Is the U.S. Public School System Collapsing? New ProPublica Report

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well, up next, America’s public schools are facing a crisis. Since the pandemic, enrollment has plummeted with around a million families opting for private schools or homeschooling. The result? Mass closures across the country. And according to our next guest, it’s predominantly impact impacting black and Latino communities. ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss his latest article for the New Yorker, The Death of School 10 and the future of American public education.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Bianna. Alec MacGillis, thanks so much for joining us. Your story focuses on School 10 in Rochester. First, for people who might not have read it, why School 10? Why Rochester?

ALEC MACGILLIS, REPORTER, PROPUBLICA: I wanted to look into this problem that I was hearing about, which is that public school enrollment around the country has plunged since the pandemic, down by about a million students nationwide. And this, of course, causes a challenge for cities that have lots of empty schools or under enrolled schools. And I saw that Rochester, New York was facing an especially stark example of this challenge. A huge drop in enrollment since the pandemic. They’ve lost about 10 percent of their students since 2019, and as a result, we’re having to think about closing a lot of schools and embark on that process. We’re basically already into this process that a lot of other cities around the country are going to be facing. And so, I went to Rochester a couple times to report on what they were doing there and just how wrenching this process was going to be for this city and for other cities around the country as they face this steep drop in public school enrollment.

SREENIVASAN: So, connect those dots for us. I mean, what was it that kind of precipitated the drop in enrollment and how does that affect the budget for the school closure?

MACGILLIS: It’s pretty straightforward. I mean, we closed the schools for a really long time in lots of cities, lots of districts around this country, and many cities schools stayed closed for in-person learning for a year and a half, all the way until September of ’21. And so, you just had a lot of families that chose to leave the public schools during that period. They left for private schools, parochial schools, many of which had stayed open for most of the pandemic. They left for homeschooling. And then, even after schools reopened, many of these districts, when families — when some families came back, when some kids came back, they found that things were so unruly. A lot of schools were really wrestling with very kind of just kind of crazy behaviors in classrooms, kids coming back after being away for so long, being kind of unsocialized. So, a lot of families made the decision at that point that they are going to move their kids out of the public schools. And so, we’ve had this really unprecedented drop nationwide, about 1 million kids off of the public school rolls. And that very naturally leads many cities with more space, more staff, more buildings than they need, and they’re now then having to consider this really, really difficult upheaval that’s involved in closing schools in certain neighborhoods.

SREENIVASAN: So, if Rochester is not alone, if this is part of a national trend of public school enrollment decline, does that mean that we are likely to see in other cities what is happening in Rochester, this kind of belt tightening where if you’ve got this building costs and if you’ve got the teacher costs, but you don’t have the student sort of checks that come in with them, you’re going to have to do this?

MACGILLIS: Absolutely. And my article mentioned some other cities that are also embarking on this, and it’s actually not just cities that we think of as being very heavily sort of disadvantaged cities like Rochester, New York, even sort of wealthier cities are going through this because, really, you saw wherever school stayed closed for a very long time, you saw — you’re seeing this challenge being especially acute. Seattle is facing the closure of many of its elementary schools. Ann Arbor, Michigan, a quite wealthy city, is facing a huge budget deficit as a result of having lost about a thousand students there. Columbus, Ohio is looking to close a lot of schools. Santa Clara, California and Silicon Valley, they are — they faced a huge drop in enrollment. This is happening in lots of places, but especially in the sort of blue cities and in counties that had their schools closed, especially long during the pandemic.

SREENIVASAN: OK. So, if the schools are having to be closed. Is there a pattern about what type of schools get closed more often or what the student population is of these schools that are most impacted?

MACGILLIS: Yes. Unfortunately, there is. To the extent that the closures were especially long in many cities, many heavily black and brown and low-income city, low-income districts, and it’s those districts that are now having to close schools, you’re seeing — because of this enrollment decline, you’re seeing a disproportionate effect in those communities. And then on top of that, there’s research that is showing, even in prior years, when districts set out to close schools because of under enrollment, that seems to fall disproportionately heavily on black and brown majority schools, even beyond what one would expect from the enrollment numbers and the school performance numbers. It just seems to, unfortunately, kind of cut that way. There seems to be a bias, really, in the way that districts end up closing schools. And the research also shows, unfortunately, that kids whose schools have been closed, to have to move to other schools, that that has a consequence, a lasting consequence on their academic performance. That doesn’t mean it’s a mistake to close the schools. Many cases, it’s unavoidable. If your numbers get so low, it’s really hard to justify keeping schools open. But it does have a lasting consequence on the kids whose schools have been closed.

