021); students who were “lost” during remote learning (Goodnough, 2020); and a “seismic hit” to public school enrollments fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic (Hubler, 2022). An analysis from Chalkbeat and The Associated Press found that 500,000 students across 33 states left public schools from September 2019 to September 2020 (Belsha et al., 2020). A 2020 Census Bureau survey found an increase in homeschooling in 2020 (Eggleston & Fields, 2021), and the libertarian CATO Institute released survey results displaying a rise in private school enrollment (McCluskey, 2021). Ultimately, a 2022 national tracking survey found that 1.2 million students left public schools since the start of the pandemic (Return2Learn, 2022).

Although the stories suggest a shocking crisis brought on or worsened by the pandemic, the drop in enrollment should not be a surprise. Even before March 2020, experts noted that declining birth rates could lead to enrollment drops (Barshay, 2018). While some decreases in public school enrollment may indeed be due to the combination of declining birthrates and the pandemic, they could also result from Americans’ differing visions about what purpose schools are supposed to serve. Public schools’ role as a public good to support access and equality exists in tension with public schools’ growing role as a private commodity. Together, this tension has contributed to an increasing number of pathways out of public schools and a growing mistrust of public education as an institution, which ultimately impacts public school enrollment.

Competing visions

American public education has always had multiple goals, and some of these goals are in tension with one another. In 1997, David Labaree identified three such educational aims:

  • Democratic equality suggests that schools are public goods that must prepare all young people to act as responsible members of society.
  • Social efficiency suggests that schools must train the next generation of laborers so that they can meet the demands of the market to generate economic growth.
  • Social mobility suggests that schools are a private commodity that must enable each individual to enhance their position in a society built on the ideals of competition and meritocracy.

In a 2018 Kappan article, Labaree further explains how schooling has been transformed into a mostly private good in which families make individual decisions about their children’s education, rather than considering schools as a holistic public good. Providing choice, which serves individuals’ social mobility, stands in tension with the idealistic goal of democratic equality. In another recent Kappan, Labaree (2022) considers how these tensions have made the relationship between schools and the state increasingly fraught. The contradictions also have affected the public’s relationship with their schools. While the current structures of school are advantageous to some Americans, others do not feel well served by their schools. This breeds mistrust in the public sector, ultimately leading some to abandon urban public schools.

Varieties of school choice

Milton Friedman, the “godfather of the free market,” argued in 1955 that the government’s role in schooling should be limited and that parents need the autonomy to pay for “approved educational services.” Forty years later, he declared that “the only way to make a major improvement in our educational system is through privatization” (Friedman, 1995). This line of thinking undergirds efforts to promote school choice.

The school choice movement as we know it today emerged in the 1980s during the Ronald Reagan administration, and it is now a major feature of the public education landscape. By positioning parents and students as “shoppers,” school choice forces schools to compete with each other to offer the most appealing academic program (Abowitz & Stitzlein, 2018; Labaree, 1997). Michael Apple (2006) outlines how this “free market” system of education treats parents as consumers armed with information to make decisions in an educational “marketplace.”

Three specific varieties of school choice enable families to select schooling options that they believe will support their child’s needs, but these options potentially exacerbate the enrollment crisis in traditional public schools and limit their ability to serve the public good.

Vouchers

Through vouchers, the government directs funds to families to pay tuition for private and/or religious schools (Berends, 2014). Just five voucher programs operated in school districts in 2000, but that number expanded to 12 by 2010 (EdChoice, 2021). In 2000, Betsy DeVos, a longtime voucher proponent (Kronholz, 2000), put $3 million behind a pro-voucher ballot referendum that voters in Michigan soundly rejected. DeVos later became the U.S. secretary of education in 2017. Although she was unable to bring about federal vouchers during her tenure, her presence atop the education bureaucracy (and deep-pocketed philanthropic network) fueled several voucher victories in Republican-led states (Klein, 2020). In the 2020-21 school year, 22 states added or expanded voucher programs, reaching 29 total programs in 2021 (EdChoice, 2021).

Although federal law has limited the extent to which vouchers can be used for religious schools, in 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, eased some of these restrictions (Kim, 2020). And in 2022, Carson v. Makin followed the Espinoza decision to allow state money to go directly to private religious schools (Kim, 2022). These cases further eroded the separation of church and state and expanded families’ abilities to use public funds for religious education, moving public money away from public schools and into private ones.

