Why are enrollments in Public Schools continuing to drop?

The decline in the number of children attending public schools is continuing in 2023, according to reports

The trend towards homeschooling or private schools started before COVID dropped, as parents were already becoming concerned about what is taking place in the public schools.

But once COVID hit, the exodus quickly ramped up largely due to the erratic behavior of the public school in response to the pandemic. Parents had no certainty of which way school officials would go, who were seemingly changing their minds on a whim.

According to data released by the National Center for Education, the number of children in the public school system dropped from 50.8 million in the fall of 2019 to 49.4 million in the fall of 2020, a drop of over one million students in the course of a year.

In 1973, there were approximately 13,000 children being homeschooled by American parents. This had grown to five million by 2020 and this trend is continuing. As an example, the number of students being homeschooled in Texas increased five times between August 2020 and August 2021 according to the Texas Homeschool Coalition.

As well, many Christian schools are also reporting significantly higher enrollments since the pandemic ended. The demand is also forcing many churches to consider starting new schools. READ: Christian School Enrollment Booms: 79 Percent See Increase Post-Pandemic, Report Says

Much of this increased interest is due to genuine concerns about what is happening in the public school system.

Below are a just few examples:

May 2021: A frustrated mother from Las Vegas, Kandra Evans, was shut down by school board officials when she read the material, which her daughter was forced to memorize as part of a school project, because it was too explicit. “If you don’t want me to read it to you, what was it like for my 15-year-old daughter to have to memorize pornographic material?”, Kandra asked.
The city of San Francisco finally had to sue its school districts to force them to reopen because of the rising number of suicides among teens. Meanwhile, a teacher’s union leader from Chicago continued to oppose the reopening of schools from her Puerto Rico poolside.
Parents expressed concerns after a video surfaced of a California teacher bragging that he is turning his students into revolutionaries. The teacher had also put up a poster of one of the world’s biggest mass murderers, Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, on the classroom wall.
The superintendent of the Loudoun County School District in Virginia was fired in December 2022, for failing to protect students. This happened after a biological male, who identified as gender-fluid and was wearing a dress, assaulted a female student in the girl’s washroom. The district’s failure and an alleged cover-up of the incident resulted in the perpetrator being transferred to another school where the biological male sexually assaulted another girl.
When concerned parents protested the Loudoun school incident, the father of the first girl who was sexually assaulted, Scott Smith, was arrested during a School Board meeting in JuneJune 2021 for expressing his outrage at what happened.
Parents allege that a Virginia school withheld academic merit awards for exceptional students in the name of equity. The move could potentially affect these students’ ability to receive scholarships.
The National School Boards Association sent a letter to the justice department asking them to investigate these parent protests at school board meetings likening them to domestic terrorists.
An English teacher in Northern California has allegedly announced she will no longer be teaching proper grammar and writing skills because they are racist and apparently so is math according to the Oregon Department of Education.
And while prayer to Jehovah has been all but banned in schools, it doesn’t seem to have applied to Aztec gods.