SREENIVASAN: You take the reader through this story with the help of a couple of characters. One is a mom who just sounds amazing, Janice Kapoor (ph). Tell us a little bit about her.

MACGILLIS: Yes, I decided to focus on Janice (ph) because she was just especially committed to trying to keep her school open. It’s a school called School 10. It’s in a really quite lovely, sort of, working class, middle class, majority black neighborhood in Southwest Rochester. The school’s been around for a long time. It’s a beautiful old school, built way back in 1916. And the community feels very attached to it. And it’s just a very considered — seemed to be a very warm, welcoming kind of school. It has had challenges with test scores like many schools in Rochester, but it’s really quite a beloved school. And so, when it ended up on the list to be closed, there was a real uproar. And Janice (ph), who’s on the PTA there, leads the PTA there, became very engaged in trying to save the school. And it was all the more painful in a sense, because the school was not — the building was not going to be closed, School 10 was going to be shut down, and all the kids there were going to be dispersed. But the building was still going to be used for a public Montessori program that had somewhat different demographics than School 10. And so, it was very painful, and Janice (ph) was engaged for months and trying to keep the school open and then was not able to. And it’s just been — she was very eloquent in talking about just how wrenching this kind of process is for families like hers.

SREENIVASAN: You know, what’s interesting is that even if this school that you’re writing about didn’t kind of measure up on test scores or whatever it is that the kind of different thresholds were, it seems that there was a sense of community here, that people still — that a school did bring these families together.

MACGILLIS: Yes, it really was. It was so clear. I spent the last couple of days of the school year there in late June and got to see various end of year ceremonies that they were holding, and it was so poignant and really affecting to see just how strongly students, kids and their families were reacting to the end of this particular school. They had a big ceremony in the gym auditorium where they were — where the principal was calling up every single educator in school, every teacher, every aid, every staffer by name. And you could see the school — the kids just, you know, shrieking with joy and gratitude for their teachers. You could sort of tell, of course, which ones were the most beloved by the decibel of the shrieks.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

MACGILLIS: You know, it was just a reminder that even a school like this that had, by some metrics, subpar scores was still a beloved place and was an important — very important institution in this community. And that was now going to be lost, just like — just as it’s going to be lost in so many other places around the country that are going to be having to close doors.

SREENIVASAN: I also wanted to highlight the — I think the parent’s name was Chrissy Miller (ph), who is a parent of a special needs child. What happens to kids like hers?

MACGILLIS: Yes, this is this — you know, especially wrenching aspect to this. You have cities like Rochester that have, over the years, as their enrollment has declined, even before the pandemic, enrollment was declining in Rochester, though not the same speed as we’ve seen recently. And in this district, you see a lot of families leaving for the suburbs, families leaving for charter schools. And you — and the district — the kids that remain in the district are very disproportionately have special needs designations. And so, you just have a very high special needs population. And for these kids, these closures were especially painful, difficult because they’re so used to their — their routines are so important to them, the stability, the reliability of their — both their educators and their fellow classmates means so much to them. And so, it was — there was this real plea coming up in those parents in Rochester as much as possible keep the kids and their educators together. As they are — as the school or many that were going was being shut down, and it was just very hard for the district to actually do that when it came time to make assignments. So, in fact, I think a lot of those parents are just going to leave for homeschooling or maybe move elsewhere. And that’s simply going to further exacerbate the falling enrollment in a city like Rochester.

SREENIVASAN: You write about a program that Rochester has, what, the Urban Suburban Program? Is that unique? I mean, and is that contributing to almost kind of urban flight?

MACGILLIS: Rochester has — years ago, they set up this program that was intended to kind of increase movement between the suburbs and the city. So, it’s easier to kind of move across lines. Over years — over the years, not surprisingly, most of the movement has gone to the suburbs where urban — kids in the city can apply to go to suburban schools and suburban schools can kind of pick and choose who they want to take, and that has had veritable effects of kind of pulling some of the most engaged families out of the city schools. There are similar programs in some other cities. And so, you’ve had these dynamics that are going on for some time now that have made things tough for urban schools. The fact is that now the pandemic closures and the consequences of that enrollment have just kind of just wildly exacerbated this pre-existing trend. And it gets to the point in some cities where you really start to wonder, is this institution going to survive? Rochester now well more — fewer than half of kids born in Rochester are expected to be attending the district schools. And you just wonder at what point does the system get so small that it’s hard to almost sustain itself?

