Education

‘Can’t Explain’: Thousands Of Students Who Left School During The Pandemic Are Unaccounted For: REPORT

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Thousands of students who fled the public school system during the pandemic are unaccounted for by K-12 school districts, according to a report by Stanford University and the Associated Press.

Roughly 240,000 K-12 students in 21 states and the District of Columbia had no school records from 2019-2022, according to a report by Stanford University and the Associated Press. Though most students who left the public school system entered into home-schooling and the public school system, more than one-third of the students are unaccounted for.

“There’s this chunk that we just can’t explain,”  Thomas S. Dee, a Stanford professor and the author of the study, told The Wall Street Journal.

Through 2019-2022, in 21 states where data was available, 710,000 left the public school system, the report showed. Private school enrollment rose by 103,000 students while home-schooled students increased by 184,000.

The population of school-aged kids in the U.S. dropped by about 183,000 students, the report stated. Regardless of the increases in private and home-school enrollment, thousands are not recorded in the school system.

It is possible that families are not enrolling their students in kindergarten and home-schooling their children without notifying the school, the report stated. At least 19 states mandate that kids enroll in kindergarten and states who do not require the grade were more likely to have undocumented students.

The unaccounted for students come as the nation suffers historic learning loss; between 2020 and 2022, the nation’s reading scores dropped to fall in line with numbers from 1990, while math scores fell for the first time. Every state has seen a decline in its students’ math scores since 2019 while fourth and eighth-grade students recorded the largest drops ever.