Now that we’re “turning the corner on COVID” (ahem) and almost all of the public schools are open again, problem solved, right? With all of the kids going back to class, life can continue to return to something resembling normal. The problem with this idea, at least in New York City, is that not all of the children are returning to the classrooms. And it’s not because they’re on quarantine or they can’t afford an N95 facemask. For many, their parents have simply pulled them out of the schools. And we’re not talking about a handful of students in underserved neighborhoods of the city. This report from the Department of Education shows that some of the most popular and successful public schools in Gotham have lost as much as a quarter of their student body in a little more than a year. (NY Post)
Families in some of the city’s top school districts are leaving the Department of Education at an alarming clip, according to state data.
Mayor Eric Adams speculated this week that parents who’ve ditched the city and its public schools are likely to return as soon as Gotham gathers itself.
But that ongoing flight — which is hammering school budgets — is hitting traditionally popular districts especially hard.
Here are a few of the highlights (or lowlights) that point to the true extent of the decline. Manhattan’s District 2 includes some of the swankiest neighborhoods in the city like Greenwich Village and Soho. They’re down 17% from two years ago. They lost 2,500 of 16,400 kids. Brooklyn’s District 15 (in AOC’s home turf) dropped 16%. Enrollment at Chelsea’s PS 11 fell by 170 students, a plunge of 17%. Other examples abound.
Certainly, you can blame some of this downturn on the number of New Yorkers who have simply abandoned the city and aren’t coming back. But the total population losses are nowhere near the drops being seen in school enrollment. There may also be some families who are still so terrified of COVID that they’re afraid to send their kids back. But the obvious reality is that a lot of families are now either sending their children to private schools and religious schools or simply switching to homeschooling.
But why? There’s probably been enough anecdotal evidence showing up in the news over the past couple of years for us to take a stab at the answer. The teachers’ unions have been ruining the schools by keeping them closed for so long. When the schools do manage to open, parents are hearing more and more about the secretive indoctrination going on in the classrooms, with children being cautioned to “not tell mom and dad what you studied today.” And the liberals in charge of the system continue to fight to do away with advanced placement classes and standardized testing, making the college admission process all the more challenging.
Under those conditions, plenty of parents must be wondering what the heck went wrong and how the public schools went so far off track. Alternate options where parents retain more control of (or at least knowledge of) what their children are being taught must be looking pretty appealing about now. And the loss of all of those kids means that less tax revenue is channeled into those schools. Given the circumstances, perhaps that’s for the best.
