Various racial and ethnic subgroups also exhibited radically different behavior. At the beginning of the last school year, enrollment in Massachusetts public schools was much lower for white and especially Asian students (-3.1 percent and -8.1 percent percent, respectively) than was presaged by trends running through the 2010s. Black and Hispanic enrollment, however, actually climbed upward compared with the same projections. Goodman and his co-author, BU doctoral student Abigail Francis, found similar patterns in data collected from around the United States, though those figures run only through 2023.
Those findings offer a suggestive update to those of earlier studies. One, also co-authored by Goodman, showed that white, Asian, and higher-income families in Michigan were the least likely to return to their local public schools in the second year after school closures began. Among them, four-fifths of students who moved to private schools in 2020 stayed there the following year.