What's happening to America's public school students? 

The drop in enrollment, plus chronic absenteeism, should be cause for great concern, or at least curiosity among parents, teachers, administrators, psychologists and many others across our nation.

The reasons for what's going on are complicated — and critical to understand. 

First, there's the COVID piece of it. American public schools lost more than a million students from the fall of 2019 to the fall of 2020, with enrollment falling from 50.8 million to 49.4 million students in that period, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).