Stephen Green writing for PJ Media provides a link to this Los Angeles Times article. Consider the following another installment in our series on the "decline and fall of California."
California public school enrollment has dropped for the fifth year in a row — a decline of more than110,000 students — as K-12 campuses struggle against pandemic disruptions and a shrinking population of school-age kids amid wide concerns that the decrease is so large that educators can’t account for the missing children.
This year’s decline, which includes charter schools, follows a huge enrollment hit during the 2020-21 school year, when the state experienced the largest drop in 20 years, with 160,000 students.
Several factors probably contributed to the falling numbers, experts said, although it is hard to pinpoint answers from preliminary state data. Some students entered private schools, which saw an increase in enrollment. Home schooling also increased as families either did not want to comply with pandemic safety measures such as masking or were concerned about the health risks posed by in-person learning.
Another potential factor is that more families may have moved out of California than expected, either because of rising housing costs or flexibility with remote work, amid other reasons.
The article concludes that the factors itemized above do not account for all of the drop, and that "large numbers of the most vulnerable children are truant.” It does help us understand why the CSU system has dropped the use of SAT/ACT scores for admission.
My personal takeaway from the sad condition of California: human beings can manage a paradise so badly that its people will voluntarily leave and move to less nice places that are intelligently run for the benefit of those in residence.
