Survey of Attendance Practices
Category: Student Well-Being
Sustained enrollment losses and other post-pandemic factors have placed budgetary pressures on many school districts and motivated difficult discussions about both closing under enrolled schools and staffing reductions. Using the most currently available national data, this brief provides descriptive evidence on trends in the number of operating schools and their teacher staffing and discusses their policy implications. We find that, in the post-pandemic period when public-school enrollment fell by over 1 million students, the number of operating schools is effectively unchanged while the number of teachers increased. This combination implies average enrollment per school and pupil-teacher ratios declined. One in four public schools currently has enrollment at least 15 percent below its pre-pandemic baseline. Over the same period, pupil teacher ratios fell by 4 percent. Where closures did occur, they were more common among schools in lower-income neighborhoods, those serving higher concentrations of Black students, and charter schools. These results indicate that how school districts adapt to their post-pandemic fiscal reality remains an unresolved and important education-policy challenge.
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/60a8-kk19
