Liberal responses to pandemic led to loss of population and students

 National Review:

Experts say it’s time for education leaders, especially in big cities such as Los Angeles and New York, to acknowledge that declining enrollment in assigned public schools is here to stay.

New York City public schools are projecting enrollment losses of 30,000 students this fall — a decline Mayor Eric Adams has called a “massive hemorrhaging of students.”

The drop in enrollment is part of a larger trend that accelerated during the pandemic: NYC schools lost 43,000 students in the 2020-21 school year, a 4 percent drop from the year before. The next year, NYC schools lost 21,000 students, a 1.9 percent drop.

More than 120,000 students have left the city’s district schools in the last five years. All but one of the DOE’s community school districts saw declining enrollment last year.

NYC school officials have blamed the decline on the pandemic, population shifts, and stalling birth rates, the New York Post reported. Big cities struggling with astronomical costs of living, such as NYC and L.A., have been hard hit by relocations. California and New York State had the largest number of residents moving out of state from 2020 to 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

However, the declining enrollment in New York City and other public-school districts also reflects a larger shift toward school choice. More parents are opting to enroll their children in charter and private schools or to homeschool. Newer options, like microschools — which typically serve 15 students or fewer — and virtual schools, have also increased in popularity since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Overall enrollment at charter schools in the city increased by 9 percent since the pandemic began and 1.3 percent this year alone, according to data from the New York City Charter School Center. Charter schools in the city have seen six consecutive years of growth and their total enrollment stands at nearly 140,000 students as of this year.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles Unified School District — the nation’s second-largest district, behind NYC — is projected to see a 30 percent drop in enrollment over the next ten years, the Los Angeles Times reported. Enrollment in LA Unified has been slowly falling over the past 21 years, since hitting a high of 737,000 students, which led to overcrowding that negatively impacted the quality of the districts’ schools.

Now, the district has some 430,000 students enrolled in K–12 and expects to see a drop of roughly 3.6 percent per year to roughly 309,000 nine years from now, according to the Los Angeles Times, which reports that experts have listed a number of reasons that factor into declining enrollment, such as families moving to more affordable areas, declining birth rates, and the growth of charter schools.

Jonathan Butcher, the Will Skillman fellow in education at the Heritage Foundation, noted that overall enrollment in assigned public schools is down nationwide; there was a drop of 1.5 million public-school students from spring 2020 to the following school year.
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The blue states' lockdowns led people to flee their schools and in many cases fleeing the states for red states like Texas and Florida.  The teachers' unions were responsible for the closing of schools in blue states in many cases.  Their response to the pandemic was a disaster for those states.

See, also:

DC persists with its irrational college requirement for child care workers

And:

Teachers' union head raked in over $500K while fighting to keep schools closed during pandemic, tax forms show