Nearly 152,000 California children are not attending any type of formal school, a new analysis of pandemic enrollment data found.
Some of the drop is explained by students skipping kindergarten, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom sanctioned in September. But huge numbers of these children are likely attending unsanctioned homeschool programs or dropping out of school altogether.
“What we’re wondering is whether families don’t feel comfortable right now trusting schools with their children,” said Natalie Wheatfall-Lum, a policy director at the Education Trust - West. “These are things that began before the pandemic but were exacerbated by the pandemic.”
Looking at the three school years between the fall of 2019 and the spring of 2022, the Associated Press and Stanford University’s Big Local News project found that California’s public school enrollment went down by 270,928 students, but only a fraction of those kids — 23,598 — switched to private school or were registered as homeschool students. The population of school-age kids declined by 95,751 in the same period.
That leaves 151,579 kids unaccounted for.
Low-quality education and racism
The AP’s analysis showed that across 21 states and Washington, D.C., 230,000 children had disappeared from public school populations and apparently did not enroll anywhere else.
The majority of those children are in California. A representative from the California Department of Education did not grant an interview after a request about the “missing” students.
Maria Clayton,the department’s director of communications, said in a statement: “California is doing more than any other state to get kids back into the classroom and mitigate any learning loss that occurred due to the pandemic — everything from universal transitional kindergarten to (universal) free school meals to mental health funding.”
Clayton pointed out that some of the children may have moved to other states which did not report them in their data. She also said that homeschool and private school numbers are essentially self-reported in California, although that would still leave those children unaccounted for at the state level.
Adonai Mack, who leads education advocacy at Children Now, said that families may have valid reasons for keeping their kids out of public schools.
Many schools in California are understaffed for the number of students, and EdSource reported that 17% of classes in the 2020-2021 school year were led by California teachers who did not have the proper training.
Furthermore, schools can be outright hostile to children of color, he said.
“I mean,” Mack said, “let’s not act like there’s not racism in our schools.”
Broadly speaking, California faculty members do not look like the students they’re teaching. The Education Trust found that while nearly 80% of kids attending public school in California are students of color, less than 40% of teachers are people of color.
Certain marginalized communities have felt disconnected from their local public schools for years, Wheatfall-Lum said. The COVID shutdowns and hybrid learning strains, she said, “just exacerbated that feeling of not feeling part of a community at school, not feeling like a partner in their students’ learning.”
And students of color and students from low-income families, Wheatfall-Lum said, “are the ones that have been hardest hit and most impacted by not having access to quality educational opportunities.”
An additional fringe subset of families who fled schools were likely those who object to public health measures such as vaccines.
“There’s a whole cadre of families that are uninterested in having their children vaccinated for anything,” Mack said, “whether it’s COVID or whooping cough.”
High-quality public education needed
California school districts, Wheatfall-Lum said, need to redouble efforts to track down kids who are missing school.
“One evidence-based practice has been doing home visits with students and families, particularly where there’s been a history of chronic absence, just to understand better what is going on with the students,” she said. Also helpful would be figuring out what kind of support these children need to get them back into a classroom
Districts need to offer a high-quality education and engaging extracurricular activities to make families want to return to public schools, Mack said.
Students, Mack said, need to feel engaged and excited to come to school, whether that be for math class, for orchestra or for the Dungeons & Dragons club.
“Sometimes, school districts and school leaders and educators, they focus so much on … the core academic programs,” Mack said. “Usually, it’s just math and English. And there’s so much a heightened focus on those things,” to the exclusion of programs in the arts and sciences that may be the main draw for a student to attend school in the first place.
CORRECTION: Due to an update to in Colorado’s s enrollment figures, this story has been corrected to change the estimated number of missing schoolkids in all states from 240,000 to 230,000.
This story was originally published February 09, 2023 5:00 AM.
