Photo by Alena Darmel
Chalkbeat: Until now, it was one of the pandemic’s great mysteries: Where did the missing students go? When classes resumed in fall 2020, several months after COVID struck, enrollment in the nation’s public schools had plummeted by more than a million students. It was the largest single-year decline since World War II. And defying hopes of a rapid rebound, enrollment barely budged the following year. There have been clues about where students went, such as the steep rise in homeschooling, but a full explanation of the public school exodus has been elusive. Now, a new analysis offers a more comprehensive accounting — though one of its most striking findings is that tens of thousands of students remain absent from the available data.