The Flight from Public K-12 Schools

Concrete Evidence (November 10, 2025)

Courtesy Harrison Keely/Wikimedia Commons.

Schools at all levels are facing an enrollment problem. In higher education, the large Millennial generation—a demographic echo of their Baby Boomer parents—has given way to the smaller and less college-obsessed Gen Z. Many schools, especially lower-quality ones, have had trouble filling seats as a result.

Meanwhile, births have been in decline for almost 20 years. The effects of this decline have been working their way through the K-12 system, starting with smaller batches of kindergarteners. To make matters worse, the 2020 pandemic pushed many families to rethink public K-12 schools in particular, at least if they had other options.

A new paper in Economics of Education Review provides a deep dive into K-12 enrollment in Massachusetts, capturing the scale of the decline. It pairs nicely with an earlier report on nationwide trends from the Brookings Institution.

As Brookings points out, the pandemic added a sudden shock to the more gradual slowdown public schools were already experiencing. Between the 2016-7 and 2023-4 school years, the share of kids who attended traditional public schools fell from about 85 percent to below 80 percent. Some kids shifted to alternatives like charters. Many others are missing from federal enrollment data and might not be in school at all.

“Projections to 2050 suggest that, even if families eventually return to pre-pandemic habits, overall population decline alone will trim public-school rolls by about 2.2 million students,” the Brookings researchers wrote. “If, however, parents keep choosing alternatives at the pace observed since 2020, traditional public schools could lose as many as 8.5 million students, shrinking from 43.06 million in 2023-24 to as few as 34.57 million by mid-century.”

The Massachusetts study gives a more local, but also more fine-grained, look at the problem.

Enrollment in the Bay State’s local public schools fell about 2 percent between 2014 and 2019. Another 2 percent fall by 2024 would have simply continued the trend. But the actual decrease was about twice that, thanks to an abrupt downward lurch in enrollment in 2020.

At the same time, charter schools saw their previous enrollment growth level off—implying they were losers rather than winners, which differs a bit from the national picture. (The authors concede, however, that “[s]ome of this may have to do with charter expansion being restricted by a Massachusetts law that caps both the number of charter schools statewide and the share of each district’s funds that can flow to charters.”) Meanwhile, private schools ended their prior decline in enrollment, and home schools saw significant growth.

Relative to a world where pre-pandemic trends continued, public schools lost 2 percent of their enrollment (about 16,500 kids) and charter schools lost 19 percent (about 9,000), while private schools gained 16 percent percent (11,000) and home schooling rose 50 percent (4,000). The flight from public schools was concentrated among white and Asian students and higher-income districts. Interestingly, the losses are also heavily concentrated in the middle-school years, as opposed to elementary or high school.

Of course, the decision to leave the public-school system is partly a function of being able to afford and access other options—and even more families might leave if their menu of choices improved. As the authors summarize public opinion, families “have lower satisfaction with public schools even years after school closures ended.”

A dwindling population of children already threatened to upend American education. The pandemic has acted as an accelerant.

From the Manhattan Institute

• Daniel Di Martino proposes reforms to the “public charge” rule, which restricts the immigration of those likely to rely on public benefits.

Other Papers of Note

• When studying bias and disparities in criminal justice, it can be difficult to make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. This study addresses that problem by focusing on first-time offenders facing drunk-driving charges with no aggravating circumstances. In these cases, there’s only one offense at issue, and its severity is measured pretty objectively, via a blood-alcohol test. Female, white, and higher-income defendants tend to receive lighter punishment, though this may in part reflect differences in how defendants approach their cases. (“For a person with limited financial means or job flexibility,” the authors note, “a short jail sentence may be preferable to a prolonged and costly period of probation.”) Interestingly, these gaps were biggest in the most lenient courtrooms—for example, stricter courts hardly ever dismiss these cases for anyone, so there aren’t big demographic gaps in dismissal rates there.

• Did the opioid epidemic push affected areas toward the Republicans?

• Pew explores the history of America’s racial-classification system and measures how people feel about it. Interestingly, only 46 percent of Americans think the federal government should even ask about race in surveys, though another 21 percent are unsure.

• Gambling seems worse for crime than other types of tourism.

• “Financial misconduct is often a team activity,” and remote work might reduce it.

• “[R]estricting access to temporary foreign labor modestly improves wage outcomes for low-wage Canadians.”

• When students struggle academically, is it because they’re unmotivated, or because they have trouble translating study time into skill improvements?

• If you’re worried about “state capacity,” focus on, well, states—which attract less political attention than the federal government and have limited ability to borrow, and thus often struggle to carry out their basic functions competently, David Schleicher and Nicholas Bagley argue in the Boston College Law Review.

• The Tax Foundation breaks down the impact of the new tax bill’s special treatment of seniors.

• Everyone argues about whether minimum-wage hikes cause unemployment, but employers can respond on other margins as well when they have to pay workers more. A new working paper says minimum-wage hikes affect “schedule unpredictability,” in which businesses pass the “risk of slow business days onto workers through the channel of unpredictable scheduling.”

• Does diversity drive innovation?

• “I find no evidence for a sudden jump in mortality risk at retirement. By contrast, I find that each additional year of retirement duration increases mortality risk by 0.9 percentage points, suggesting growing inequalities in mortality risk between retirees and counterfactual nonretirees.”

Have a great week, all.