SREENIVASAN: There’s a study out by a group called Learning Counsel that predicted public education is set to lose 16 million enrollments by 2030. I mean, that’s just six years away. And it says, by that time, public schooling is predicted to be at or just above 50 percent of the market. Where are the growth rates here? Is it automatically going from public school to private school, or how much is homeschooling increasing?

MACGILLIS: It’s really both of those. So, you have — you’ve got a huge boom in homeschooling since the start of the pandemic. And the concern there, of course, is that in so many states, it’s very, very unregulated. And so, for some — in some families homeschooling can be a very serious, substantive thing where the family really commits itself and it makes — they decide that makes sense for their children. You know, other cases, unfortunately, homeschooling can really look not all that much different than truancy, where there’s just not a lot going on in that home. And we have very little way of knowing in many states what’s actually happening. Private schools are also seeing a big boom in many states, partly because of this massive expansion in private school vouchers that we’re seeing in many — mostly red and purple states, where vouchers have now become essentially universal, used to be that they were targeted only toward lower income kids and disadvantaged school districts. Now, they’re available in about a dozen states. They’re available to any family, regardless of income, regardless of where they are in the state.

SREENIVASAN: How much does politics play into all of this? I mean, look, we’re having this conversation and a heated election cycle. You know, even though the former president has kind of distanced himself from Project 2025. I mean, one of the plans that the Heritage Foundation laid out was really an evisceration of the Department of Education, which has been a goal for a lot of conservatives for a long time. I mean, that said, most of the funding for schools comes at the state and local level, right?

MACGILLIS: You know, some of the Heritage Foundation plans, the Project 2025 plans, for education could have some real impact. There’s some — there’s plenty of funding that comes from the feds to schools, especially money that’s intended for lower income schools. But most of the education funding and policy setting in this country happens at the state and local level. That’s why you’re seeing what you’re seeing around the country now, where you have the enrollment drops, especially steep in states that kept their schools closed a long time. Meanwhile, you’ve got the voucher money flowing in states that haven expanded those programs. It really is — that’s really where the real action is at the state and local level. And this enrollment decline, you know, to be clear, is happening most of all in the blue states that kept schools closed for so long. It’s — that’s what’s happening here with this particular dynamic. It’s not really something that’s — ironically, it’s not being driven by the conservative think tanks who have been hoping to undermine public schools for years, it really, in some sense, happened at the volition of the blue states and cities themselves.

SREENIVASAN: So, how do you had — you know, you’ve talked to a lot of these parents. Is there a way to stop this kind of the spiral?

MACGILLIS: Absolutely. This is the kind of the spiral, the tipping point that this article is warning about happening in cities like this and many others around the country. And I think to stop that, it’s really true to arrest that cycle, it’s going to take a real recognition by people who believe in public schools, who believe they’re important institution and foundational institution in our country to recognize the extent of the crisis right now and to recognize what happened coming out of the pandemic and to be honest about that and to really somehow just confront of it directly and try to at least slow or even possibly reverse some of these trends, because there really is the chance of that kind of a spiral.

SREENIVASAN: I wonder how much of this is also an issue of public perception. I mean, there was a study out by Pew that essentially showed just over half of people don’t have as much faith in the institution of K- 12 education. And it’s more on the Republican side than it is on the Democratic side. But how do you kind of rebuild that trust?

MACGILLIS: It’s really difficult and it’s — and it is — you know, it’s something that I spoke about this with Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, back in September of 2020 when I was reporting on the school closures, and when it was becoming clear that the schools were not going to be reopening that fall in many districts around the country, especially in heavily Democratic areas, and I just put the question to her, you know, are you worried, as someone who cares a lot about the public schools, as someone who is — all your, you know, your — the educators for your union, their jobs depend on this institution, are you worried that a lot of families are not going to come back and they are also going to lose support from taxpayers after these extended closures? And she expressed confidence that would not happen, that it was just so clear that public schools are such an important part of our country, of our communities, that they would inevitably survive this hiatus. And I think what we’re seeing now is that that may have proved over optimistic.

SREENIVASAN: Senior reporter for ProPublica, Alec MacGillis, thanks so much for joining us.

MACGILLIS: Thank you.