Nat Malkus, a senior fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, oversees the Return to Learn Tracker, which monitors chronic absenteeism in U.S. schools. His latest report, released in early February, includes data from 39 states and Washington, DC.
He states that after reaching a high of 29 percent in the 2021–22 school year, the chronic absenteeism rate—missing 10 percent or more of school days in an academic year—fell by 2.6 percentage points the following school year and by 2.2 percentage points the next year. This progress was encouraging, but it stalled last school year, with rates falling by about 1 percentage point on average. This leaves the average chronic absenteeism rate for most of the country at 23 percent, roughly 50 percent higher than the pre-pandemic baseline.
This chronic absence problem is especially egregious in our large urban areas. In Los Angeles, more than 32 percent of students were chronically absent during the 2023-2024 school year. Thirty-four elementary schools have fewer than 200 students, and 29 use less than half of their buildings. Chicago is even worse, with a chronic absentee rate of 41 percent.
Malkus concludes that these patterns suggest that shifts in attitudes and behavior are largely driving the across-the-board increases in post-pandemic absenteeism. Six years after the pandemic, students and their parents are placing less value on attending school each day.
One realistic way to address chronic absenteeism—and save taxpayer dollars—would be to close ineffective schools. But government bureaucrats and teacher union bosses refuse to allow that to happen. In fact, school closures have slowed over time.
An analysis by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics shows that in 2014-15, the closure rate—the share of schools nationwide that were open one year and closed the next—was 1.3 percent, but in 2023-24, the rate was 0.8 percent.
Another way to alleviate the problem would be to reduce the number of teachers by eliminating the lowest performers, but that will not happen. Teacher union-mandated permanence clauses make it nearly impossible to fire an incompetent teacher. In California, a 2012 court case revealed that, on average, only 2.2 of California’s 275,000 teachers (0.0008 percent) were dismissed each year for unprofessional conduct or unsatisfactory performance.
Chronic absenteeism rates would also improve if students felt a sense of purpose in going to school. Currently, many kids lack interest in showing up. A 2024 report from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation surveyed more than 1,000 Gen Z students aged 12 to 18 and found that only 48 percent of those enrolled in middle or high school felt motivated to show up. Only half said they do something interesting in school every day. Similarly, a 2024 EdChoice survey indicated that 64 percent of teens said school is boring, and 30 percent view it as a waste of time.
In addition to the problem of chronically absent students, families are removing their children, especially if they are high achievers, from government-run schools in large numbers.
Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of Education and Economics at Boston University, authored a study that found that nationally, white and Asian parents are far more likely to withdraw their children from public schools than Hispanics and African Americans.
“The question that worries me is whether this means that public schools have now cemented a reputation as not being the place where high-achieving students attend. If you’re a family that’s looking for a challenging curriculum, and you have a talented student, you’re no longer seeing public schools in quite that light,” Goodman said.
Perhaps the leader in the public school exodus is Chicago, whose numbers are particularly grim. Dwindling enrollment has left about 150 Windy City schools half-empty, while 47 operate at less than one-third capacity, leading to high costs and limited course offerings.
Worth noting is that Chicago spends about $18,700 per student. At small schools that have been losing students, per-pupil costs are double or triple that. At one 28-student school, the cost per student is $93,000. (For the sake of perspective, the Latin School of Chicago, among the city’s most expensive private schools, costs about $47,000 per year.)
Not surprisingly, as the number of students declines, school district insolvency is on the rise. Education finance experts say more districts are grappling with this problem, especially those that spent pandemic federal aid on recurring expenses or didn’t scale back their budgets in anticipation of the aid’s end.
As a result, districts are facing increased involvement from their counties and states, ranging from financial monitoring to takeovers. In rarer cases, districts may even declare bankruptcy or consider merging with other districts.
While public schools are bleeding students, school choice of all types continues to grow. Overall, there are now 75 private school choice programs in 34 states, serving more than 1.5 million students.
Notably, micro-schools—where classes traditionally have had fewer than 15 students of varying ages, and the schedule and curriculum are tailored to each class’s needs—are growing in popularity, currently educating about 2 percent of the U.S. student population—roughly 750,000 students. Most micro-schools are independently run by parents, but some are part of a formal network that provides paid, in-person teachers. Lessons take place in settings such as homes, libraries, and other community centers.
In sum, unionized government-run schools, which offer a free (for the user) product, are losing customers because they are failing to fulfill their mission. It’s not about a lack of funding, pandemic-related issues, large class sizes, low teacher pay, or any of the myriad excuses made by those who champion public schools.
Absent the elimination of all government-run schools and the adoption of a system of total privatization, we should give every family in the United States a choice of where to send their kids for an education, and let tax dollars follow the child.
Until we make major changes, Americans’ dissatisfaction with schools will continue to mount, and the exodus will proceed apace.
