The results come from of African American parents of school-aged children conducted by the research and polling company Morning Consult. Its findings, while capturing only a moment in time, may reflect educational preferences that have shifted significantly away from traditional public schools in the COVID era. 

Morning Consult’s survey was administered to roughly 1,300 respondents across January and February on behalf of , an Indianapolis-based advocacy group that backs school choice. During the pandemic, the organization has of parents and teachers on general perceptions of K–12 education. Black adults, including parents, have been included both in those ongoing efforts and in separate surveys as districts adjusted to the demands of remote instruction and virus mitigation.

Overall, 57% of respondents said they supported education savings accounts — a financial vehicle that offers families money to spend on educational costs of their choosing — even without being provided a description of their function. Even higher proportions supported school vouchers (62%), open enrollment of public schools (66%), and charter schools (68%).

Paul DiPerna, EdChoice’s vice president of research and innovation, said he found it notable that families’ attitudes toward such policies have remained “fairly stable” even as the circumstances surrounding schools have changed dramatically. In conducted in the fall of 2021, for example, two-thirds of African American parents said that COVID had made them more open to the idea of homeschooling; 65% said they were supportive of homeschooling today.

“At the time [of the previous poll], the pandemic looked a lot different for parents and schools,” DiPerna said, invoking the Omicron wave that closed or severely disrupted schools in early 2022. “But some of these levels of support are still high for other modes of learning besides the traditional district school.”

Black respondents in other public opinion research, including a February survey commissioned by the school choice advocacy group Yes. Every Kid., have demonstrated high levels of support for policies like vouchers and education savings accounts. Although such polls can provide substantially different findings depending on how questions are worded, African American parents’ somewhat more favorable attitudes toward school choice could be related to their relative satisfaction with local schools, than that of white parents in some previous polls. 

That openness to alternative modes of education could be somewhat greater than for parents of other backgrounds. In all, just 39% of African American parents said their post-pandemic preference would be for their children to spend the entire school week completely outside the home. By comparison, EdChoice’s February tracking poll of all K–12 parents found that a slightly greater figure, 41%, said they favored such an outcome.

Black families have clearly demonstrated a greater willingness to experiment with learning outside traditional schools over the last few years. According to , the percentage of African American students classified as homeschoolers leapt from just 3.3% to 16.1% over the first COVID year. That explosive growth was undoubtedly powered by the adaptation to online learning, but updated federal figures are that participation in homeschooling has remained elevated among American families in the years since. 

Support for other forms of non-traditional schooling were also shown to be high, mostly in line with the attitudes of other demographic groups. Sixty-two percent of Morning Consult’s respondents said they had a favorable opinion of microschools (defined as a public, private, or homeschool learning environment that enrolls 25 or fewer students); somewhat surprisingly, 9% of respondents said their children were presently enrolled in a microschool.

Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at the nonprofit research and consulting group Bellwether Education Partners, said that while it’s difficult to gather real-time enrollment data on just how many families are experimenting with learning opportunities outside of traditional districts, the responses “show greater interest and participation” in programs like microschools.

“I think the openness and interest in some of these different options is one data point showing that there’s pretty strong demand among [African American] families for different kinds of education options than what their kids might be accessing currently.”

Black parents were also likely to say they were more involved in their children’s education than in the pre-COVID era, with 43% saying they felt “much more involved. Among those with annual incomes over $75,000 — more than two-thirds of respondents said they were either somewhat or much more involved than before.

But the direction forward still isn’t clear. Asked whether they wanted their children’s general K–12 experience to either change or stay the same, 62% said they sought some kind of change. While 38% reported that they were looking for something new, however, a sizable minority (24%) said they wanted things to revert back to the pre-COVID status quo. Just under one-quarter of parents said they preferred that schooling stay as it is now.

DiPerna said that the evidence clearly pointed to an openness to new educational experiences — either through school choice policies like vouchers and charters — or initiatives like microschools, pods and tutoring that can be implemented in a variety of settings. That curiosity exists among families of all backgrounds, he argued, and even in spite of the fact that roughly half of parents (including 57% of African American parents) said that their own local schools are on the right track.

“Even with the overall satisfaction levels with schools, you still see that there’s an underlying preference for different types of schools — non-trivial numbers, by any definition, especially if you extrapolate to the full population of students around the country.”

On Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 1, a law expanding Florida’s private school voucher program and authorizing public schools to enroll students on a part-time basis. At the bill signing in Miami,  the legislation represented “the largest expansion of education choice not only in the history of this state, but in the history of these United States.”

Families in Florida could soon gain an important new freedom under state law — the opportunity to mix and match public and private or home schooling. 

Already a reality in several states, part-time public enrollment would allow private and homeschool students to essentially pick and choose among classes at nearby schools, whether traditional or charter. Participation by those schools would be voluntary, and they would be compensated proportionally for the additional pupils taught. 

