Officials are dipping into reserves to cover an $88 million deficit. They’re continuing afterschool enrichment programs, like STEM and basketball, and promising to protect teaching, counseling and school leadership positions even though the COVID relief funds that paid for many of them have nearly dried up.

In talks with staff and the public, the district heard that the extra support “dramatically moved the needle academically and should be continued,” said district spokeswoman Christina Clark. Philadelphia, she added, aims to become “the fastest improving, large urban school district in the nation.”

But for now, the budget doesn’t reflect what some experts call “right-sizing” — reducing staffing levels to reflect an enrollment decline that is expected to for another decade. 

“You’re making a big gamble,” said Daniel DiSalvo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “You’re either flatlining or increasing your school spending while the number of students is falling.” 

But Philadelphia, which is projected to run out of reserves in two years, is far from the only urban district in that spot. In a new paper released Thursday, DiSalvo and Reade Ben, an economic policy analyst at the institute, take stock of similar issues in the nation’s largest school districts. They show that while enrollment nationally fell 2% between 2013 and 2023, the number of teachers rose 11% and per-pupil spending continued to climb.

Prior to the pandemic, population and enrollment declines tended to hit certain pockets of the country, experts say; even Philadelphia closed more than 20 schools . But district and state leaders have no experience dealing with enrollment loss of this magnitude, which is exacerbated by expiring relief funds.

“Historically, when we’ve seen districts go through these things it’s been like a few of them at a time — not like all of the big districts at once,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. Those districts, she added, have “such a big impact on our country’s perception of what’s going on with public education.”

Feeling the ‘brunt of it’

The amount districts spend per student increased in all nine of the cities the authors examined — New York City, Houston, San Diego, Dallas, Austin, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Antonio and Los Angeles. Houston, for example, spent $8,011 per student in 2013 and in 2022, spent $14,183.

Total staff increased over that time period in four cities — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas. The number of staff members in New York City increased from 11,202 to over 12,700.

“It is evident that school districts have yet to adjust their staffing and budgeting to the reality of fewer students,” they wrote.

Their data, however, doesn’t reflect more recent actions in some districts. New York City Mayor Eric Adams $700 million from the district’s budget since November, but canceled a third round of cuts in February.

The story plays out a bit differently from state to state.

Philadelphia is looking for relief from the legislature, which is under a 2023 court order to remedy past school funding disparities. currently pending would close an annual $1.4 billion gap for the district over the next seven years and significantly reduce future deficits, Clark said.

The authors also focus on Texas, which, unlike Pennsylvania, is growing and is California as the state with the most students in public school by this fall.

But that growth is more in the and in “,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant who works with many districts in the state. He noted that school boards don’t get a lot of say in whether a charter opens in their district because the state education agency authorizes of them.

“If 5,000 students enroll in charters instead of district schools, then the district feels the entire brunt of it,” Eschbacher said.

Confronting that reality, the Plano district is , while leaders in Fort Worth have delayed for now. The Fort Worth district did, however, eliminate more than that were mostly paid for with relief funds, including “success coaches” who worked with high school freshmen, instructional specialists and assessment staff. Another victim of enrollment loss: Full-time , which some schools are cutting.

“Hopefully, kids will be selecting the right book because there’s not going to be anybody there to guide them,” said Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, who leads Parent Shield Fort Worth, an advocacy group. She doesn’t have a problem with the district closing schools, but understands why some community members pushed back. “Schools are like landmarks where parents and grandparents and older children have gone.” 

The outlook is more dire in California, which is another 660,000 students by the 2032-33 school year.

The reaction to those forecasts has varied. Some districts, like San Diego Unified, announced — and then — layoff notices this spring, while others, including , issued pink slips. Some plan to not replace staff members who leave or retire.

“It’s a mixed bag,” said Michael Fine, CEO of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which monitors districts in financial distress. The number of districts on his watch list actually dropped from 37 to 23 between December and March. “What that tells me is that school boards did what they needed to do, given the data about where they were headed.”

The greatest loss — 278,600 students — is expected in Los Angeles County, where some districts, like Inglewood Unified, began years before the pandemic. Home to massive new pro sports and entertainment venues that are pushing up the , Inglewood is closing at the end of next school year. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in the county, is currently from firms that will “attract and retain students.” But the district is also closing one under-enrolled school this summer, and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has that more are to come.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has from a shortfall in state revenues so they can adjust more gradually to the loss of federal aid. But school board members and the say the plan, which includes borrowing from reserves, is risky and could end up costing districts more in the future. 

