Key Points
- Enrollment numbers in the first two pandemic school years demonstrate that district instructional offerings influence families’ enrollment decisions and that these effects were more pronounced in the second full pandemic school year.
- Enrollment declines in 2020–21 were largest in districts that were the most remote, and relative to districts that offered more in-person instruction, declines grew in the 2021–22 school year.
- Our results suggest that the most-remote districts lost over 600,000 more students than they might have if their in-person instructional offerings matched those of the most-in-person districts.
Executive Summary
We examine how COVID-related reopening policies during the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years affected enrollment in public school districts. We use difference-in-differences and event study designs to estimate plausibly causal effects of different reopening policies on public school enrollment.
Consistent with prior research, we find that public school districts with the most amount of remote instruction during the 2020–21 school year saw the largest enrollment declines in the years following the pandemic, whereas districts with the most amount of in-person instruction saw the smallest enrollment declines. The addition of enrollment data for 2021–22, the second full pandemic school year, allows us to show that districts offering the most in-person instruction in the prior year regained much of their enrollment losses, while districts that offered the most remote instruction saw enrollment decline further. Lastly, enrollment changes are evident across all grade spans but are larger in the youngest grades. Results are robust across a variety of different model specifications.
Our findings suggest that reopening policies played a large role in which districts lost and regained enrollment in the years following the pandemic.
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic initiated a dramatic decline in public school enrollment.1 During the 2019–20 school year, almost all public school buildings closed in March or April 2020.2 The following school year, in fall 2020, many families withdrew their children from traditional public schools and searched for alternative schooling options.3
At the start of the 2020–21 school year, there was large heterogeneity in how districts reopened.4 Some districts opened by offering all students full-time in-person instruction, others offered in-person instruction for some grades or part of the school week, and others kept buildings closed and offered only remote instruction. Full or partial remote instructional offerings mean that parents—especially those with younger children—supervised behind computer screens from home.
This report studies how pandemic-related reopening policies and districts’ instructional offerings (also referred to as instructional modalities) affected public school enrollment in the two school years following the first pandemic school closures, 2020–21 and 2021–22. Understanding the relationship between reopening policies and enrollment changes can help policymakers prepare for future challenges that could arise in schools. For example, large enrollment shifts in the wake of the pandemic could lead to future disruptions in school finance, teacher labor markets, and student preparation.
We examine three research questions. First, how did COVID-related instructional offerings affect enrollment in public school districts? Second, were there heterogeneous effects of instructional offerings across grade levels? Third, were there heterogeneous effects of instructional offerings across the two pandemic school years, 2020–21 and 2021–22?
We use descriptive and quasi-experimental methods to answer these questions. These strategies allow us to explore the impact of heterogeneous district reopening plans on enrollment while accounting for differing pre-pandemic enrollment trends and observable district characteristics. Under certain assumptions, which we discuss below, this quasi-experimental design can produce causal estimates of district reopening plans on public school enrollment.
From a descriptive standpoint, we find that public school districts that offered the most remote instruction in the 2020–21 school year saw the largest declines in public school enrollment at the beginning of that year and continued to lose enrollment during 2021–22. This is consistent with prior studies.5 On the other hand, we find that public school districts that offered the most in-person instruction during the 2020–21 school year had smaller enrollment losses that first pandemic year and recovered most of those enrollment losses in the 2021–22 school year.
Using quasi-experimental methods, we find that enrollment in public school districts offering the most amount of remote instruction dropped by an average of 1.4 percent across both pandemic school years, relative to districts offering the most amount of in-person instruction. We also find that enrollment declines during the 2020–21 and 2021–22 school years were driven primarily by students in younger grades.