No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. - None are so blind as those who choose not to see.

From With Plunging Enrollment, a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools by Shawn Hubler.  The subheading is The pandemic has supercharged the decline in the nation’s public school system in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed.

A striking job by the "journalist" in avoiding the obvious.  

All together, America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020, according to a recently published national survey. State enrollment figures show no sign of a rebound to the previous national levels any time soon.

A broad decline was already underway in the nation’s public school system as rates of birth and immigration have fallen, particularly in cities. But the coronavirus crisis supercharged that drop in ways that experts say will not easily be reversed.

No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off. But experts point to two potential causes: Some parents became so fed up with remote instruction or mask mandates that they started home-schooling their children or sending them to private or parochial schools that largely remained open during the pandemic. And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out.

"No overriding explanation has emerged yet for the widespread drop-off" is a pretty incredible claim.  The problem has never been with Covid, it has always been with government's response to Covid.  From the very beginning, independent voices, parents, and many on the right have been arguing that because children have virtually zero mortality or morbidity risk from Covid, that schools should remain open and unmasked.  Many have also made the argument that mandatory vaccines for children (which for much of this time period were not available) were a bad policy.  Those voices also argued that there would be extensive cognitive and social impacts on children with schools closed or masked and they have been proven correct.  As always, the poor and most socially vulnerable have been the biggest victims of the hubris of the statist experts.

Hubler offers only two explanations - 1) remote instruction and mask mandates, and 2) Job losses, homelessness and school closures.

Parental objection to remote instruction and mask mandates is clearly a valid explanation.  School closures is also a valid explanation though it overlaps with remote instruction.  Job losses and homelessness are an emotive smokescreen not anchored to any material reality of school enrollment declines.  

Hubler does not even mention the parental wrath over instruction in Critical Race Theory and DEI initiatives in many school systems as a possible reason for declining enrollment.  Millions of parents being able to monitor how their children are being taught and what they are being instructed was not likely to end well for the more progressive school districts with the more vocal radical teachers.

She also does not mention the clarity the Covid governmental reactions have provided.  Very early on it was obvious that children were the least at-risk population.  There was no need to close schools or insist on masks nor mandate vaccinations of a lightly tested novel vaccine once it became available.  No need whatsoever.

But teacher unions and politicians were all for closing schools and mandating vaccinations regardless of the empirical evidence and so millions of parents had to shoulder the burden of disrupted jobs AND children at home at the same time even though there was no need for that.

And then they saw what their children were being taught and how they were being taught.

Oddly, Hubler actually has some of the evidence she doesn't want to acknowledge in her article.

In some states where schools eschewed remote instruction — Florida, for instance — enrollment has not only rebounded, but remains robust. An analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, concluded last month that remote instruction was a major driver around the country, with enrollment falling most in districts most likely to have delayed their return to in-person classrooms.

Private schools have also seen some gains in enrollment. Federal head counts have not yet been released, but both the National Association of Independent Schools and the National Catholic Educational Association have reported increases that total about 73,000 K-12 students during the past two years.

So school closures and remote learning are causes of lost enrollment.  Private schools which did not close and in general were more pragmatic about masks and vaccine mandates did better than public schools. States which kept schools open and have more robustly responded against CRT and DEI have also maintained their enrollment.  Hubler does not mention it, but European countries, most of which did not shut their schools, also have also not seen the fall-off in public enrollment nor the explosion in home-schooling and private school attendance.

Hubler also reports that the effects of lost enrollment are most concentrated in deep blue states and deep blue cities.  

Interestingly, in the comment section to the article, even the hard left leaning New York Times readers are not having any of Hubler's nonsense.  I look at the top ten comments and quote them directly.  These are the most popular reader comments as voted by New York Times readers.  Not until comment eleven is there a comment which smacks of right-leaning diagnosis.  All the rest are blue readers.  They offer up:

We have a school district that refuses to downsize its administrative staff to compensate for its shrinking budget.  Oakland has one of the highest administrator to teacher ratios in the state, if not the country. 

Many parents are frustrated with the pursuit of equity above academics.

The district has chosen to lower standards to achieve equity rather than meet kids where they are and bring them to their highest possible level. 

Shutting down schools and instituting 'learning' from home beyond the initial March-May period in 2020 was arguably one of the biggest social disasters related to public learning. 

The teachers unions destroyed the public school system in states led by Democrats. 

Europe never closed its schools for extended periods because there, teachers do believe in the importance of teaching.

The teachers’ union overplayed their hand and the Democratic politicians went along with it. 

Still boggles my mind that NYC teachers were prioritized for vaccinations - during a time when they were scarce and in tremendous demand - yet insisted on continuing remote/hybrid learning. 

And unfortunately, our Democratic leaders wouldn’t stand up to them even for our children’s sake.  

Removing gifted courses and advanced math classes may increase "equity," but it will not help my children succeed in a brutally competitive global economy. 

I'm a teacher.  People keep saying "the pandemic," but lockdowns are what hurt young people the most.  

In the case of schools, teacher unions wanting to keep schools closed.

Clarification:   The Pandemic did not cause this.  The arbitrary school closings caused this. 

But under the social justice warriors led by Bill de Blasio, the merit system was eliminated and the curriculum was dumbed down. Thousands of families - a significant number of them working class Asians, either moved out of the city or enrolled their kids  in private schools.  

As long as the Teachers Unions have a stranglehold of progressive politicians, the schools will continue to decline.

If Hubler were interested in getting at an explanation, she could find it among her own readers.  The progressive left implemented empirically unsupported policies (school closures, remote learning, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, etc.) which gravely impacted parents and children.  Parents are frustrated with school administrations.  They are frustrated that teacher unions have more influence with politicians than do parents.  They are frustrated that ideological fringe positions around CRT and DEI are driving negative consequences to their children's educations.  They are frustrated that there is no accountability in the educational eco-system.

Marry this with similar issues at universities and with the student debt fiasco looming over borrowers and the nation and you have a toxic environment which is entirely created by well intended but utterly destructive left-leaning policies ungrounded in the needs and aspirations of parents and their children.

You don't have to go to right leaning news sources to discover this to be true.  Just listen to the readers of the New York Times.  They will tell you.

As an aside, for all that public school boards don't deserve it, I would be surprised if attendance doesn't bounce back within a couple of years.  Public schools can be a great answer to parental needs.  But those public school boards have to actually care about parents and their children more than they care about a stone cold ideology and public sector unions.