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?’ ”

Let’s go to the tape!

The first objection is fundamental in nature and should be enough to kill the idea before it is fully formed, like taking out a weed as it starts to shoot up. Health insurance is a job-linked benefit, and that is one of its very worst features — which says something when ranking bad things about U.S. health insurance. Lose your job, lose your health care. Why, oh why, would we want to replicate that standard for child care?

In fact, making child care a job-linked benefit manages to be an even more terrible idea, because you’re not just losing access to the child care you need to work, you’re wrenching your child away from their caregiver. Young children thrive on consistency and reliability; studies show that has a number of negative effects on children’s development.

Ok, you might say, fair enough. However! The alternative at the moment is, um, . So something is better than nothing? Well, no. In this case, something is a fool’s-gold stand-in for a real solution! It’s the equivalent of handing a twenty to a homeless individual versus funding robust public services. Except it’s actually worse, because there’s nothing wrong with giving a homeless person a twenty, but in this case you’re handing that individual a twenty while actively working to cut the public services they need.

I’m talking, of course, about corporate taxes. Corporations have long of their mouths on child care, waxing poetic about its importance while at the same time fighting tooth or nail against . This fingers-crossed-behind-the-back maneuver has been on impressive display during the debate about the Build Back Better Act: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been simultaneously on how much the lack of child care is costing the economy while opposing the legislation that would fix child care.

So, no, unless a company is also lobbying for a functional, sustainable, publicly-supported child care system, it gets no gold stars for throwing a tiny percentage of its workforce a bone.

And it truly is a tiny percentage. Take Home Depot as an archetypal example. Home Depot has approximately 500,000 employees. They in 2012 at their Atlanta headquarters with capacity for 278 children. Great for those families, no help to… hmm, (puts on green accountant hat, clacks away at old-timey calculator), almost everyone else.

What about companies that give front-line workers some light benefits? Bzzzz. Sorry, that’s the sound of a half-measure. Giving employees a break on child care costs when there is no child care to be found is giving them a voucher for milk on empty shelves. The child care crisis is not merely about affordability; programs are and closing because there isn’t enough money flowing in the system, period. We don’t just need parent fees to go down, we need program revenues to go up. There is only one actor capable of accomplishing that two-step (spoiler alert: it’s the government).

When the discussion about corporate child care benefits comes up, I often like to ask people to perform a thought experiment. Consider, if you will, the first grade. As of tomorrow, first grade is no longer provided as a matter of public education, but instead requires all parents to pony up $12,000 in order for their child to attend. In response, a handful of companies start to offer on-site first grade. A handful of others offer their employees a partial stipend to help defray the cost of first grade.

You recognize how ridiculous this is, of course. We expect corporations to pay into our public schools, primarily via business property taxes. It’s a common good everyone benefits from that requires paying into the common purse. I could talk for a long while about how K-12 school funding is inequitable and flawed, but no one is pinching pennies to pay for the first grade nor unable to find a slot. It’s time to stop letting businesses freeload on child care.

So, companies, stop building child care centers until and unless you are standing up and telling the government to . Otherwise, you are not part of the solution. You are very, very much part of the problem.