LOCALIZE IT: What happened to kids missing from US schools?

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Enrollment in U.S. public schools plummeted during the pandemic, with a loss of over 1.2 million public school students from the 2019-2020 school year to the 2021-2022 school year — 2.5% of the entire the public-school population in grades K-12.

Some of those children left for private school or homeschooling or moved out of state. But for years, no one has known for sure where they went. In many cases, publicly available data gives no indication where kids ended up, or whether they were keeping up their education at all.

An investigation by The Associated Press, Stanford University's Big Local News project and Stanford Professor Thomas Dee sought to find out how many students who left public schools are still unaccounted for. Our analysis found hundreds of thousands of “missing” students, even after taking into consideration changes in the population of school-age children, increases in private school enrollment and a surge in the number of home-schooled children.

It is unclear where these children went. Some may be young students whose parents have decided not to start them in formal school. Some may be taught at home, either formally or informally, and their families haven't registered them as home-schooled. Some might not be learning at all.

California alone showed over 150,000 missing students in the data, and New York had nearly 60,000.

READ AP'S COVERAGE

The pandemic missing: The kids who didn’t go back to school.

THE DATA

The data behind the analysis is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_1FNH3yUjaq4M-AW45Dqx_hRG-PZSdTi/edit#gid=2085047455

A ReadMe file with notes on the data available for every single state is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nq7BZgoRvONibvp30ztJdDFVNWZpVFNq9FSAW1YNb-U/edit

HOW WE ESTIMATED THE NUMBERS OF MISSING STUDENTS

The AP collaborated with Big Local News and its partner, Professor Dee of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, to collect data on the number of students in public, private and home-schools in every state for school years 2019-20 to 2021-22. Only 21 states, plus Washington, D.C., were able to provide adequate data for all three types of schooling across this period.

Based on those states with complete data, we calculated the change in public, private and home-school enrollment from those two school years, plus the change in the school-age population using census estimates.

In theory, all these changes should cancel each other out. If enrollment went down in public schools, there should have either been a corresponding increase in non-public schools, or a drop in the population.

However, in many states the numbers did not come close to adding up. Overall, out of over 700,000 students who left public schools in these states, 40% switched to home-schools or private schools, and 26% of the change can be explained by population loss. That means a third of students who left public school – 230,000 kids – could not be accounted for. Because so many states fail to provide adequate data on private school and home-schooling, the true number of missing students nationally is likely higher.

TIPS FOR LOCALIZATION

Although the number of missing students is high overall, there were several states that had no missing students, or even more students than expected. (It’s possible that this is due to imprecise data or that the Census undercounted the school-age population.)

States that require young children to attend kindergarten also had many fewer missing students in the analysis. That suggests families holding their kids out of school during the pandemic could have been a significant factor. Reasons could range from concerns about COVID-19 to ongoing distrust of or disengagement from the education system.

Even in states where the number of missing kids is smaller or unavailable, the data provides insights into the number of children who are home-schooling or in private school, and how that has changed in each of the last two school years.

Home-schooling

Home-schooling skyrocketed during the pandemic, up 30% in the states for which we have home-school data. Ten states and D.C. saw home-schooling numbers increase more than 50%:

— Washington, D.C., 198% increase from 2019-2020 to fall 2021-2022

— Massachusetts, 68%

— New York and Rhode Island, 65%

— Oregon, 62%

— Vermont, 61%

— Maine, 60%

— Delaware, 57%

— Washington, 54%

— Pennsylvania and South Dakota, 53%

Reporting questions: In these states, what can families say about why they’ve made this choice? What home-schooling programs are they using, and are their kids still getting a good education? What education levels are teachers seeing from kids who have been home-schooled and may be returning to school?

Private schooling

Private school enrollment increased only 4% overall. Eight states saw private enrollment rise more than 10%:

— Rhode Island, 32% increase from fall 2019 to fall 2021

— Tennessee, 24%

— Washington, 20%

— Massachusetts, 18%

— Texas, 14%

— North Carolina, 11%

— New Hampshire and Montana, 10%

Reporting questions: In these states, what can families say about why they’ve made this choice? Who is paying the kids’ tuition – vouchers, scholarships, wealthy parents? What types of schools are they going to, and what’s different about the education these kids are now getting?

Missing students

The states estimated to have the most missing students in the analysis include California (151,579), New York (59,084), Louisiana (19,166), North Carolina (12,072), Colorado (10,943), Washington (10,614), and Georgia (9,060).

Reporting questions: In states with missing kids, what are officials doing to try to reengage these kids? Have these efforts largely subsided? When you meet kids who aren’t in school, is their situation so complex that the system isn’t designed to serve them?

If a state has optional kindergarten, what efforts are underway to make the case for kindergarten? Are families reengaging in first grade, or are some choosing to keep their child out of the school system? What are first grade teachers seeing in students’ preparedness? And what are parents of young kids doing for these first crucial years of a kid’s education? Is it effective?

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Localize It is an occasional feature produced by The Associated Press for its customers’ use. Questions can be directed to Katie Oyan at koyan@ap.org.

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Due to an update to one state’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.