The change is included in a larger school choice bill, the debate over which is expected to dominate Tallahassee’s 2023 legislative session. Most of the discussion around that proposal focuses on its central provision, voucher-like “education savings accounts” to every family in the state. Coming amid a red-state rush toward more educational options, the legislation would make Florida one of the nation’s friendliest states for school choice.

Unlike the ESA expansion, a move toward part-time public enrollment wouldn’t carry . But it could deliver its own, more subtle, shock to K-12 education in the state. Demand for alternative schooling arrangements swelled during the pandemic, and while , thousands of families seem to have permanently parted ways with public school systems. In Florida alone, over 150,000 students received their schooling primarily at home during the 2021-22 academic year — over the preceding five years — and experts believe that additional support from the state could push still more to explore new options.

“Part-time enrollment is something families are very interested in,” said Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit research and consulting group. “If it’s embraced more by states and local districts, you could see more families decide to get off the fence and move to a more flexible learning environment for their kids.”

Patricia Levesque, CEO of the Florida-based advocacy group ExcelinEd, observed that “mindsets changed” during the pandemic, as a sizable number of parents experienced both disappointment with the performance of American schools and a growing sense of confidence in their own ability to venture outside of traditional public offerings. While many aren’t ready to make a year-round commitment to homeschooling, for instance, they might be willing to split the difference with their local districts. 

“I think a lot of families got that taste of greater involvement in their children’s education and realized, ‘I can do this, I enjoy it, and I want to be a part of it,’” Levesque said. 

No mandate for now

The idea may be unfamiliar even to some education policy veterans, but part-time enrollment is already a feature of the K-12 landscape around the country.

identified 12 states that expressly allow part-time enrollment, ranging from deep-blue Illinois to bright-red Idaho. But availability and comprehensiveness vary, with only six states defining access to part-time schooling as a student right. States also differ in how much public schools can be paid for accepting part-time students, as well as how many courses can be offered on a part-time basis. 

The legislative language of Florida’s statute, known as , does not include a mandate for school or district participation in the initiative, merely specifying that “any public school in this state, including a charter school, may enroll a student on a part-time basis.” Levesque — also serving as the executive director of ExcelinEd’s sister group Foundation for Florida’s Future, which advocated — said the door is still open for legislators to revisit a possible requirement in the years to come.

“I like to start by making things permissive, and then you let the innovators go after it,” Levesque observed. “Districts or schools that really want to take advantage of the flexibility can pave the way and they show the others what can be done.”

Part-time enrollment has parallels to another policy that caught on quickly over the last decade: Tebow Laws, which permit homeschoolers to take part in their local schools’ sports and other extracurricular activities. Named after former University of Florida quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow, the measures , though they remain controversial in some. (Kansas, which passed a form of part-time enrollment last year, related to participation in high school sports, while legislators in Virginia have similar proposals in recent years.) 

Survey evidence that a significant portion of homeschoolers may already spend a few hours per week in an institutional school, a practice sometimes referred to as “flexischooling” or “hybrid homeschooling.” That phenomenon gained traction over the last few years as more families either willingly embraced, or resigned themselves to, the sporadic availability of in-person learning.

“[The pandemic] has further called into question the model that attending school means showing up for six or seven hours in a building every day,” said Robert Kunzman, an education professor at Indiana University and the managing director of the International Center for Home Education Research. “Certainly the pandemic has accelerated the sense that this is not only something that is possible, but is desirable and beneficial.”

Opportunities for districts

For schools, part-time enrollment offers an enticing opportunity to boost their own head counts after multiple years of declining K-12 enrollment. More than 1 million students left their district schools in 2020 and 2021, often as a result of frustrations related to school closures and online learning. 

Better still, fuller classrooms come with more public funding. Florida’s proposed law would reimburse districts for the part-time students they enroll. If, say, a private school student chose to take AP biology at a nearby public school, the state would fund the school for one-sixth of a full-time student (based on the benchmark that a full-time student takes six courses); if she also enrolled in a Latin course with space available, the funding would increase proportionally to one-third that of a full-time student. 

But logistical challenges remain. Any part-time students would need transportation to and from school buildings, potentially on irregular schedules — a serious complication in Florida, where are already experiencing severe shortages of bus drivers. (As part of the state’s Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, eligible families up to $750 to offset the cost of school transportation.) Transcripts and other student data would theoretically need to be shared between schools and families as well, Bellwether’s Spurrier said, to say nothing of the difficulty of tracking the whereabouts of various students within campuses.

“Absent policy supports on some of those concerns, [interest in part-time enrollment] might not be to the scale that you might expect given the desire we’ve seen parents express for new models of learning,” Spurrier said.

That desire is clear. In commissioned by the advocacy group EdChoice, a narrow plurality of parents said they would prefer for their children to study at home between one and four days of the week. An additional 15% said they would rather opt for full-time homeschooling, representing a clear majority in favor of an à la carte approach of some fashion. Those attitudes mirror a broader swing identified in , which showed a nine-point increase (to 54% from 45%) in public approval for homeschooling over the past five years.

