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Years after COVID-related health fears subsided, public school enrollment in Massachusetts remains significantly lower than in 2019, according to research released earlier this year. The sharp declines — matched by simultaneous moves to private schools and homeschooling — were driven overwhelmingly by a flight from the most affluent school districts, which lost many more students than all of the state’s low- and middle-income communities combined.
The article, published in the journal Education Next, draws on state and national data to measure changes in student enrollment over the last half-decade. Both in Massachusetts and around the country, white and Asian parents were far likelier to pull their children out of public schools than Hispanics and African Americans. Kindergarten and middle school enrollment plunged, while elementary schools actually saw a small bump in total students.
Joshua Goodman, an economist at Boston University and one of the study’s authors, said the uncertainty of the COVID era has given way to a new equilibrium for the 2020s: The families of the highest-performing K–12 students, and those with access to greater resources, increasingly disaffiliate from traditional public schools.
“The question that worries me is whether this means that public schools have now cemented a reputation as not being the place where high-achieving students attend,” Goodman said. “If you’re a family that’s looking for a challenging curriculum, and you have a talented student, you’re no longer seeing public schools in quite that light.”
Public School Enrollment Is Declining — But Not Everywhere, or for All Students
The number of pupils filling seats in all Massachusetts schools, public or private, was lower in fall 2024 than five years before. But that erosion, driven in part by broader changes to the state’s demographics, is less striking than the changes going on beneath the surface.
Enrollment at private schools shrank by just 0.7 percent during that period, much less than the 16.3 percent decline that was predicted by years of falling head counts leading up to the pandemic. By contrast, traditional public schools saw a drop of 4.2 percent, nearly double the projected reduction over the first half of the 2020s.
Various racial and ethnic subgroups also exhibited radically different behavior. At the beginning of the last school year, enrollment in Massachusetts public schools was much lower for white and especially Asian students (-3.1 percent and -8.1 percent percent, respectively) than was presaged by trends running through the 2010s. Black and Hispanic enrollment, however, actually climbed upward compared with the same projections. Goodman and his co-author, BU doctoral student Abigail Francis, found similar patterns in data collected from around the United States, though those figures run only through 2023.
Perhaps the most jarring divergence arose along class lines. In the state’s most affluent 20 percent of school districts, as defined by their share of students qualifying for free lunch, K–12 student rolls fell by 5.7 percent; everywhere else, the slide amounted to just 1 percent. In all, that slice of the richest communities lost about 150 percent as many pupils as the bottom 80 percent.
Those findings offer a suggestive update to those of earlier studies. One, also co-authored by Goodman, showed that white, Asian, and higher-income families in Michigan were the least likely to return to their local public schools in the second year after school closures began. Among them, four-fifths of students who moved to private schools in 2020 stayed there the following year.
In a different paper examining student flows in the initial years of the pandemic, University of Michigan economist Brian Jacob found that white families removed their children from public schools at much higher rates in districts that were slow to reopen for in-person instruction. Jacob said in an interview that he was “not surprised” to see that parents who had found private alternatives hadn’t yet switched back.
“There was evidence that more affluent families were shifting kids away from public schools during COVID because they wanted more in-person instruction,” he observed. “It may be that schools are going to have to work a lot harder to win back some of the families they lost.”
Even today, with COVID quarantines and Zoom classrooms long in the past, Americans’ feelings about public schools are notably cool by historic standards. In a Gallup survey released in February, 73 percent of U.S. adults expressed dissatisfaction with the state of public education, up from 57 percent in 2001.
Satisfaction With U.S. Public Education Reaches Record Low in New Gallup Survey
Parents, directly invested in their local schools and regularly exposed to their children’s teachers, are more sanguine about the issue than other respondents. But they have also become more likely to say that K–12 education is headed in the wrong direction than in years past.
Martin West, Education Next’s editor in chief and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said the “exit of quality-conscious families” — particularly those with the means to afford private school tuition — provides a real-time picture of how perspectives of local schools are changing, even in a state with comparatively impressive academic results.
“We have lots of survey data telling us that parents are concerned with public schools,” West said. “This analysis gives us data on families’ revealed preferences, based on the decisions they’re making.”
Over the last few years, news accounts in Greater Boston have reflected building frustration among parents in some of the area’s wealthiest towns, with many departures apparently spurred by new constraints on access to advanced coursework. Brookline and Newton, each boasting some of the highest home values in the state, have reportedly lost sizable portions of their pre-COVID enrollment to nearby private schools. As one Newton teacher recounted in the conservative Free Press, those migrations largely followed the district’s move away from “tracked” math classes.
Goodman, a resident of middle-income Cambridge, said he had seen parents in his own social circle consider independent schools out of impatience with both a lack of rigor and growing behavioral problems in their neighborhood schools.
“That’s the piece of the conversation that’s been missing for me in Massachusetts,” he said. “I haven’t seen school districts grappling with the questions of why they lost all these families, and whether they actually want to do the work to bring them back into schools.”
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