Charters

Charter schools occupy the liminal space between Labaree’s social mobility and social efficiency goals. They often, although not always, have different governance structures from traditional public schools while still being part of the public school system. As such, they enable families to choose a school that meets their individual mobility goals while enabling the state to prepare future workers in potentially more efficient and innovative ways. Operating under a charter designed by parents, educators, community groups, or private organizations, many of these schools are free from certain government requirements that might stifle the educational innovation charters hope to encourage. A growing number of charter schools are run by charter management organizations (CMOs); nonprofit organizations that operate like districts, such as KIPP and Green Dot Schools; or for-profit educational management organizations (EMOs), such as Edison Learning (Berends, 2015).

Charters are the fastest-growing area of school choice, exploding in the last two decades. From the 2000-01 school year to the 2018-19 school year, the number of charter schools quadrupled to more than 7,500 schools nationally, and a growing percentage of charters are governed by CMOs and EMOs (Berends, 2021). Even as charters expand, research suggests charter schools’ success is mixed, at best (Berends, 2015). Much like traditional public schools, some charters are first-rate, and many others are spectacular failures. Regardless of whether charters “work,” it is clear that charters result in diminished budgets for traditional public schools (Apple & Pedroni, 2005), and their growth continues to sideline the idea of schools as public goods (Labaree, 2018).

Learning pods

A third example of choice is a pandemic creation: learning pods. As families across the country grew weary of remote learning, many teamed up to form clusters of consistent students (to minimize health risks) who received in-person instruction in their homes. Families drew from their wallets or, in some cases, their community networks to develop these on-the-fly at-home schools. Some low-income families used GoFundMe pages, mutual aid, scholarship programs, and community collaboratives for funding (Goodnough, 2020; Irons, 2021).

These pods eschewed distance learning and state-sponsored education policy. A 2022 study from the Center for Reinventing Public Education found that parents felt more engagement with and more control over their children’s learning and environment in pods (Jochim & Poon, 2022). That control, however, came at a steep price. The report found that half of the participating families earned more than $125,000 a year, and the weekly cost of learning pods was $306 per family (Jochim & Poon, 2022). Additional services popped up to support learning pods, such as Selected for Families and Schoolhouse Inc., which offered high-priced options so that interested families can “have access to the same teachers leading K-12 schools hire” (Moyer, 2020). In no time at all, the language of competition and the allure of choice infiltrated this new educational space.

Although it is easy to dismiss learning pods as an emergency solution during a public health crisis, early data suggests that they have not vanished despite the national return of full-time in-person learning. Some families have continued to stay in their more intimate and exclusive pods. A June 2022 poll from EdChoice found a four point increase in interest in learning pods, up from the previous month, for families with school-age children. Some parents are willing to pay upwards of $373 per child per month. The poll also found that Black parents and parents living in an urban setting were the second most likely group (after private school parents) to show interest in learning pods.

Public schools’ role as a public good to support access and equality exists in tension with public schools’ growing role as a private commodity.

Importantly, some Black families, in particular, have embraced learning pods as a long-term option. Given the history of racialized schooling that has disproportionately harmed Black youth, some parents laud pods because they allow students to be educated in a liberatory space by a trusted adult (Jacobson, 2022). Chris Stewart, CEO of the nonprofit Brightbeam, described learning pods as “a safe harbor” for some Black students and families (Jacobson, 2022).

Choice and the collective

The increasing “market share” of vouchers, charters, and learning pods in the urban schooling ecology produces severe consequences. The pursuit of choice erodes public education, creating more pathways out of the public school system, and consequently, leading to the under-enrollment of public schools.

The United States has been here before. Carl Kaestle’s Pillars of the Republic (1983) chronicles the “patchwork” of schooling approaches in the early decades of the 19th century. Each schooling structure was geared to a specific subset of children, and no singular type of education was provided for the collective (Kaestle, 1983). Within such a patchwork approach, any individual schooling option can produce positive outcomes, but as a collective they limit the ability of the public sector to serve its entire public. Educational researchers Sarah Reckhow and Jeff Snyder (2014) coined the phrase “jurisdictional challengers” (p. 186) to explain this phenomenon. Different options generate more competition for students and, ultimately, move kids (and money) out of the public system and into a growing number of alternative choices (Reckhow & Snyder, 2014).

A recent Massachusetts-based empirical study proves that point. Public school enrollment in Massachusetts had been falling pre-pandemic (a nod toward the long-standing project of privatization), and in the first year of the pandemic, enrollment fell by 3.9% (Dee & Murphy, 2021). At the same time, charter districts in Massachusetts increased enrollment by 2.7%, with the greatest growth in the areas of the highest concentration of poverty. Growing reliance on and belief in choice separates families from the collective, undermining schools’ role in promoting democratic equality.

