A National Story
To explore whether the enrollment patterns observed in Massachusetts by fall 2024 are representative of the nation more broadly, we compare our data from the Bay State to the most recent data available at the national level from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Common Core of Data for fall 2023. We find remarkable similarities (see Figure 4).
Fall 2023 public school enrollment nationwide was 2.8 percent below predicted levels compared to a 2.6 percent drop for Massachusetts by fall 2024. Both in in Massachusetts and across the U.S., enrollment drops were substantially larger for white and Asian students than for Hispanic and Black students. High school enrollment experienced little change, and the elementary grades recovered, while preschool/kindergarten and middle school grades experienced major drops. These patterns suggest that Massachusetts’s experience is typical of the nation more broadly.
The sustained decline in public school enrollment observed here is consistent with evidence that Americans, including K–12 parents, remain less satisfied with public schools even years after school closures ended. Between 2019 and 2025, the fraction of Americans reporting satisfaction with public education dropped by 12 percentage points, as did the fraction of K–12 parents reporting satisfaction with their oldest child’s school. The fraction of parents saying K–12 education is heading in the wrong direction was fairly stable from 2019 to 2022 but rose in 2023 and then again in 2024 to its highest level in a decade, suggesting continuing or even growing frustration with schools.
Concerns about the learning environment and behavior of their children’s peers may partly explain increasing parental concerns. For example, chronic absenteeism among public school students is a stubborn problem. In 2024, 20 percent of Massachusetts students were chronically absent compared to 13 percent in 2019, an increase that is again mirrored in national data.
Negative student behaviors within schools are also a growing worry. In 2022, a national sample of school leaders attributed a host of challenges to the pandemic and its lingering effects, including acts of disrespect toward teachers and rule-breaking use of electronic devices. Though leaders of all school levels experienced such increases, those in middle schools reported the steepest growth in post-pandemic behavioral problems, particularly physical fights between students, hate crimes, bullying, rowdiness in hallways, and classroom disruptions due to misconduct and unsanctioned cell phone use.
Survey evidence suggests that, if anything, parents’ and school leaders’ perceptions of public school learning environments may be worse now than in the first year or two after the pandemic’s onset. The fraction of K–12 parents who said they fear for their child’s physical safety at school rose by 10 percentage points between 2019 and 2024. And in late 2024, 72 percent of surveyed teachers, principals, and district leaders reported that student behavior was worse than it had been in 2019, a higher percentage than in 2021 and 2023. The share of educators reporting that students were misbehaving “a lot more” than before the pandemic jumped sharply, to 48 percent in late 2024 from 33 percent in early 2023.
Changes in traditional K–12 public school enrollment have been, and will continue to be, influenced by many factors, such as the growth of charter schools and expansion of publicly supported school choice programs. But the disruption of the pandemic and persistent concerns about student behavior are particularly acute in middle schools, consistent with enrollment declines concentrated in such grade levels. The subset of parents turning to private schools and homeschooling may be doing so in hopes of finding their children a safer and less disrupted learning environment.
Our analysis of Massachusetts data through fall 2024 provides the first systematic examination of how these concerns have translated into sustained enrollment shifts, offering insights into whether the initial disruptions to school choice patterns represent temporary adjustments or more fundamental changes in parental preferences for schooling options. Our findings also raise important questions about the long-term implications for public education, given a sustained exodus of higher-income, white, and Asian families.
