Kindergartners Abandoning Public School in Fall 2021, Too [View all]

"We're proud to show the nation what is possible in terms of safely educating our one million students," New York City Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter tweeted Wednesday after meeting with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. Porter may need to refresh her math.

The nation's largest school district announced Thursday that kindergarten applications for fall 2021 were down a whopping 12 percent over last year, after having dropped 9 percent the year before. Though the city expects families to keep trickling in after the filing deadline, it's clear that the pandemic enrollment hit—which this school year cut overall K-12 participation down 4 percent, to 960,000—will not be a one-year phenomenon. Early learners are abandoning public schools, and not just in New York.

We already knew that the 2020–21 year was a wipeout for public school kindergarten enrollment nationwide—down 16 percent, according to an NPR survey of 100 districts last October. Hard numbers are devilishly hard to pin down, varying from state to state (as do kindergarten attendance requirements), but the rough estimate is that about one-third of overall K-12 decline this year (which itself has been estimated at between 2 percent and 5 percent) is attributable to kindergarten alone.

Where have all the 5-year-olds gone? Not Catholic schools, which despite being much more likely to be open five days a week saw their biggest single-year drop (6.4 percent) in a half-century, concentrated most heavily at the pre-K and kindergarten levels. Overall private school numbers, however, appear to be slightly higher.

Read more: https://reason.com/2021/04/09/kindergartners-abandoning-public-school-in-fall-2021-too/