Pandemic causes decline in education enrollment

School enrollment fell. National test scores plummeted. Teaching jobs remained empty, mental health needs were on the rise, and roughly half of students were below grade level in at least one subject as this school year started.

A federal study released Wednesday — “Report on the Condition of Education 2023” — stitched together often-stark data from a dozen sources about the many ways that schools, students and teachers struggled in 2021-2022 as the pandemic persisted.

The report, from the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), showed lagging enrollment in the nation’s public schools — down 3 percent in 2021, with 49.4 million students compared with 50.8 million before the pandemic, in 2019.

But researchers also pointed to a partial rebound for children in prekindergarten and kindergarten: Before the pandemic, for instance, 54 percent of 3- and 4-year-olds were in school — a number that dropped to 40 percent in 2020, then grew to 50 percent in 2021.

“The condition of education, as one might expect, is a complicated picture for the United States,” NCES Commissioner Peggy G. Carr said. “And things have been complicated more, I think, by the past two or three years, as we have struggled with a pandemic impact across our nation.”

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