Perhaps less obvious to the naked eye — although not less significant — is COVID’s effect on the public school system.
The pandemic, and all the social changes that came with it, shattered some of our culture’s biggest educational taboos. More importantly, it shattered the illusion that our public schools are a great and trustworthy American institution.
Everybody talks about “COVID learning loss” (and the large gaps in learning students are still suffering months after school closures and missed lessons). Far less discussed is the “COVID trust loss” in our public schools (at a 25-year low) and all the ways that the social norms that bound public school together as an American bedrock have begun to fragment.
Since 2020, a wave of school choice policy has swept across the country. Its seeds were sown long before the pandemic, but COVID trust loss created the culture ripe to harvest them.
Four shifts post-pandemic are changing the fabric of American education: increased transparency inside the classroom (and more light shed on all the shortcomings of public schooling), the breakdown of the homeschooling taboo, the shift toward remote work, and demographic migrations into states prioritizing school choice.
Each of these paradigm shifts is quietly rewriting the education world. Each is important, and each is reshaping education in its own way.
If you’re a skeptic of government-run schools, there’s a lot to be excited about.
Zoom School Revealed the Rot in Public Education
In the early days of COVID, public schools went online, and parents had the chance to watch what was happening in their child’s classroom in real time. Many were not pleased.
Teachers and administrators were trying to translate an already broken model of education onto a format it didn’t fit, breaking it even further in the process.
Parents, also shut up inside their houses and in close proximity to their children, saw Zoom school and were horrified — is this really what my kid does all day?
Some chalked it up to the shortcomings of the medium: public school was designed for real-life rooms and three-dimensional interactions, not computer screens.
Others (more astutely) blamed the model itself.
It’s no secret that America’s public school outcomes aren’t great — the Nation’s Report Card, published by the federal government, publicly documents as much. But many parents were confused by the content of their children’s classes — like the parents documented in the Sold a Story podcast, who were horrified to discover their children weren’t learning to read.
Public school enrollment dropped sharply. Many families switched to private schools (which re-opened faster than public schools) or began homeschooling. Some of those families returned to public school after the lockdowns ended, but many didn’t, and public school enrollment is trending downward. Nationally, enrollment dropped 2.5 percent between 2019 and 2023, and continues to decline.
Even in cities like Austin (with population trending upward), public school enrollment is falling — Austin’s school district has lost 10,000 students over the past decade, despite the city population growing by 10 percent (nearly 100,000 new residents) over the same period.
If public schools were private companies, and surveyed their customers (the parents) — or just looked at their retention data — the market feedback would be clear. Parents aren’t happy with the results public schools are delivering, and are looking elsewhere.
Zoom School Made Homeschooling Less Taboo
Millions of parents pulled their kids out of public school in 2020 and started homeschooling them, confident that their homespun instruction would be better than whatever Zoom school was meting out.
Nearly overnight, homeschooling — once a strange practice reserved for the hippies and religious zealots and social outcasts — became normal. It went from a fringe concept to a shared cultural experience.
Nearly everybody knows somebody who homeschooled for at least a few months during the pandemic. And you can’t say “homeschoolers are weirdos” without a tinge of irony if you yourself (or your sister, or your best friend, or your cool neighbor) were once a homeschooling parent, no matter what the extenuating circumstances.
More importantly, even if you weren’t homeschooling, you still had your kids at home all day — one of the core (unimaginable?) realities of homeschooling life. Pre-COVID, parents could say “I could never homeschool my kids, I can’t imagine having them home all day.” Post-COVID, no longer: having your kids home all day was something everyone could imagine, because it was something everyone had experienced.
By the time the lockdown had abated, having your child home all day had gone from unimaginable, to practical, to a very viable possibility for the future.
Work-From-Home Broke Up “Default” Childcare
At the same time Zoom school was in full swing, COVID was permanently rearranging the workplace. Technology had long before made remote work possible; the pandemic forced employers to catch up. Parents went from 9-5 office residencies to commuting only as far as the kitchen table, taking meetings while waiting for their sourdough to rise.
One of the core services public school offers, to families and to society generally, is childcare. Parents who go to work need somewhere for their kids to go. But if parents work from home, they can be the adult in the room while kids do school — especially if their child is enrolled in an online program (so mom doesn’t have to be the teacher).
For many kids, especially an older student who doesn’t need constant supervision, doing school online (with mom or dad in the other room for support if you need them) is a viable option. If your child doesn’t like the public school curriculum, or prefers working at their own pace, or is on the butt end of public school bullying and social hierarchies, online school can offer a compelling prospect.
During COVID, all sorts of online schools grew quickly: Sora School, an online project-based middle and high school; Synthesis, the game-based spinoff program from Elon Musk’s Ad Astra school; Kubrio, a “world school” with three time zone swaths and students from all around the globe — to name just a few.
More traditional models like online charter schools and public cyber schools are also on the menu; but for families with self-directed children, more custom combinations of tools and programs (Khan Academy paired with Teaching Company lectures, IXL supplemented with Coursera MOOCs) abound.
Post-COVID, remote work appears to be here to stay. As Cal Newport wrote in his book Slow Productivity, referencing Apple employees refusing to go back to the office: “These frustrated Apple employees [are] at the vanguard of a movement that’s leveraging the disruptions of the pandemic to question so many more of the arbitrary assumptions that have come to define the workplace.”
This questioning of assumptions, not incidentally, applies equally to schooling.
Perhaps equally importantly, remote work also frees families from work-induced geographic constraints, making it easier for them to relocate to states with the best schools or robust school-choice supports.
Move To Choice-Friendly States
COVID policy rearranged the demographic spread of the country en masse: people fled in droves from locked-down states (like New York and Illinois and California) to open ones (like Texas and Tennessee and Florida).
States with less-restrictive school closure policies also tend towards freer education policy (both are correlated with the relative power of teachers unions). Many fewer states have since passed sweeping school choice policies, where families have access to public vouchers for use at private schools.
The effect is that a large number of kids — who would’ve otherwise been stuck in states without school choice — now live in states with a huge number of school options emerging.
Eighteen states have implemented universal school choice since 2020. Some of those states, like Florida and Texas, are becoming hotbeds for education innovation, and many are seeing an increasing number of private school options emerging.
Incidentally (or perhaps not incidentally at all), many of these school choice-friendly states are also the places people are having the most kids — a positive indicator of the education market’s future growth. Where there is demand (young students) and capital (school choice dollars), supply (interesting new schools) will follow.
Part of the reason public schools in America have had such a monopoly on education is because of other extenuating circumstances: parents need to work all day; no one was at home to watch the kids; tax dollars were exclusively bundled into the public school system — and everybody trusted the public school system. After all, it’s one of the great American institutions (or so we’re led to believe).
But with those undergirdings starting to shift, public school’s Herculean hold on the American psyche (and the American way of life) is shifting too. Logistically, we don’t need public schools the way we did a decade ago. We’re more skeptical of them. And alternatives have been destigmatized.
The 2.5 percent public school enrollment drop is still small; it’s early days. Nearly 50 million kids are still enrolled in public schools. Public education is still the default.
But the cultural landscape — and the cultural paradigm — has shifted. And the education landscape will continue to shift in response — slowly now, but more and more, until the unquestioned “default” of one school for all children feels as distant as normal reality did during the height of the pandemic.
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