Nationwide, public-school enrollment fell by more than 1.4 million students to 49.4 million between fall 2019 and fall 2020—a decline of roughly 3%, according to data from the U.S. Education Department. The following school year, enrollment failed to return to prepandemic levels and remained roughly flat.

In those three years, enrollment fell in roughly 85 of the nation’s largest 100 public-school districts for which data was available, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Fort Worth, Texas, all saw school-system enrollment drops of around 10%, the analysis found. …

Charter-school enrollment rose more than 7% from the 2019-20 school year to the 2020-21 school year, and then fell slightly in the 2021-22 school year to about 3.7 million students, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

[This is as close to market dynamics as parents can achieve in the near-monopoly on education by the government. If Republicans really focused on school choice, they’d win in landslides. — Ed]