And as COVID spurred more families to experiment with alternative educational models — from learning pods to microschools — the demographics of the homeschooling movement have also shifted. A population that once disproportionately attracted religious and right-leaning families has become somewhat more diverse, Kunzman noted, and likely more open to cooperating with local educators and school authorities on a class-to-class and year-to-year basis.

“It’s now less of an absolute, ideological commitment to homeschooling and more, ‘What do I perceive as best for my child for this coming year?’”

A year after the nation’s schools experienced a historic decline in enrollment, new data shows that many urban districts are still losing students, and those that rebounded this year typically haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Whether families withdrew to enroll their children in online charters, school them at home or fled to far-flung suburbs with more affordable housing, the pandemic has triggered population shifts that could change the composition of U.S. school districts for years to come.

Data from Burbio, a company that tracks COVID-related education trends, offers the first look at the degree to which states and districts have recovered from a punishing year of lockdown and remote learning. Out of 40 states and the District of Columbia, few have seen more than a 1% increase compared to 2020-21, when some states experienced declines as high as 5%.

Flat enrollment this year “means those kids did not come back,” said Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University. “Parents were making these enrollment decisions last summer. There was still a great deal of uncertainty. Parents wanted stability for their kids.”

shows that last year’s losses were concentrated in the early grades. Those who opted not to enroll their young children in public schools last year, or found an in-person option somewhere else, might never return for middle or high school, Dee said. 

While enrollment in many of the nation’s urban districts was already shrinking before the pandemic, school closures and economic upheaval forced many families to make decisions they might have put off otherwise.

Barring further pandemic disruptions, student population trends will likely return to their pre-COVID pace, Dee said, but added, “The effects of the sharp, recent enrollment declines may be long-lived. The fiscal consequences will remain for some while.”

New York experienced the sharpest decline, a 2% drop — more than 48,000 students — since last year. That’s on top of the previous year’s 3% decline. Enrollment in Florida saw the biggest bounce at 4%, or more than 111,000 additional students — a reflection of higher birth rates, job growth and fewer COVID restrictions under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, experts say. 

Of the 10 largest districts in the nation, only Florida’s Orange and Hillsborough counties, home to Orlando and Tampa respectively, saw enrollment surpass pre-pandemic figures.

“Florida was continuing to grow when other states came to a plateau,” said Susan MacManus, a political scientist from the University of South Florida. “Things were open and you could still work.”

State data offers a glimpse of what will likely be further enrollment growth in Arizona, Florida and Utah — states with more affordable housing, growing tech sectors and outdoor living that became an important draw during COVID. At the same time, fewer people are moving to the Northeast from other states and countries, citing . 

District-level figures — provided exclusively by Burbio to ����Ӱ�� — offer a richer picture of what happened to students after the pandemic began. The data, combined with state-level reports and interviews with district officials and parents, shows many urban districts lost students to growing exurbs. And some districts with no population growth added thousands of students in virtual schools.

Districts with enrollment loss could face tough decisions about layoffs and school closures in the near future. Meanwhile, smaller districts that are rapidly gaining students are struggling to hire staff and preserve the kind of close-knit environment that drew many parents in the first place.

“The pandemic kind of accelerated some of those pre-existing trends,” said Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a think tank. While school closures forced many parents to look for other options, housing and rental prices were also pushing families out of major metro regions. “All you have to do is go to Zillow and see the year-over-year changes,” he said.

In December 2019, Tanner and Miranda McCutchan relocated from northern California to Boise, Idaho — one of 10 metro areas that saw the most growth between 2020 and 2021, according to recent . That leaves two fewer children who will enter California’s schools in the coming years. Miranda stays home with 4-year-old Paige, who attends a Montessori preschool, and 18-month-old Emery, while her husband runs a glass company. 

“We couldn’t afford a house where we lived,” she said. “It was keep renting or move somewhere we could buy a place.”

The fiscal cliff & ‘Armageddon’

In California, Burbio collected data only from Los Angeles, Oakland and San Diego. All three saw declines, due in part to California’s high-priced . With the state’s school-age population expected to keep over the next decade, district leaders are bracing for a to their budgets.

The Oakland Unified Public Schools offers a preview of what other districts with declining enrollment and birth rates will soon confront — the painful and unpopular decision to close schools. In February, the district, which saw a 5.6% enrollment decline compared to last year, decided it would over the next two years. Four others will merge or reduce grade levels.

In the Granite School District, near Salt Lake City, enrollment fell 2.4%, down to 60,371 this year, even though the state’s overall enrollment is up. 

The district has seen a decline in birth rates and an increase in families fleeing to “cheaper areas to build larger homes within [Salt Lake County],” said Benjamin Horsley, chief of staff for the district, adding officials anticipate “leveling out around 55,000 students.” The district has already closed three schools and expects to shutter 10 to 14 more in the next five to seven years. 