To DiSalvo and Ben, that pushback shows that unions will push for a “new normal” of lower staff-student ratios and higher spending.

“This will put policymakers in a bind,” they wrote. To avoid cuts, they’ll have to either “increase taxes or find other ways to pay for schools with more teachers and staff but fewer students.”

Asking voters to approve a tax hike is also a risk, Roza said. In Vermont, for example, where residents vote on school budgets, many are their district’s proposals.  

“Vermont has had steady enrollment declines for decades,” she said. “So communities are like, ‘Why do the costs keep going up?’ ”

Foremost among them: expanding career and technical education.

Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the conservative , scoured the websites of all 72 major-party candidates in 2022’s gubernatorial races. In all, he found 27 education issues supported by at least one candidate.

The data suggest clear partisan divides: Among Democrats, the top two issues mentioned were increasing K-12 funding and expanding Pre-K. Among Republicans, it was school choice and curricular reform.

But one issue rounded out the top three among both Democrats and Republicans: CTE. Along with greater funding, it was mentioned more frequently than any other topic. In all, 30 candidates, or 42%, featured it on their websites.

Higher funding held a distant fourth place for Republicans, far below CTE. An equal percentage of GOP candidates — 22% — expressed support for charter schools and better reading instruction.

Smarick, a member of the University of Maryland System’s Board of Regents who has also served as chair of the state’s Higher Education Commission and president of its State Board of Education, said he wasn’t surprised to find CTE hold such a prominent place.

“So many people have pushed for so long for a ‘college for all’ mentality, which was good and important, that now a lot of elected officials are saying we also have to do something on certificates and certifications and apprenticeships” and other career-driven outcomes.

He also noted that many college-going students don’t end up with a four-year degree. “So state legislators and governors have to think in terms of ‘How do we serve all of these adults?’”

The findings resonate with those of a survey released earlier this month that found Americans now want K-12 education to focus on “practical, tangible skills” such as managing one’s personal finances, preparing meals and making appointments. Such outcomes now rank as Americans’ No. 1 educational priority.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is already signaling that CTE is a priority: Last week he previewed the administration’s “Raise the Bar: Unlocking Career Success” initiative, which seeks to overhaul secondary education with an eye toward granting students the skills and credentials necessary to enter college or the workforce after 12th grade. 

Designed in concert with First Lady Jill Biden as well as the secretaries of commerce and labor, it urges colleges to offer dual-enrollment coursework to high school juniors.

The National Student Clearinghouse has estimated that the number of students with “some college, no credential” in 2020 grew to , roughly the .

It may be a surprise, then, that while 28% of Democratic candidates in Smarick’s analysis mentioned expanding community college, not a single Republican did.

Big differences between incumbents, challengers

Smarick also broke out mentions between incumbents and challengers, finding that non-incumbent Democrats discussed several issues that no incumbent did: One in four articulated what he called an “anti-school choice position,” and more than one in five argued for less school testing. 

He theorized that perhaps these challengers “believed taking these positions would help them win primaries and garner support of teachers’ unions.”

Likewise, 38% of Republican non-incumbents expressed support for charter schools, while not a single Republican incumbent did. Non-incumbents were about twice as likely as incumbents to say they supported school choice more generally (81% to 40%). Smarick suggested that this is because these non-incumbents, like their Democratic counterparts, were also focused on winning primaries and earning the support of base voters who support more ideological causes.

Incumbents, he said, zeroed in on more practical day-to-day issues like early childhood and funding and, in red states, expanding the number of choices available to families. “It just seems like once you’ve been in office for a while, a lot of these incumbents realize that lots of families like their traditional public schools and they want to make sure that they’re well-funded.”

That may especially be true of schools in the “COVID era,” he said, which need extra funding so students can recover academically. 

More broadly, Smarick said, public opinion polls consistently show that the public “likes the idea of well-funded schools. So it’s not really a surprise that incumbents, including Republicans, put that on their list of things that they want to make sure they accomplish.”

