The Student Population is Declining

Marc Porter-Magee is a great follow on Twitter (I know it is X, but I’m going to keep calling it Twitter until I am forced by a Grok AI Commissar to change). Lots of people post rage bait and slop, but Marc consistently tweets interesting and engaging research and journalism. He’s a one-man aggregator.

Earlier this week he tweeted this figure, from a new Bellwether report. It draws from NCES projections of the public school student population to the year 2031.

Only nine states are projected to see their student population grow, and two are projected to grow by less than one percent. Eight states are projected to lose more than ten percent of their student population, with California, Hawaii, and New Mexico projected to lose more than 15 percent. This is a problem.

I know everyone likes to talk about AI and how that is going to be the most transformative aspect of education in the near to medium-term future. If I had to put my money anything, it is the decline in school age children that will be most disruptive to K-12 education. Our schooling systems are not built to deal with falling populations. They can handle growth, they can even handle stagnation (poorly, but they can survive). But decline? It’s going to be miserable.

If you’re curious as to why this is happening, Bellwether states it directly, “The primary factor affecting declining school enrollment is a reduction in the U.S. birth rate, which means fewer children are in communities to begin with.” Interstate migration plays a smaller role, and decreased international immigration could as well, but this is generally a story of births in decline since 2008.

Schools are going to need to close. Teachers and other staff are going to lose their jobs. There will be empty buildings and narrowed options. Handled adroitly, it will be challenging, but in a system that has, for example, staffed up at a rate wildly disproportionate to changing student populations, I think we are in for serious trouble.

There are hard numbers that back this up. The Edunomics lab at Georgetown has created the WANDA tool that allows you to look at any school district in the country and observe enrollment and staffing trends from 2018-19 to 2024-25.

Let’s look at Sacramento City Unified, the district in which the capital of the state projected to lose the second largest percentage of students sits. From 2018-2019 to 2024-25, student enrollment dropped from 42,506 to 37,913, a loss of 4,593 students (11% of the total student population). During that time period the district increased its FTE employee count from 3,772 to 3,810, 38 additional employees (1% of the total number of full-time employees). Looking under the staffing figures, the number of teachers, paraprofessionals, and district administration dropped by 8%,9%, and 39%, respectively. But the number of non-teaching school-based staff like assistant principals, nurses, academic coaches, and specialists grew 51% and the number of transport, food services, custodial, and facilities staff grew 28%.

Sacramento Unified hired more and more adults to serve fewer and fewer students. Something has got to give. Unless districts and states want to dramatically increase taxes, there are going to be some very tough decisions to make.

Like many things in education, the solution is simple but difficult. Schools and districts are going to need to shrink to match their shrinking student population. But how they do that, in a world where they are governed by boards that routinely place adult interests over children’s, is unclear.

I would like to put a marker down. The projections from the figure above have nothing to do with school choice (note the large declines in California, Oregon, and New York, states that aren’t going to see private school choice in the timeframe that these projections cover).

Nevertheless, I expect choice to be blamed for the sorry condition of state and district finances as they wrestle with demographic decline.

We already see localities like Madison, Wisconsin putting the “cost” of vouchers on to citizens’ property tax bills to make sure that vouchers take the blame for people’s dissatisfaction with their tax rate. Notice, they don’t explain that (thank you WANDA) Madison’s schools have lost 7% of their students and only cut staff by 1%, including hiring 17% more paraprofessionals and 13% more non-teaching school-based certificated staff. That has nothing to do with property taxes being too high. It’s those darn vouchers!

Rather than take ownership for their own poor decision making, choice is going to be blamed. Rather than explaining that district numbers are declining due to entirely secular demographic trends, vouchers will be the menace lurking at the door.

Don’t fall for it.

This was originally published to our Substack.