Districts experiencing similar losses should have been making those tough calls before the pandemic, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

“Federal [relief] money is delaying it a year or two, and the fact that state budgets are healthy is delaying it a year or two,” she said about closing schools. Roza advises a network of over 40 urban districts nationwide, the majority of which are shrinking. “Federal money will run out, and enrollment for some of them isn’t isn’t going to come back. These cost factors are going to just slam down on people.”

Los Angeles Unified, for example, saw a 5.9% decline this year and is expected to by fall of 2023. Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said Monday that he’s not yet considering closing schools, but added that at the end of his first 100 days — in about two more months — he will discuss “technical corrections” and “belt tightening” measures to respond to the loss of students. 

He agrees with Roza about the dangers of the approaching fiscal cliff, and didn’t mince words about what would happen to the district if it didn’t turn enrollment trends around by the time federal relief funds dry up in 2024. “Armageddon,” he said. Then he added, “It’s going to be a hurricane of massive proportions.” 

The student population in the Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas, began dropping about five years ago. Superintendent Jesus Jara attributes much of the decline to the growth of charter schools. 

“The anti-charter discussion — that was in the ‘90s. They’re not going away,” Jara said. “The discussion is how are we more flexible and how we are more agile for our communities.” 

Despite declining enrollment, the district needs to build and renovate 33 schools to better serve its current population, he said. That includes breaking up some large, 4,000-student high schools to offer more “boutique” and career-focused programs to compete with charters.

‘Has not slowed down’

Districts with falling enrollment are strategizing how to keep the students they have. But accelerated growth comes with its own challenges, Roza said, putting pressure on leaders to act fast, especially if they need to recruit staff amid a nationwide hiring shortage. Schools might be “digging deeper and deeper into applicant pools” and not necessarily choosing the best candidates, she said. 

Liberty Hill Independent School District, northwest of Austin, Texas, didn’t lose students during the pandemic. Enrollment, at 5,539 last year, is now over 6,800 — a 23% percent leap. It’s a bedroom community that just got its first H-E-B, a “big box” grocery store, and is conveniently located near a toll road with easy access to Apple’s new complex near Austin. 

During the pandemic, the community “actually saw a 40 percent rise in residential home builds, and it has not slowed down,” said Superintendent Steven Snell. The district has eight schools now and will open a ninth next year. 

Parents value the district’s small-town atmosphere and the sense that educators know their families well, he said — connections that could be hard to maintain as the district adds 1,000 students a year. Meanwhile, the district has raised salaries for substitutes because of shortages, and there’s a scarcity of available bus drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers.

“When you have a salary that is causing you to live paycheck to paycheck, you’re going to jump ship for a little more money to survive,” Snell said.

Many of the enrollment swings this year reflect the success of online programs in meeting the needs of families for consistency amid the pandemic’s many disruptions.

For some virtual charters, the enrollment spike was temporary. Oklahoma’s Epic One on One, an online program, had 17,106 students in 2019-20. Enrollment roughly doubled last year and is now down to 23,156, according to state data.  

“Many parents decided to enroll their student in Epic once the pandemic hit, but it appears that trend has slowed with this year’s enrollment numbers,” said Carrie Burkhart, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Education.

But whether parents are concerned about COVID or found that online school better suits their children, virtual programs remain in high demand. 

South Carolina’s enrollment has increased almost 2%, due in part to “skyrocketing enrollment in virtual charters,” said Ryan Brown, spokesman for the state’s education department.

The student population in the Huntsville Independent School District, about an hour north of Houston, shot up 40% this year because it operates the Texas Online Preparatory School. And in Colorado, Harrison School District 2, near Colorado Springs, began a partnership with The Vanguard School, a virtual program and one of three charter systems affiliated with the district.

“Many might see it as a public school district versus charter battle,” said Harrison Superintendent Wendy Birhanzel. “We believe this makes us stronger and responds to the needs of the community.”

Homeschooling trends

While Burbio data offers an incomplete picture of where lost students have gone, others have been trying to fill in the missing pieces. The Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey showed that homeschooling jumped from about 5% of households to the fall after the pandemic began. By the start of this school year, it had settled back down to about 7%, according to August 2021 data.

Others have left for more established private schools. Michelle Walker, an Oregon mother who became an advocate for school reopening last year, withdrew her daughter from the Canby Public Schools, near Portland. She secured a spot — and financial aid — at a private school for fourth-grader MacKenzie. She also took out a loan and received money from family to help cover tuition.

“I drive 80 miles roundtrip every day to make sure she goes to a good school,” she said. “It would take a lot for me to put her back in public schools.”

shows many other parents are following suit. According to Burbio, most districts in Multnomah County, which includes Portland, and nearby Clackamas County have seen enrollment declines this year. 

Some district leaders are still hoping to lure back students they’ve lost. The Bernalillo Public Schools, north of Albuquerque, serves families in Pueblo and Hispanic communities, including many in multi-family households concerned about COVID risk. 