Harvard University education scholar Martin West, a co-author of the annual public opinion survey on school issues, said the differences between incumbents and non-incumbents are “fascinating” and suggest that “the experience of running a state school system, or perhaps the responsibility of having run one, has a moderating effect on candidates’ views.”

He also noted that the striking differences in positions taken by Democrat and Republican candidates are consistent with the most recent EdNext findings showing greater partisan polarization overall.

Blue state, red state, swing state divides

When it came to the states candidates were vying to lead, Democratic nominees didn’t offer many surprises: Those in blue states supported traditional “higher-dollar” initiatives such as expanding pre-K and community college, and raising K-12 funding levels and teacher pay. And while blue-state Democrats talked about investments in community college and university systems, swing-state Democrats were much more likely to discuss CTE.

As for Republicans, red-state GOP candidates were actually less likely to advocate for more red-meat Republican positions such as a parents’ bill of rights or measures to block so-called critical race theory in the classroom. Just one in five GOP nominees in red states advocated for these policies, fewer than in blue or swing states.

Perhaps most striking: In blue states, more than half of GOP nominees took a pro-charter position, but in red states, not a single GOP nominee did. They were also four times more likely to advocate for more K-12 funding than their blue-state GOP counterparts.

Smarick said that perhaps red-state GOP nominees saw less of a need than their blue-state counterparts to fret about instructional crises in schools — or that perhaps their states’ public schools perform well enough to lessen the need to advocate for school-choice and charter reforms.

But it may also suggest a kind of “remarkable” generational change around charter schools, he said.

“If we go back 10, 15, 20 years ago, lots of Republican candidates were more willing to talk about charter schools than school choice,” Smarick said. “Now it seems to have flipped.”

And since many of those pro-school-choice Republicans won their races, he said, “in red states, we’re going to see the tax credits, more ESA [Education Savings Account] stuff. And this is different than it was, certainly, a generation ago.”

Overall, nearly two-thirds (64%) of Republicans in Smarick’s analysis talked about supporting school choice, while just one Democrat, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, mentioned it.

When it came to how these issues played out, Smarick found a few surprises: Increasing K-12 funding was a “top-five” issue among winners in blue, swing, and red states.

Matt Hogan, a partner at the Democratic polling firm , said he wasn’t surprised. He said Impact’s polling has consistently shown that increasing K-12 funding “is very popular and its continued popularity is consistent with voters’ desire a focus on bread-and-butter issues when it comes to education, rather than engaging in culture war fights.” 

For Democrats, Harvard’s West noted, the push for more K-12 funding was paired with expanding Pre-K and community college, two investments “with which K-12 funding will have to compete.” That may help to explain why states that switch from Republican to Democratic control have traditionally on K-12 schools, he said.

In the end, what might be most significant in Smarick’s findings is what’s not mentioned: teacher shortages. They got “minimal attention” from candidates, with just three of 72 even mentioning the issue.

“I kept looking through these websites, expecting half or three-quarters of candidates to talk about it, and they just didn’t,” Smarick said.

Though the issue was , “It was the dog that didn’t bark” on candidates’ websites. “Which makes you think maybe we ought to take a look at what’s happening in states as opposed to just following national narratives about education policy.”

, part of a series of studies conducted in the wake of high-profile litigation against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, shows that Hispanic and African American applicants to both colleges enjoy substantial advantages relative to whites and Asian Americans. Their chances of acceptance are drastically higher than they would be in the absence of affirmative action, but with a somewhat counterintuitive addendum: preferential treatment is relatively weaker for minority applicants from poor and working-class backgrounds than it is for their peers from more affluent families.

Those findings, and those of the preceding papers, are built on data that was made publicly available during the discovery phase of two lawsuits — Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — that were before the court. Peter Arcidiacono, an economist at Duke University and the studies’ lead author, has provided expert testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, who claim that the storied institutions have systematically discriminated against Asian applicants. In an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, he said he hoped his work would help clarify the public debate over one of the most divisive issues in American politics.

“So much of the debate about affirmative action is happening in this binary where you’re either for it or against it,” Arcidiacono observed. “But there’s a large range of possibilities, from just [using] race as a tiebreaker to fully equal outcomes. So in order to get a sense for whether affirmative action has gone too far or has not gone far enough, you have to understand the role that race plays currently, and you can’t do that without the data.”

