🛝 Older Students Hit Hardest by Pandemic, Families Flee Public Schools

Welcome to Playground Post, a bi-weekly newsletter that keeps education innovators ahead of what's next.

This week's reality check: Federal recovery dollars have expired, but the students who need help most are teenagers who were in elementary school when COVID hit. Meanwhile, wealthy families are voting with their feet, and most districts haven't stopped to ask why.

💎 Data Gem

Only one-third of teachers have access to paid parental leave. That's 14 percentage points lower than other workers. Among teachers who leave the profession, 15% cite family obligations as the reason.

Are Schools Underestimating How Badly the Pandemic Hurt Older Students?

During the pandemic, Lauren Bauer watched older students in a learning pod struggle more than the younger ones.

Parents had higher expectations of them. Kindergartners could play for much of the day. But the older students were supposed to be learning material that would set them up for the rest of their lives.

Now Bauer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, has data to back up what she observed. A recent report from The Hamilton Project found that the older a student was when the pandemic hit, the bigger the performance decline.

Students who were in fourth grade during COVID closures and are now in ninth grade fared worse than students who were in kindergarten and are now in fifth grade.

The pattern held across subjects. 

Math revealed especially deep declines, which researchers speculate could be due to how the subject builds upon previous concepts. Miss a foundational year, and everything after becomes harder.

The recovery efforts largely focused on younger students. And the federal dollars that funded those efforts have now elapsed.

Nationally, results are grim. The most recent NAEP scores showed continued declines in reading and math. Low-performing students are in what Harvard researchers called "free fall." 

These downtrends predate the pandemic, but COVID accelerated them.

But some states have come under fire for lowering proficiency standards to mask the damage. Oklahoma, Alaska, and Wisconsin have been accused of altering assessments in ways that make recovery look better than it is.

It's not working.

"Learning loss is so substantial that even making the tests easier is not doing what it used to," Bauer said.

For education innovators, the data points to an underserved market. Most pandemic recovery tools targeted elementary students. Middle and high schoolers need age-appropriate interventions: high-dosage tutoring designed for adolescents, credit recovery platforms, formative assessment tools that identify gaps without the high stakes, and academic support that doesn't feel remedial. The students who were in fourth grade when COVID hit are now freshmen. They're running out of time.

Wealthy Districts Are Losing Students the Fastest

The richest school districts in America are bleeding students.

Research published in Education Next found that the wealthiest 20% of districts lost 5.7% of their students compared to 2019 levels. 

Everywhere else, the decline was just 1%.

In raw numbers, that slice of affluent communities lost about 150% as many students as the bottom 80% combined.

In Massachusetts, the traditional public schools saw enrollment drop 4.2%, nearly double the projected decline. Private schools, meanwhile, fell just 0.7%, far less than the 16.3% drop that was expected based on years of declining enrollment before COVID.

White and Asian families drove much of the shift. Enrollment for white students fell 3.1% below projections. For Asian students, it dropped 8.1%. Black and Hispanic enrollment, by contrast, actually climbed compared to pre-pandemic trends.

Four-fifths of students who moved to private schools in 2020 stayed there the following year.

"There was evidence that more affluent families were shifting kids away from public schools during COVID because they wanted more in-person instruction," said Brian Jacob, an economist at the University of Michigan. "It may be that schools are going to have to work a lot harder to win back some of the families they lost."

Americans' feelings about public schools are notably cool by historic standards - a Gallup survey found 73% of U.S. adults are dissatisfied with public education, up from 57% in 2001.

Joshua Goodman, an economist at Boston University and one of the study's authors, worries about what this means for public schools' reputation.

"The question that worries me is whether this means that public schools have now cemented a reputation as not being the place where high-achieving students attend," Goodman said. "If you're a family that's looking for a challenging curriculum, and you have a talented student, you're no longer seeing public schools in quite that light."

Martin West, Education Next's editor and a Harvard professor, called it the "exit of quality-conscious families."

For education innovators, the opportunity is twofold.

First, districts that want to compete for these families need differentiation tools: advanced coursework platforms, gifted programming, rigorous curriculum options that signal academic ambition.

Second, the families who left are now customers in the private and homeschool markets. They have resources and high expectations. Products serving these households, from curriculum packages to enrichment programs to credentialing services, are selling to an increasingly mainstream buyer, not a niche one.

Public Schools Shrink While Charter Schools Grow

According to federal data released in December, 49.3 million students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools in fall 2024. That's down 0.3% from the prior year.

Since 2019, the cumulative decline is 2.8%, representing more than 1.3 million students who are no longer in traditional public schools.

The number of operating public schools also fell, from 99,297 to 99,073. 

Charter schools numbers are a bit different - enrollment jumped 2.6% in a single year. Charters now serve 8% of all public school students.

The shifts vary dramatically by location: the District of Columbia saw enrollment grow 2%, Arkansas gained 1.2%. But Louisiana lost 5.9% of its students. Maine dropped 3.5%.

Large urban districts show the same divergence. Philadelphia grew by 1.8%. New York City shrank by 0.9%. Los Angeles Unified lost 2.8%.

Experts point to lower birthrates and school choice competition as contributing factors. The result is a zero-sum fight for students that many districts are losing.

California now has the highest student-teacher ratio in the country at 21.7-to-1. Vermont has the lowest at 10.3-to-1. As enrollment falls unevenly, these gaps will widen.

Shrinking districts need efficiency: tools that help them do more with fewer students and smaller budgets, software that optimizes staffing and facilities, and platforms that make consolidation less painful.

Growing charters and choice-friendly districts need scale: student information systems, curriculum solutions, and operational infrastructure that can expand quickly. The districts in the middle, the ones watching students leave but unsure how to respond, need something else entirely: enrollment marketing, parent engagement platforms, and program differentiation that gives families a reason to stay.

⚡️More Quick Hits

This week in education:

• Federal school choice tax credit sparks 2,100+ public comments — The new $1,700 per-donor credit has 75% parent support if it funds tutoring and after-school programs, but just 40% if limited to private tuition

• Iowa becomes first state to receive federal education block grant — Waiver merges four funding streams and projects $8 million in savings from reduced compliance requirements

• Illinois sets first statewide AI guidance for K-12 schools — Guidelines due July 1, 2026; one of 25 states to issue AI-in-education guidance in the past year

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