The district was the last in the state to lift its mask mandate. Superintendent Matt Montaño said he’s encouraged that enrollment, while still below pre-pandemic figures, has picked up slightly since last year. 

The district’s pre-K program, with 190 students at three schools, earned a five-star rating from the state education department — an accomplishment Montaño hopes will help recruit new students.

“Once we get them in our doors,” he said, “there’s no reason why they should leave us.”

But if the family wants to move their child to better schools in the nearby Elwood, Union or Manhattan districts they would be hard-pressed to find housing in that price range. 

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These invisible boundaries are what researchers at Bellwether Education Partners call “border barriers” — lines between districts that frequently keep low-income families out of higher-quality schools. The Chicago area, the authors write, has 45 such divisions, where families in low-income housing brush up against districts with more resources and better schools but few, if any, affordable rental units. 

Bellwether explores these differences in “Priced Out of Public Schools,” released last week that adds a new layer to our understanding of how closely housing and education are intertwined. Districts with out-of-reach rental prices spend, on average, at least $4,600 more per student — the result of higher property taxes. While states’ school finance formulas aim to equalize funding across districts, they don’t make up the gap. 

“As we think about what we need to do moving forward, it’s not just an education solution alone,” said Alex Spurrier, co-author of the report and a senior analyst at Bellwether Education Partners, an education think tank. States, he said, should consider multiple policy levers to address “what is a very thorny challenge.”

The report comes as continue to rise and many low-income families , long delays for federal rental assistance funds and landlords who reject . When families relocate to more affordable housing, their children often must leave not only their schools, but their districts as well — especially in states like Texas, California and Illinois, where metro area maps are dotted with dozens of small school districts. The authors label the phenomenon “educational gerrymandering,” the creation of smaller, exclusive districts that cater to higher-income, less racially diverse student populations. While the report recommends multiple approaches to address the disparities, experts note that altering district boundaries is politically risky: People with money are likely to vote against those who meddle too much.

“People who have wealth are willing to use it to get high-quality schools.” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and the deputy director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “The rules of the game do produce some inequities.” 

Mergers and secessions

Some of those rules date back to nearly a century ago when the nation entered a movement that by 1970 had cut more than 100,000 districts down to less than 20,000. Now there are 13,000.

But district mergers tended to lack high-minded ambitions to create more racial or socioeconomically balanced schools. Rather, they were likely to be unions of districts with similar demographics, explained Tomas Monarrez, a research associate at the Urban Institute who has studied racial and ethnic segregation in schools.

Some of the starkest examples of drawing boundaries to benefit wealthier populations include recent efforts by some communities to break away from larger, often county-level, school districts. the 2017 report from EdBuild, noted 73 secessions since 2000, with another 55 either attempted or in progress.

Several have launched in the Northeast, but the Bellwether report also includes examples in the South. In Memphis, Tennessee, for example, communities within Shelby County split off into smaller districts in 2014 after the majority Black Memphis district dissolved and merged into the county district. In Alabama, there have been 10 successful attempts since 2000, with in the works. 

“At the very least, we should be wary of those secession trends,” Monarrez said. Mergers, however, can minimize disparities in access to quality schools if leaders pursue them with the goal of improving equity, he said.

Some states have created where multiple districts share tax revenue or allow students to transfer into schools across district lines as a way to reduce disparities. The Nebraska legislature created such a plan involving 11 Omaha-area districts. In Massachusetts, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, encompassing Boston and the surrounding area, is another example.

But Malkus, at the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned that such options only tend to “nibble around the margins.” Daniel Thatcher, a senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, noted that open enrollment programs can make school funding disparities worse because the receiving district gets the state funding for those students.

School choice programs are another way to allow students to attend a school outside their neighborhood, the authors suggest. The results of that approach are mixed. that within a district, charters lead to a slight decrease in student diversity. But across a metro area, the presence of charters can create schools that are more racially mixed.

That’s what leaders in School District 49, adjacent to the Colorado Springs, Colorado, district have found. The district is considered “inaccessible” to lower-income families because there’s not enough affordable housing to meet the demand, according to the Bellwether report. But more than a third of the district’s students come from outside the district for traditional, charter and online options, said Peter Hilts, the system’s chief education officer. Half of the Colorado Springs district’s students are nonwhite, compared to 43 percent in District 49.

“There’s no question that open, inclusive choice has made us a more diverse district,” Hilts said. “If you genuinely want educational equity, you must believe in school choice, and if you truly advocate for inclusive choice, you must address other factors like transportation, affordable housing, and childcare options that can inhibit choice.”

Housing affordability not only affects families wishing to move into a district, but also those who want to stay put. In Tacoma, Washington, low-income families are beginning to leave because of a lack of housing options, said Elliott Barnett, a senior planner for the city. Proximity to quality schools is a key element of , a project that recommends building additional types of housing in neighborhoods that were previously reserved for single-family homes.

“We know that where a person lives has a link to their access to opportunities that have a big impact on our lives such as education achievement, income, life expectancy and others.” Barnett said. “Even if kids can travel from elsewhere to a high-performing school outside their neighborhood, that is another burden to overcome.” 

