You Might Also Like: It Turns Out

**Kara Miller** (0:00)
Over the last few years, the educational landscape of America has shifted a lot.

**Thomas Dee** (0:07)
So we want to both track, are kids going to private school, are they going to home school, and are they simply going elsewhere? And all three are true, as it turns out.

**Kara Miller** (0:20)
Stanford's Thomas Dee joins me to talk about rigorous classes, paying teachers more, and whether the move away from public schools might be a long-term trend.

**Thomas Dee** (0:30)
It's not just that some public schools fail to meet the expectations of parents during the pandemic. It's not just that some public schools fail to meet parents desire for rich academic experiences for their kids. I think there is also this sense that public schools are failing more generally at being high-powered learning environments.

**Kara Miller** (0:55)
That's all coming right up.
Welcome to It Turns Out. I'm Kara Miller. Just over six years ago, when schools across the country shut down or switched to virtual learning, there was an education earthquake.

**Thomas Dee** (1:21)
We've saw an exodus of over a million students from US public schools, particularly beginning in that first full school year after the onset of the pandemic, fall 2020 And that decline in public school enrollment really accelerated and supercharged the longer-term demographic decline people had been expecting over a longer sweep of history.

**Kara Miller** (1:48)
And the pandemic had lasting effects on where people send their kids to school, according to Thomas Dee, who's a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education. He has been keeping tabs on how families and students have changed their schooling preferences over the last six years.

**Thomas Dee** (2:05)
And one of the things that was surprising to me about this was that I thought it would be a transitory phenomenon. At the time, I thought, well, a lot of schools are growing remote.
Parents are finding other accommodations. Some of them are setting up temporary homeschool arrangements, or maybe temporarily shifting to private school, maybe skipping kindergarten in states where that's allowed. But when we turn to the fall of 2021, I had fully expected those kids would return to public schools.

**Kara Miller** (2:38)
But they didn't. Kids didn't just skip kindergarten or return to school after being in a homeschooling pod.
Instead, their relocation has proved to be a little more permanent.

**Thomas Dee** (2:50)
At a national level, we failed to see a recovery of the public school enrollment loss that occurred in the wake of the pandemic. And that colors the challenges we're dealing with now from a policy perspective.
Now the public school districts no longer have federal pandemic aids supporting them. They are now reckoning, many school districts are reckoning with the fiscal implications of sustained declines in enrollment.

**Kara Miller** (3:21)
Which made me wonder, when you look back at American history, have we ever seen this sort of drawdown of kids in public schools?

**Thomas Dee** (3:30)
Not to my knowledge. I mean, certainly there have been some historic events, but I don't know that we've ever seen such a sudden and substantive shift in public school enrollment.

**Kara Miller** (3:41)
So why, at a time when public school enrollment has declined, have private schooling and homeschooling increased?
One clue comes from a recent paper by two Boston University scholars who scoured Massachusetts' data. And here is a snippet of what they found. Quote, high-income white and Asian students were more likely to leave public schools early in the pandemic and have not returned. In contrast, Black, Hispanic, and lower-income families have largely re-enrolled in public schools returning to pre-pandemic levels. This suggests that the pandemic has substantially shifted the racial-ethnic composition of public schools. And Thomas Dee says, This phenomenon is not unique to Massachusetts.

**Thomas Dee** (4:31)
I think basically what's gone on, what happened during the pandemic is, some parents were just dissatisfied initially with how their local schools were responding.
In particular, a quasi-experimental work I've done with Professor Elizabeth Huffaker at the University of Guarida showed that a substantial amount of the exodus from public schools can be explained by the adoption of remote schooling options. And what effectively happened, and I think this is completely understandable, is the parents, particularly parents of younger children, kindergarten, first, second grade students, simply didn't want to sit their child in front of a computer or a laptop all day. And that was the only thing on offer from their public schools. And so we find very clear, rigorous evidence that those policy choices drove parents away, and in particular, the expectation is it would be parents with the means to go find some other accommodation for their children.

**Kara Miller** (5:37)