Source: Reason
by Matt Welch
“As back-to-school week wheezes into gear for the nation’s 54 million or so children between the ages of five and 17, a startling, post-COVID reality is becoming more apparent, even if the implications are still too big to process. It is this: Though the U.S. population continues to grow, the number of kids attending public K-12 schools will likely never again reach its 2019 peak. The rise of homeschooling — from around 2.8 percent of the school-aged population pre-pandemic to around 5.8 percent now (reliable statistics are hard to come by) — is a chief contributor to that decline, along with ever-decreasing birth rates. … So surely government spending on those schools, which typically amounts to around 20 percent of state/local budgets, will decrease too, right? Ha ha, no.” (09/06/24)
https://reason.com/2024/09/06/we-have-already-passed-peak-public-school/