Enrollment Is Down, The Number Of Teachers Is Up, And Money Is Going To Run Out

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The pandemic may be over, but its consequences for the American education system are not. That is the lesson of two recent papers looking at how the pandemic shaped the decisions of students, families, teachers, and administrators.

The first paper, published by the American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus, tracks enrollment trends from the 2019-2020 school year through 2021-2022. The topline findings are staggering. In that time period, enrollment in the U.S. public K-12 system fell by 2.9%, or 1.3 million students.

One of the most important things that Malkus found was that the changes in enrollment did not happen uniformly. Districts that spent more time remote lost more students. Districts that spent more time in person lost fewer. To put it in straightforward terms, Malkus writes, “Across the most-remote districts, enrollment fell by one in 23 students. By contrast, the middle group of districts lost one in 44 students, and the most-in person districts lost an average of one in 87 students across two years.”

But it wasn’t only remote schooling. Masking policies appear to be related to enrollment as well. Districts with longer time periods requiring student masking saw larger declines than districts that masked for part of the pandemic, which in turn saw larger declines than districts that never required masks at all.

Why did all of this happen? Malkus states it directly, “School districts’ widely varying instructional offerings became instrumental forces that shaped parents’ responses. COVID culture was the ultimate driver of instrumental instructional offerings and, thereby, families’ subsequent decisions and, ultimately, district enrollments.”

The second paper, by Melissa Diliberti and Heather Schwartz of the RAND Corporation, looks at the other side of the educational equation: educators. The researchers surveyed a random sample of 291 school district and charter network leaders in the spring of 2022 and asked a battery of questions about their operations and opinions during the pandemic.

There are widespread fears of a teacher shortage. Ninety percent of administrators who responded to the survey stated that they have had to take steps to shore up gaps in their teaching force. These include things like increasing pay, adding additional duties to existing teachers’ workloads, cancelling planning periods, combining classes, and utilizing remote instruction. Seventy-five percent of administrators believe that teacher shortages, and the problems they cause, will continue into the next school year.

But what if the teacher shortage isn’t what everyone says it is? Contra the prevailing narrative that there is an exodus of teachers from the profession that is causing the labor shortage, 77% of districts have increased the number of teachers that they employ to above pre-pandemic levels. As the researchers look at the numbers, they come to an against-the-grain conclusion, “we believe it is districts’ increase in number of staff that they seek to employ rather than an exodus from teaching that is straining the teacher labor market.”

Not surprisingly, schools are worried about the financial costs associated with increasing their teaching staff. Looming just over the horizon is the tightening and then closure of the pandemic-related federal funding spigot. Hiring new staff creates permanent costs that are currently being paid with temporary money. When that money runs out, it is not clear what districts are going to do.

These two papers, taken together, paint a foreboding picture of the next several school years. But it is hard to not come to the conclusion that some of the harm is self-inflicted. Schools’ decisions during the pandemic drove parents’ decisions to disenroll their students. Schools choosing to hire more teachers in the face of declining enrollment squeezes budgets. Schools choosing to use temporary federal relief money like it is always going to be there creates fiscal “cliffs” that everyone sees coming and will continue to see coming and will then watch as schools fall over them.

It has become a cliché at this point to say that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it, but it is not wrong to say that there are a lot more things within our control than outside of it. The same is true for schools. While the pandemic was clearly outside of their control, how they chose to respond to it, and how they continue to respond to it, is within schools’ control. Making decisions that drive families away or create unsustainable financial conditions will only exacerbate the problems that the pandemic caused. Schools and districts can make better ones.

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