Some states, like and , have recently passed legislation to increase the supply of affordable housing. While such efforts haven’t always taken school locations into account, Monarrez said that’s beginning to change. California governor Gavin Newsom mentioned the need for a wider array of housing options near schools as one goal of his state’s legislation. 

The next step, Monarrez said, is for policymakers to reconsider district boundaries as well.

“We need to find out more about what would happen if we changed these lines,” he said. “A viable solution is drawing better lines.”

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors.

Megan Monsour knew she was taking a risk last year when she pulled her two sons out of the Wichita, Kansas, district and enrolled them in Green Gate, a nature-focused microschool. Not only did she fret over her sons’ exposure to COVID-19, but wondered whether they’d get the attention they needed for persistent reading difficulties.

But then Green Gate arranged for a dyslexia specialist to tutor the boys during the school day — something the district wouldn’t do even though the Monsours were willing to pay for it.

“Although we believe in and want to support public schools, it was frustrating that there was no flexibility to have the tutoring I wanted,” Monsour said. Now, after a year in the program, she said their reading has improved. “I also like the independence and autonomy Green Gate teaches. They have a lot of time outside and I think children need more recess and chances to have hands-on learning.”

The Monsour boys are two of the roughly who left the Wichita district last year and among thousands across the country who aren’t returning to public schools this fall. While the pandemic provided the initial spark behind the growth of pods — and remains an important catalyst — parents say their reasons for joining have expanded as the concept has taken root. Those reasons are as varied as resistance to mask mandates, a desire for culturally relevant education and frustration with services their children were receiving in public schools. As the movement enters its second school year, many parents who formed small pods last fall are also recognizing their limitations and are now linking up with larger, more-established networks of homeschoolers for support.

“Now that they have a year under their belt, they are starting to find their legs,” said Kija Gray, a coach who advises mostly Black families in Detroit that have left public schools for homeschooling and pods. A year ago, she said parents were “really super nervous” about their decisions. Now she hears more excitement in their voices. “What I think they found was community.”

In July, Tyton Partners, a consulting organization, released on the durability of such alternative schooling models. Of the 2,500 parents responding, three-quarters of those who chose pods last school year — like the Monsours — planned to stick with them. The authors estimated that enrollment in pods and microschools, which are larger but still offer personalized instruction, would reach 1.5 million this fall.

But some of the skepticism that initially greeted the movement remains. The costs and logistics involved in maintaining pods, especially for families struggling financially or parents returning to work outside of the home, continue to present challenges.

“They’re not likely to scale substantially post-pandemic,” said Thomas Toch, director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd. Pods, he said, were a “rational response” to school closures, but “free public schools, we learned …, play a central role in most families’ lives, their very uneven quality notwithstanding.”

Critics of the pod movement that they would ultimately hurt public schools by taking away student funding. But some districts this fall have tried to reverse the trend and lure back those who fled public schools last year. In the , Virginia district, staff members have made phone calls and sent postcards, texts and emails to those who left for homeschooling or private schools. In Wichita, the district contacted 115 families, including those in pods or microschools. Half have returned, said spokeswoman Susan Arensman.

from EdChoice and Morning Consult shows participation and interest in pods peaked last fall and since then have held constant at about a third of parents. About a quarter of those in pods have left their public schools and about a third who say they are interested in joining one would do so as well. Those who are Black, Hispanic, Democrats, live in urban areas and in the West are among the most likely to participate in pods, while parents who are white, Republican and low-income are among the least likely to show interest, their polling shows.

Privately and publicly funded efforts to lower the costs of pods and microschools are available for those who can’t afford the option. Without such efforts, concerns about pods being a choice only for the more affluent will continue, the Tyton authors warned.

‘Centered on the virus’

School closures drove parents to form pods last year so they could spread the responsibility for teaching — or paying for a teacher — across multiple families. Now some of the restrictions schools put in place to avoid closures are also influencing their decisions.

“The first question I get is, ‘Do you mask?’” said Karla Withrow, who runs EarthChild Explorers, an outdoor program serving preschoolers and grades K-1 in a large Riverside County park in southern California. She doesn’t require masks, and the students are always outside, where transmission is less of a risk. A former preschool director who trained other teachers in San Diego, Withrow weaves nature into her curriculum and recruited her husband, a hot air balloon pilot, to give lessons on weather and wind.

The parents that seek out her program, she said, share a lot of the concerns she had last year when she decided to homeschool her kindergartner.

“I just felt in my heart that classrooms right now aren’t education- and student-centered,” she said. “I think they’re centered on the virus.”

Far from Southern California, on a five-acre farm outside St. Paul, Minnesota, Diane Smith formed a pod with two other families from the White Bear Lake Area Schools. A former fifth-grade teacher in a Catholic school, Smith teaches the students biology and they pooled their money to hire an Algebra II teacher. They’ve taken boat tours on the St. Croix River to study the region’s many bodies of water, and one student’s father, a medical researcher, helped the group dissect a pig’s heart for a science lesson.