Those questions are becoming more concrete by the month. in the case, which will be heard in the 2022-23 term. With plaintiffs asking the nation’s highest court to bar the consideration of race and ethnicity as a factor in the college application process, and Republicans in Congress that would force colleges to publicize their use of non-academic characteristics in admissions, the stage is being set for a major rollback of affirmative action as it has been practiced for half a century. According to Arcidiacono’s latest study, a significant reversal could shrink the percentage of African American students admitted to Harvard by more than two-thirds.

Georgetown economist Harry Holzer finds those projections plausible. A proponent of race-based affirmative action, he signed (alongside multiple Nobel laureates) defending Harvard’s policies that was filed in a lower-court iteration of the suit. Arcidiacono’s line of research “makes reasonable points,” Holzer said, while arguing that it does not invalidate the use of racial considerations by admissions officers. 

“It doesn’t change my support for affirmative action to see his numbers, though I certainly don’t disagree with the research findings. It shows that when very elite schools practice affirmative action in admissions, which they do, it does effectively raise the admission rate for people of color — especially African Americans — by a lot.” 

Race & class

Arcidiacono and his coauthors dug into admissions records for over 300,000 domestic applicants to the admissions classes of 2014–2019, of which roughly 142,000 applied to Harvard, 57,000 applied to UNC as in-state candidates, and 105,000 applied to the same college from out of state. Applicant-level information included demographic attributes such as race and socioeconomic status, as well as richly detailed academic records covering high school grades, standardized test scores, and individual ratings from admissions officers across a range of academic and non-academic indicators. 

Combining high school GPA, SAT scores, and scores on SAT II subject tests, the research team created academic ratings for each applicant and ranked them by decile (a statistical measurement dividing data into 10 equal parts). The lowest-performing students were grouped into the bottom 10 percent and the strongest performers grouped into the top 10 percent. Most African Americans fell into the bottom 20 percent of all applicants to both Harvard and UNC, but they were admitted at the highest rate for almost every performance decile, followed by Hispanic, white, and Asian applicants.

The acceptance gaps between categories are largest around the middle of the spectrum for academic qualifications, with African Americans applying to Harvard being accepted at a rate double that of Hispanics — and 12 times greater than Asian Americans — at the fifth decile (i.e., between the 41st and 50th percentile of qualifications). For out-of-state applicants to UNC, African Americans at the fifth decile were almost 33 times more likely to be accepted than Asian Americans and 14 times more likely than whites. 

Overall, Harvard’s policies roughly quadrupled the likelihood that an African American applicant would be accepted relative to a white student with similar academic qualifications, while multiplying the likelihood of admissions 2.4 times for Hispanics. For out-of-state applicants to UNC, the force of racial preferences multiplied African Americans from 1.5 percent of admitted students to 15.6 percent, a tenfold increase. Black applicants applying in-state to Chapel Hill gained a smaller advantage from affirmative action, becoming 70 percent likelier to win admission.

Beyond these general calculations, the authors noticed a peculiar interaction between race and class. While white applicants from lower-income families appear to receive an advantage in admissions relative to wealthier whites with similar academic profiles, disadvantaged African Americans and Hispanics do not. Affluent applicants of color therefore receive a comparatively larger boost over affluent white applicants than poor and working-class students of color enjoy over poor and working-class whites. 

Holzer said the substantive arguments in favor of affirmative action — particularly the educational value of maintaining a racially diverse campus — “don’t require that the specific recipient face bias or barriers in the past.” Still, he asserted that low-income students of color deserve “extra credit” not only for their race but also their class background.

“If the bump for just being African American is really large, you could imagine that maybe [admissions officers] think, ‘We’re already taking care of that problem,’” Holzer said. “But for someone like me, who thinks that class really matters a lot, you want to make sure that lower-income students of color get consideration.”

Arcidiacono argued that the large edge claimed by some wealthy students, even if they come from historically excluded groups, risks eroding public faith in the fairness of admissions altogether. Disillusionment already exists not only due to long-running patterns of underrepresentation, he added, but also newer blots such as the Varsity Blues scandal, which saw moneyed parents conniving with college employees and private admissions counselors to game the system.

“This is in the context of a system that completely favors people who come from richer backgrounds,” Arcidiacono said, listing the factors already favoring upper-class applicants: ready access to college counselors, special weight placed on extracurricular activities, and recruitment for sports like sailing and golf.

