State’s Decline in Births Plays a Role, but Charter Schools and Private Schools Have Some Advantages in Colorado; Protracted School Closures and Curriculum, Policy Clashes with Parents Likely Contributing Factors in Enrollment Dip
Fewer students are attending public schools in Colorado.
The state’s combined public elementary, middle and high school enrollment has dropped by 0.5% from Oct. 2020. The fall of that year was the time of full-blast pandemic shutdowns, which included many schools. Middle school enrollment has dropped by 2.21% from 2020.
The news media and the educational establishment in Colorado are claiming the drop is due to the state’s overall decreased birth rate. They also cite housing costs as a complicating factor for students, the student’s families and teachers. But a deeper dive shows that charter schools and private education are two big competitors in Colorado. The declining birth rate and the real estate market may not be the biggest factors.
In addition, the frequent displays of hostility by leadership in public education toward frustrated families are partially to blame for the exodus. Dissatisfied with unprecedented, protracted closures and increasingly hard-to-justify curriculum choices, parents and guardians are probably just taking their kids elsewhere. But few in the news media or public sector education are talking about it.
Where is the Problem?
If public schools are losing students, that doesn’t mean children aren’t being educated. Education is a legal requirement for every child in every state of the U.S. Nonetheless, this drop concerns teachers, administrators and public education experts.
Concerns about Dropping Public School Enrollment in Colorado:
- Per-pupil funding, the guaranteed portion of state money that goes to schools, depends on enrollment numbers; fewer kids mean less money for a district.
- The “budget stabilization factor,“ an effort to rein in government spending, complicates the efforts of individual school districts to get the funding they want.
- Schools don’t get what they want in terms of funding; they get what the state of Colorado says they need.
- What the state says they need is based on various complex calculations.
- These calculations do include the cost of living–which itself includes housing–in a district.
- The calculations also include the need to retain “qualified personnel”.
According to Tracie Rainey, head of the Colorado School Finance Project, who spoke to the Colorado Sun, the state has an interest in spending more so Colorado can tilt ahead of other states in education. Rainey, also in the Sun, cites Colorado’s state rate of per-pupil funding as below the national average
But if every child is ultimately still getting educated, where is the problem with declining public school enrollment?
Have Lots of Students Left Public Schools for Charter Schools?
Yes, charter school enrollment in Colorado is growing at the same time that public school enrollment is shrinking. This doesn’t prove public-to-charter migration. These are, however, concurrent phenomena.
One segment of various school districts grew during the pandemic: charter schools. From 2019-2020 to 2021-2022 school years, charter schools in Colorado grew by over 8,000 students. It’s not apples to apples since Colorado public schools have almost 1 million pupils. But where their numbers dropped by one-half percent, charter schools grew by 3.9%.
In the fall of 2019, only Washington D.C. and Arizona had a higher percentage of pupil enrollment for charter schools.
Private Education Has Fewer Hurdles in Colorado
Private schools in Colorado have fewer rules than charter schools.
There is no tuition cost for most charter schools though many require students to apply for enrollment. Charter schools work directly with the Colorado Charter School Institute or the local education district. Through performance-based criteria specified in the literal “charter”, or contract, charter schools can avoid certain regulations that are required of public schools.
Almost no private schools are tuition-free. This is the case in Colorado and nationwide. Private schools in Colorado, however, have surprising latitude in their operation. The webpage for private school requirements in Colorado is not long. It is eleven paragraphs, excluding headers.
“Neither the Colorado State Board of Education nor any local board of education has jurisdiction over the internal workings of a nonpublic school since these schools are considered to be small businesses.” (US Department of Education)
Getting the numbers for private school statistics in a single state is hard. But, for the 2022-2023 school year in Colorado, there were 69,991 students in private schools. This is up by 9,000 from 2013, the latest year for which data was readily available. This doesn’t prove a COVID correlation for private school enrollment in the state of Colorado but there is a national trend with some data to that effect, according to former policy analyst Kate Michael. She consulted a recent Gallup Poll and a private school status tracker from the Cato Institute. She also found that the slot-machine school lockdown decisions were a major factor.
Birthrates; the Teacher-Parent Dissociation?
There are fewer students and fewer parents, but more conflict.
Are there fewer Colorado children now than there were 20 years ago? The rate of live births per year has decreased in Colorado from 2005 to 2017. There were 68,922 live births in 2005 and 64,387 in 2017 (with no significant spikes). Current K-12 students were born in those years, inclusive. (Interestingly, it varies by county as well. Weld has grown significantly in terms of birth rate in the 21st century while Boulder, looking at 2000 and 2021 alone, has plummeted by roughly one-third.)
Part of the PTA tension between parents and teachers is the pandemic. Part of that is what happened during it.
The pandemic brought closures, mask mandates for children and the re-engineering of many public schools’ classrooms. With mask mandates and yo-yo-ing closures, tensions between harried parents and harried teachers began to simmer. The pot simmered for two years. In the background, the nation’s politics and culture cranked the heat up. Eventually, the strident politics of the moment seeped into the teachers’ unions, a long-time ally of the American Democratic Party.
As that political angle sharpened, closures continued while data and rationales for them eroded. But the other big conflict started over new curricula in public schools. SEL, social and emotional learning, is not new. But in the last few years, the subjects became more mature, uncomfortably so for traditionalist and culturally moderate families. Other curricular innovations were catalyzed by national events. These innovations had contours suspiciously resembling ideas (and policies) popular with the American Democratic Party.
With grievances for both teams proliferating, parents and teachers began picketing and protesting. Viral videos of PTA shouting matches circled the internet.
One example of the PTA discord from the local front was Douglas County’s conflict in February of last year. When parents and teachers battled over the newly elected school board leadership, teachers staged a sick out.
Policy, curriculum and responsiveness of education leadership mattered to parents. But increasingly, administrators could not get on the same page as many parents. This resulted in an impasse. Along with other factors, the frustration of unheard parents was clearly enough to assume the burden of added tuition costs, time investments in charter school applications, or homeschooling. But these obvious disagreements between parents and administrations are hardly mentioned in any serious way in coverage by news and education media regarding the enrollment drops.
Education for Them
Many leaders who deal with public education have two minds. Those in higher levels of government and those in the public sector who have means will often send their children to private schools.
All the while, they’ll stump hard for teachers’ unions and public schools. And rarely do they say, (please be sure to keep italics) “I’ve got the income to send my kids to private schools, so I do.” If pressed on their double stance, they’ll fall back to something like, (please be sure to keep italics) “Well, it’s whatever works best for that child and their family situation.”
It looks like Colorado parents and pupils think that private and charter schools work best for them. At least right now.