But this fall, the parents realized that their children — mostly in high school — need more academic instruction than they can provide. The students are taking some classes from a large homeschool co-op. Smith said the parents have been “blown away” by the support they’ve received from the homeschool community. “Clearly, there is a movement,” she said. “You really aren’t alone.”

Opposition to the district’s mask mandate and restrictions such as keeping students in cohorts to eat lunch are among parents’ reasons for leaving the district. focusing on privilege and racial oppression also played a role. Sixth graders in a choir class were asked to consider how it would feel to be in a privileged group, which included being white, male, Christian or heterosexual, or in a targeted group, including being a person of color, female, Muslim, or LGBT. Smith said, “I thought, ‘Is this the direction we’re going?’”

‘A total place of liberation’

Perhaps one sign of pods’ staying power is that they’ve appealed to parents on all sides of the nation’s frequently polarized debates over race and discrimination in schools. Torlecia Bates decided to pull 10-year-old Kaden and 8-year-old Kaylee out of the Louisa County Public Schools, near Richmond, Virginia, last year when her worries over schools’ COVID-19 mitigation procedures were replaced with concerns about the impact of racial unrest on her children.

“I had a reality check,” she said. “I thought, ‘I have these cute brown kids, but will the world see them as a threat?’”

She began homeschooling and meeting up with other former public school families for playdates. She tagged along on field trips with , a homeschool group that serves Black and multiracial families. This year, she’s joined the group, where her children get help with math, visit museums, go kayaking and “get real-life coping skills,” she said. She teaches them on the other days, and then works the night shift at home for a banking company.

Initially unsure about her decision to leave the district, she said she “went from a place of extreme anxiety, and not being sure if I would be able to measure up, to a total place of liberation.”

She’s also saving money. Bates used to spend $13,000 a year on child care, plus the cost of afterschool programs and activities. Now, she’s spending $250 per month for two days a week at the co-op.

Cultural Roots is among the programs receiving support from the , which launched last year to support nontraditional options like microschools. Some programs use the funds to provide scholarships, and those leading larger pods and co-ops frequently offer sliding fee scales for families.

The microschool concept has caught the attention of choice-supporting policymakers, such as Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican. He announced last month that he’s allocating $3.5 million to the , an advocacy organization, to launch microschools. And in Nevada, the city of North Las Vegas used federal relief funds and worked with a nonprofit to create the , which targets city employees and other frontline personnel.

“It’s almost like free private school,” said Maria Austad, a senior office assistant in the city’s public works department. Last year, she pulled her daughter Isabella, who has Asperger’s syndrome, out of the Clark County School District, where she was frequently getting in disciplinary trouble because of problems with social interaction.

Austad enrolled her daughter in the academy, where students use an online curriculum with help from on-site teaching assistants.

Others found that their local schools were the most sensible choice. Amber Besson, a mother of three who lives north of Wichita, put her youngest in Green Gate for kindergarten last year, while her two other children, 12 and 14, stayed with the Valley Center district’s distance learning program. Now it’s just easier to have everyone together.

“Spending an hour or more in the car before and after work didn’t put me home at a time where I was able to make the best of our evenings with all of our kids,” she said.

To put the movement in perspective, those who have been able to make pods work represent less than 3 percent of the overall K-12 population. But “even a small shift in the enrollment behavior of families can have a big effect on K-12 systems, especially once federal pandemic recovery funding runs dry,” said Alex Spurrier, a senior analyst at Bellwether Education Partners. He wrote about pods and microschools in “,” a report released with the Walton Family Foundation in August. He counted those joining pods and microschools among the 8.7 million students who changed schools between 2019-20 and 2020-21 for reasons other than a normal promotion to the next grade.

Katie Saiz, who co-founded the Green Gate program with her husband in 2008, tells callers her program is full. For years, they only served preschoolers out of their home, but come fall 2020, “there was this huge need in the community,” she said, adding that 97 percent of the families that joined last year because of the pandemic are back this fall.

When the Monsours joined, their third grader was ahead in math, but struggling in language arts. Now, his mother said, he’s become a more confident reader.

“It’s really cool when you are able to put a kid where they need to be,” Saiz said, “and don’t worry so much about where they should be.”

Lead Image: Art teacher Khalid Thompson leads students from the Cultural Roots Co-op on a tour of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. (Cultural Roots Co-op)

Seriously, don’t relocate across state lines, K-12 finance experts warn. Along with changing careers, it’s one of the easiest ways to lose out on your retirement savings. In all, only about one out of five teachers receive their full pensions, while roughly 50 percent don’t remain in a single pension system long enough to qualify for minimum benefits at the end of their service.

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Those dreary findings come from on teacher retirement systems released last month by Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit research and consulting group. Ranking each state retirement system on an A-F scale, the authors find that only a handful can claim to serve both teachers and taxpayers well: Twenty states received F grades, while none received an A.