Inequality and exodus

Schools are often imagined as places of democratic possibility (Freire, 1970; Giroux, 2001; Labaree, 1997). John Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education (1916) that schools were protectors of American democracy and “a way of life” that required universal participation. Although this narrative is appealing, current political and social forces have generated ever-increasing mistrust in the public sector, especially in urban schools. Many people associate school choice with upper- and middle-class white parents fleeing public schools, but policies and trends in urban communities are exacerbating mistrust in public schools among families of color and low-income families, and these experiences could contribute to enrollment declines.

Funding cuts

Public school funding is primarily a local responsibility. School districts rely heavily on state and local resources for money, which means districts in high-poverty areas, which serve larger communities of color, receive less funding per student than districts in more affluent areas (Allegretto, García, & Weiss, 2022). The result is that public schools in urban America are chronically underfunded and lack the money to meet students’ and communities’ needs. And, over the last 50 years, those needs have skyrocketed because of federal policy.

During the 1970s and 1980s (coinciding with the rise of school choice), urban educational spaces became increasingly under-resourced, under-supported, and undermined (Lipman, 2020). Scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2008) describes the “organized abandonment” through which Black communities, especially, were deserted and reorganized to meet the needs of capitalists and the state (p. 31). This financial disinvestment left families vulnerable, and governmental neglect of their desires fed their lack of trust in government.

This distrust in the government may also be represented in the way young people are no longer showing up in public school classrooms. An analysis of 70,000 public schools across 33 states found that the recent drop in kindergarten enrollment in low-income areas was 28% higher than in the rest of the country as families refrained from sending their kids to begin their public education remotely (Goldstein & Parlapiano, 2021). As much of urban America has entered its second year of full-time in-person learning, however, current data indicates that an enrollment snapback to pre-pandemic levels has not occurred (Dee, 2022). While startling, it also shouldn’t be that surprising considering the history of disinvestment in low-income and city neighborhoods that primarily serve low-income Black and Latinx students (Boschma & Brownstein, 2016), and the resulting mistrust in those public schools.

Policing

The reduction in funding to cities coincided with “tough-on-crime” policies as more school resource officers and security staff were placed into educational settings. During the tough-on-crime era, youth of color were seen as threats to society and themselves, and police were seen as a solution to this perceived danger they might cause. In 1994, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services was established, and “by 1997, 22% of schools in the United States reported law enforcement presence, in contrast to only one percent of schools that reported law enforcement presence in the 1970s” (Holloway, 2021, p. 11). Today, police are more likely to be concentrated in schools with greater Black, brown, and Native student enrollment (Dwyer, 2020). They bring with them tools and methods used in jails and prisons (Meiners, 2011). Urban schools, in effect, have started to mimic the carceral (i.e., prison) state (Cohen, 2017).

Any individual schooling option can produce positive outcomes, but as a collective they limit the ability of the public sector to serve its entire public.

Overpolicing and criminalization of Black and brown youth have replaced federal investments in the social safety net. Recent empirical literature shows that Black students are disproportionately handed expulsions and out-of-school suspensions, with Black girls facing out-of-school suspensions six times more than their white counterparts (Gomez, 2021; Loveless, 2017). The ubiquity of school police and punitive policies funnel young people, particularly young Black boys and girls, from their public school classroom to the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Despite long-term declines in youth incarceration, Black youth remain more than four times as likely to be detained or committed in juvenile facilities as their white peers (Rovner, 2021). The carceral state within schools provides yet another data point to convince families to look for schooling alternatives outside the traditional public school system.

Gentrification

Poverty and policing are not the only structural issues sparking an urban public school exodus. In cities across the country, policy makers celebrate “urban renewal,” “urban development,” and “revitalization” projects that accelerate racialized gentrification. To attract businesses and young affluent professionals, “cities become even more hostile to the poor” (Bogotch et al., 2015, p. 328). The resulting rise in rents push public school students out of the urban core and into exurbs. For example, Brockton, Massachusetts, an exurban community just 20 miles from Boston, was historically a stronghold for white immigrants, and now it is a majority-Black community. As Black residents increased, white residents left, flipping long-standing demographic patterns (Berke, 2020). Enrollment declines in urban schools, therefore, shouldn’t be a surprise. They are a result of deliberate government policy. Students cannot attend city schools if they no longer live in the city.

Boston, the site of my dissertation proposal, demonstrates this cycle. Recently, the executive director of the education nonprofit I study told me she wanted to expand her program’s reach to outside of the city. The organization is dedicated to supporting the development of elementary-age girls through mentorship and self-empowerment. When I asked why she wanted to extend the home base of her organization, she shared:

Have you seen the 20% decline in student enrollment in Boston Public Schools? Do you realize this is historically the smallest group of young people enrolled in the Boston Public Schools? Do you realize that Lawrence, Lynn, and all those other areas, those surrounding cities, are where the resources are actually needed [because of growing enrollments]?

