Private School Enrollment in Pennsylvania Dropped Substantially During Pandemic

A recent policy brief from Penn State’s Center for Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis found that “despite claims that students migrated from public to private schools to take advantage of in-person schooling … there was a decline in private school enrollment that was largely consistent with the slow and steady decline in enrollment of private schools across the last decade.”

The report challenges the popular narrative that the pandemic fueled a shift in enrollment from public to private schools.

The Center found that private school enrollment in Pennsylvania, in fact, fell 7.1 percent, more than double the public school enrollment decrease of 3.2 percent, according to the Philadelphia-based NPR and PBS affiliate WHYY. The data for private schools look better only if numbers are included for enrollment at Penn Foster, a for-profit, online private high school. With 13,000 students enrolled at Penn Foster, the decline in private school enrollment amounted to 1.5 percent. But the enrollment figures at Penn Foster could decline significantly once public schools reopen in September for in-person instruction.

According to the brief, “the majority of student enrollment loss was concentrated in the earlier grades,” including pre-kindergarten, for which the Center does not collect any data on private school enrollment. The concentrated drop in kindergarten and pre-K enrollment suggests that “many families opted to hold their children out of school for an extra year rather than navigate the ever-changing menu of in-person and online options,” reported WHYY. It remains to be seen whether families will re-enroll their students in the schools that they left and at which grade levels they will enroll them.

One exception to the across-the-board drop in enrollment was cyber charter schools, which are privately run and publicly funded. The online schools added more than 22,000 students in Pennsylvania during the pandemic, representing a 59 percent year-over-year increase, reported WHYY.