Andrew Rotherham, one of Bellwether’s founders and a co-author of the paper, noted that a wide variety of states earned spots near the top and bottom of the list, with both Democratic- and Republican-leaning political environments scattered throughout. But across the board, he observed, the status quo in too many states punishes a wide swathe of educators.

“One of the ways this system is sustainable is that it creates millions of small losers and a much smaller number of big winners,” said Rotherham.

Chad Aldeman, a former Bellwether analyst who now serves as policy director of Georgetown University’s , said that there had been some “slow movement” in a few states to offer public employees more choice and portability in their retirement benefits, but that the intertwined issues of back-loaded pensions and colossal debts owed by states were generally going in the wrong direction.

“I would say, in broad strokes, the financial problems keep getting worse,” said Aldeman, who worked on a previous version of Bellwether’s rankings and consulted on this publication. “And the related problem about the way the benefits are structured — it’s moving in fits and starts, but it’s also getting worse.”

Bellwether’s newest report evaluates states on a “comprehensive” basis that rates how each system performs for four separate constituencies: short-term teachers (those who teach in the system for less than 10 years), medium-term teachers (those who remain within the system for 10 years but leave before retirement), long-term teachers (those who spend their entire careers in the system), and taxpayers within each state. Retirement systems in all 50 states and the District of Columbia were ranked in terms of their performance for each category, and they all received an overall score.

Grades were determined through the use of 15 separate variables, including overall funding levels, the length of the vesting period, whether teachers in the state are eligible for Social Security, required teacher contribution rates, and investment returns averaged over 10 years.

South Dakota earned the top score, 88.4 percent, while Tennessee and Washington were the only two other states to notch even B grades. Among the lowest-rated jurisdictions were a litany of red, blue, and purple enclaves: California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Louisiana, the District of Columbia, and Massachusetts, and more than a dozen others.

Those summative scores can conceal significant variation within systems, however. West Virginia, for instance, earns an overall grade of D, partly because it is one of the worst states in the country for short-term teachers (its 10-year vesting period means that huge numbers of educators won’t stay in the job long enough to earn benefits). But it lands just outside the top ten systems for taxpayers because it participates in Social Security, nets fairly high investment returns, and makes relatively high state contributions.

Among all four constituencies, short-term teachers clearly make out the worst, with 33 states and the District of Columbia earning F grades in the category. Of the rest, only five (South Dakota, Oregon, Washington, Florida, and Michigan) even rated a C or higher.

Aldeman said that the policy moves that have contributed to that reality — lengthening vesting periods, slashing benefits for newer teachers, and raising teacher contributions — can sometimes improve a given state’s budgetary picture, but they also tend to disadvantage younger employees and those who don’t stay their whole careers.

​​”When states historically have seen a big-budget bill for pension obligations, they have tended to cut benefits for new workers,” he said. “The cuts mean that newly hired workers have to stay longer to qualify for any benefit at all, have to contribute more of their own salary toward the benefits, and have to wait longer to retire and receive a lower benefit.”

Citing from the right-leaning Illinois Policy Institute, which found that 39 percent of the education funding disbursed by Illinois for the coming school year will be used to pay down the state’s huge debt obligations, Aldeman professed himself “amazed.”

“I mean, you can see the trend; it just keeps going up and up. At some point, will leaders say, ‘That’s enough, we need to do something else about this’?”

‘Life happens’

Teachers in 36 states and the District of Columbia are enrolled in defined benefit pensions programs, through which they make regular contributions to their plan and receive guaranteed payments in retirement. Fourteen states have created “defined contribution” systems, often resembling 401(k) plans, which tend to vest over a shorter period of time and offer greater portability across state lines.

Rotherham argued that education policymakers should not focus exclusively on plan type in debates over how to improve their systems. Defined benefit packages — often caricatured as “gold-plated” vestiges of the mid-20th century, when many employees could expect to retire early with enviable financial security — are not necessarily financially irresponsible for states, he said, and alternative systems can sometimes fail the test of adequacy for the retirees who depend on them.

“This debate has often become very reductionist, and it’s become a debate over what should be the form of the plan — is it defined benefit or defined contribution? — rather than which elements would make it good or bad,” Rotherham said. “And that’s what we need to be talking about because for the plan participants, it’s those elements that affect their lives, not these ideological debates between 401(k)s and pensions.”

Whatever specific structure a state commits to, he said, leaders can no longer condition their retirement benefits on career-long tenures within a given system; any expectation that employees will stay in place for decades is “not a match for our labor market,” Rotherham added.

“If you know you’re going to teach in one place for 30 years, the pension plan works for you, and you should do that. The problem is that people decide they don’t like teaching. They get sick, they have to move, they fall in love with someone whose job requires relocation, they need to be a caregiver. Life happens, people make plans that don’t work out, so these structures have to have some flexibility.”

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham is co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners and serves on the board of directors of ����Ӱ��.