JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The voices that used to fill the halls of America's public schools are growing fainter. Enrollment in public schools has decreased by about a million students in the U.S. since the start of the pandemic. Some of those kids are homeschooled now, others in private schools, partly because of voucher programs in Republican-leaning states. Alec MacGillis looked into why public school enrollment is declining for ProPublica and The New Yorker, and he joins me now. Alec, welcome.
ALEC MACGILLIS: Thank you.
SUMMERS: I mean, it's just a staggering number - a million fewer students in America's public schools over the course of about four years. Is it the chaos of the pandemic to blame, or was this just the direction that perhaps public education was already headed in here in the United States?
MACGILLIS: No, it really was the pandemic and the extended school closures that we had in so many cities. In some cities, the schools were closed for a full year and a half, and so you just had a lot of families that left the system in that period. Some families felt like their kids just were not getting enough instruction during the Zoom school and so moved them into private schools that were still open. Some families moved to homeschooling in that period for the same reason. Then other parents, you know, when they - when schools reopened, they came back in, and there's a lot of really unruly behavior in the classroom. After kids got back, they were just really kind of unsocialized. So in that period, you also saw a lot of families pulling their kids out into private schooling or homeschooling. So it's absolutely an effect of this hiatus and of some of the decisions that were made. This is one more consequence.
SUMMERS: For the story that you reported, you spent some time in Rochester, N.Y., where the enrollment crisis is particularly dire. One school in particular that you write about, called School 10, has long been beloved by the community, which is mostly Black and Latino. And its students' academic performance seemed to be improving, and yet it was one of nearly a dozen that closed in that school district alone last year. Tell us about that school, some of the reasons behind its closure.
MACGILLIS: So Rochester just saw one of the biggest declines, really, of any city in the country. About a third of their students have left the district in the last 20 years. And that decline increased very sharply during the pandemic. And so they were faced with having to close a whole bunch of schools. And one of the schools they chose to close was School #10, where I spent a lot of time talking with parents. This is a - it's a beautiful school in the middle of a working-class, middle-class Black neighborhood in southwest Rochester. It's actually named after an elderly Black research scientist who's sort of a figure of stature in the community.
But it was put on the list of the 11 schools that were going to close in Rochester. Eleven of the 34 schools in Rochester are going to be closed this past spring. I got to spend the last couple days of the school year at the school back in June, and people were just really, really torn up about the school closing. Even though the school, you know, didn't score well in a lot of tests and didn't have a very good ranking, you just saw in the last day of school how beloved the school was, the shrieks of the students when their teachers were brought up one by one for final farewell on stage.
SUMMERS: I mean, Alec, you don't have to be a parent to know that when a kid goes to school, yes, it's about learning and the academics, but that's not the only thing that schools mean to kids and to their communities. What did you find in your reporting about the impact on these young people and the communities around them, their families, when a school like the ones you wrote about close their doors?
MACGILLIS: So there's a lot of research on this, and the research has found, unfortunately, that children whose schools were closed while they were there often go on to see lower test results, lower graduation rates, even lower rates of college completion and finding a job; that there's a real lasting impact to that upheaval. At the same time, you can certainly understand why districts are choosing to close schools in these situations. The numbers have just fallen so much. It simply doesn't really make sense to keep open schools. The cost of doing so doesn't make sense. It's also true that when you have more students in a given school, there are more resources that can be provided to them, more extracurriculars, more course offerings. So it certainly makes logical sense to do this kind of consolidation. But it does come with a cost. And this cost is now going to be faced by so many districts around the country now that we've seen this huge decline in enrollment.
SUMMERS: I think one of the things that will most stick with me from your piece is that scene you were talking about at the end of the school year with School 10, where it's just so clear how much not just these kids, but the parents and the teachers and administrators really love the community that they built together. And I'm just curious, Alec, have you stayed in touch with any of the folks that you met from School 10 or have you heard at all what those families are doing as the new school year begins now to educate their kids?
MACGILLIS: Definitely. I focus on one family in particular, the family of a - very sincere Liberian refugee family, a woman by the name of Janice Kpor. And her youngest was at School 10, just starting out in kindergarten. She was so excited to have her in the school and really kind of led the fight to keep the school open, and she lost that fight. And so her daughter is now going to another school that's not really as practical for the family. So that might just be one more loss for the city of a very engaged parent.
SUMMERS: That was Alec MacGillis. He looked at declining enrollment in public schools for ProPublica and The New Yorker. Alec, thanks for sharing your reporting.
MACGILLIS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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