The out-migration of thousands of Boston’s Black residents has two causes. First, many Black Bostonians cannot afford to live in the city they have always called home. Boston, like many major cities, already suffered from a lack of affordable housing and the legacies of redlining, and rents are rapidly rising as white and affluent young people compete for the limited available housing. Second, outer-ring exurbs are more affordable, provide more space, and have already established communities of color because of immigration patterns (Valencia, 2022). A 2022 report from the Boston Schools Fund showed that nearly every neighborhood in Boston saw a decrease in BPS enrollment over the past five year. The trend was particularly steep among Black students, who made up half of the enrollment decline since 2019 (Boston Schools Fund, 2022).

Without a robust government-funded social safety net to support life in urban America, students cannot remain in city schools. Enrollment declines are the logical result. As students leave, school budgets shrink, only deepening the inequities for the young people that remain.

Breeding mistrust

Promoting choice and solving inequality can be seen as sitting at two ends of an American educational spectrum, but it is the relationship of both to a feeling of mistrust that has inflicted the most damage to public school enrollments. The desire for choice derives from mistrust in the public school system, and schools’ inability to solve inequality produces further mistrust in the public system, in general, and urban public education, in particular (see Figure 1).

On the side of choice and school privatization, the thinking goes that education is for social mobility — a private good, consumed and chosen by parents, families, and communities for their own advantage (Labaree, 1997). This erodes any faith in public schools as collective public goods intended to support students and communities. Instead, individuals are in competition with one another to “win.” Consumers shopping for the best model of education may decide the public sector is not effective and pivot to privatized options: vouchers, charters, and pods (among others).

On the side of solving inequality, decades of fiscal policy, an increase in policing, and urban renewal have eroded faith in schools as a place to promote democratic equality. Understandably, therefore, communities have grown increasingly frustrated by the poor performance of their city public schools (Ravitch, 1998). They justifiably blame public education, and, by extension, the public sector, for the lack of social support and persistence of inequality. Over decades, this too contributes to mistrust and the dismissal of the public education system as a solution.

Attempts to gauge public opinion about U.S. schools offer mixed reviews. In the 2022 PDK Poll, the public’s rating of their community’s schools was at its highest in the last five decades of the poll. But public education as a whole received a lower rating than local schools, and parents’ ratings of their own children’s schools were slightly down since 2019 despite parents generally showing more trust of teachers than non-parents (PDK International, 2022). A recent Gallup poll shows a five-decade decline in Americans’ confidence in public schools, occurring alongside a decline in confidence in other public institutions (Blad, 2022). Nearly 50% of self-identified Republicans, for example, proclaimed that they had “very little” or “no” confidence in public schools (Blad, 2022). Similarly, the PDK Poll found that conservatives were less trusting than liberals of teachers; the poll also found that Black respondents were less likely than the population as a whole to give local schools an A or B grade or to express trust in their community’s teachers (PDK International, 2022). The on-the-ground realities of schools and systems remain hyper-local and unique to each community context, but  mistrust in some sectors has been growing for decades and ultimately overlaps with the decline in public school enrollment.

Moving forward

There is no quick fix to the decline in public school enrollment. But the answer to the enrollment crisis is not abandoning education as a public good (Ambrosio, 2013). We must instead embrace public education as a piece of a larger puzzle to support our communities and our democracy.

Policies and trends in urban communities are exacerbating mistrust in public schools among families of color and low-income families, and these experiences could contribute to enrollment declines.

To do this requires a top-down and bottom-up playbook. Federal policy makers and legislators must advocate and vote for social welfare policies that support communities as a whole, understanding that schools cannot be the sole solution for persisting inequality and poverty. Locally, community members must elect representatives to advocate for them fully. They must also tell the truth, loudly and clearly, about the policies that have normalized school privatization and inequality (Mayorga, Aggarwal, & Picower, 2020). Unfortunately, this may be easier said than done as bills move through state legislatures limiting what teachers can say about our history in their classrooms (Meckler & Natanson, 2022).

Ideally, our public schools can become spaces of agency, resistance, and organization, where coalitions come together and demand that basic needs are met in all communities (Ewing, 2019). If we embrace a practical democratic vision where universal participation is welcomed and recognized, all members of a community will be able to see themselves in their school buildings and want to return day in, day out, as students, teachers, parents, and community members.

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This article appears in the February 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 5, pp. 30-37.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Abbie Cohen

ABBIE COHEN is a doctoral candidate in the Urban Schooling division at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Education and Information Studies.