“To me, one of the arguments for affirmative action would be that you’re trying to build trust in the system for a group that has been traditionally disenfranchised. But the way you do that matters, and it’s not really hitting the poorer African Americans — they’re not the ones benefiting the most.” 

The ‘narrowly tailored’ standard

The Supreme Court will consider Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard this fall, eight years after it was first filed in federal district court. When a decision is finally reached, the case could fundamentally alter the practice of affirmative action in college admissions and, with it, the racial composition of some of the country’s most prestigious schools.

Existing Court precedent was set in the 2003 Grutter vs. Bollinger case, in which a plaintiff alleged that preference systems at public graduate schools — in that instance, the University of Michigan Law School — illegally disadvantaged white students on racial grounds. A majority led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor found instead that “the narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions” was constitutionally permissible, while adding that the issue would be ripe for reexamination within 25 years. That deadline has nearly elapsed, and the Harvard litigants seek to reopen the question of whether affirmative action has been “narrowly tailored” to begin with.

The case, along with the corresponding UNC suit, centers on the accusation by a group of Asian American students that Harvard’s policies unfairly disfavored them relative to applicants from every other racial group. Although the admissions candidates with the highest GPAs and test scores are disproportionately Asian American — showed that about one-quarter of Asian high school graduates scored above a 1400 on the SAT, compared with 8 percent of whites, 2 percent of Hispanics, and 1 percent of African Americans — they were consistently graded lower according to Harvard’s personality scores. A released by Arcidiacono and his colleagues suggested that, absent the subjective penalty that Asian applicants face, they would be admitted at a rate 19 percent higher than currently prevails.

The findings instantiated a theory that first gained widespread attention a decade ago, when one right-wing commentator that Asian Americans were tacitly being held back by admissions quotas lest they grow to dominate Ivy League campuses. Although Asian high schoolers were routinely among the top-performing students in the United States, their numeric presence on elite campuses peaked around 1990 and remained roughly the same over the next 20 years.

Trends in Asian American college enrollment were the focus of by the Manhattan Institute. Author Robert VerBruggen, a journalist and fellow at the conservative think tank, noted that the unmistakable stagnation in representation — which occurred even as Asians were continually growing as a percentage of all college aspirants — began to lift about about a decade ago. Whether that was connected to the growing focus on apparent discrimination is unclear.

“It’s an interesting question why that’s happened, but it’s certainly consistent with the narrative that everybody started making a stink about it, lawsuits were filed, and schools got a lot more careful about what they were doing,” Verbruggen said.

The release of the schools’ data allowed researchers to investigate trends in admissions beyond purported anti-Asian bias. In a widely covered , Arcidiacono and his co-authors calculated that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard between 2014 and 2019 were either legacies, recruited athletes, children of university faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list (i.e., relatives of potential high-dollar donors). Another postulated that the school, which has its efforts to diversify, may African American students who stand virtually no chance of gaining admission. 

“In some sense, there’s this uneasy compromise that works to the detriment of Asian Americans and poor whites,” Arcidiacono said. “You’ve got the racial preferences helping underrepresented minorities get into certain colleges, and you’ve got the legacy and athlete preferences helping rich, disproportionately white kids get into college.”

A Supreme Court ruling favorable to the plaintiffs could leave that system profoundly changed, upsetting the demographic mix that elite schools have worked hard to cultivate. By Arcidiacono’s accounting, the proportion of African Americans admitted to Harvard over the period he studied would have been less than 1 percent if acceptance was offered on the basis of academic qualifications alone; those admitted to UNC in-state or out-of-state would sink to 4.3 percent and less than 2 percent, respectively. At the same time, the percentage of Asian Americans would have risen substantially — to over 50 percent of all admitted students, in Harvard’s case.

While oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard won’t come for months, the recently announced recusal of soon-to-be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is a promising sign for the plaintiffs. With the departure of Anthony Kennedy and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court has lost two members who had previously ruled in favor of race-based affirmative action in postsecondary education.

Whatever the legal outcome, VerBruggen said that Arcidiacono’s work offered considerable value simply by shining a light on the internal admissions processes in two highly competitive universities.

“Schools are so tight-lipped about their affirmative action policies that we don’t have a lot of data on them,” he remarked. “If you want to know what’s going on in a school, you basically have to sue them.”