> If the reason is that students are being homeschooled or going to private schools, then this seems like great news.

It's not (the plunging enrollment is largely due to age demographics, which the article acknowledges, with the rest apparently associated with the pandemic, with the article admitting that no one knows the underlying dynamics really are, but insisting that experts are somehow sure that they are durable), but it wouldn't be great news if it was..

> It's well known that the public school system in the US is just not up to snuff.

It's less well-known, but no less true, that (controlling for factors that determine success within the public schools, like parental engagement, parental educational attainment, socioeconomic status, etc.) the alternatives are no better, though they look better before controlling for those things (though less so over time as the demographics in the alternatives become less skewed) because they tend to cherry pick the most advantaged students, largely simply by being non-default choices and therefore cutting off the low tail of the parental involvement distribution.

It's obviously true, to the point of tautology, that schools which pick students who will likely succeed will tend to have students who succeed. But I wouldn't say that these schools offer nothing better after controls.

If it takes Timmy, on average, 2 days to learn a lesson and Tom 20 minutes to learn a lesson, then a system that focuses more on the educator of source of problems, instead of the child, is going to trend towards each lesson taking 2 days. And Tom? Well I imagine many of us were Tom. He'll be bored out of his mind, but hopefully can manage to use his vast swaths of free time for something other than shenanigans and being the class clown. By contrast at a school where Tom is the mean student, similar lessons can now trend towards being done in 20 minutes. Tom has a much more interesting time, learns vastly more, and comes out far better at the end.

Yes I'm aware of ideals like differentiated instruction [1] but it not only poses a massive burden on educators, it also fails to solve the problem. Even in its ideal scenario, you end up sacrificing breadth for an ideal of depth that in many cases is somewhat nonsensical. Instead of having since learned geometry, Tom is instead stuck continuing to "learn" basic arithmetic he already knows, but with 'enriched opportunities for educational depth' [with basic arithmetic].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiated_instruction

Coming from a country where private schools dominate public schools in terms of the quality of education, i assure you this is not great news. Public schools will be left with underprivileged students and the worst teaching/administration staff and it would become a great source of inequality.

It's already the case in the US that the quality of a private school education is substantially higher than even rich-neighborhood public schools.

Public schools have fantastic and cost effective results except where they are sabotaged by politics. Unfortunately destroying public education for explicitly racist reasons is now a central plank in the republican platform.

Extra funding has been provided to Abbott districts in New Jersey for decades, and these largely black districts are better funded than the districts in the wealthiest (and whitest) parts of the state. In spite of this, the performance gap has increased between Abbott and non-Abbott districts.

Also I don't think the word "explicitly" (or "racist," or both) means what you think it means.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district

Conclusion: facts are racist

What a lazy and completely unsupported talking point.

Who shut down the public schools resulting in catastrophic learning loss and depression? I'll give you a hint. It wasn't Florida.

None of those are banned.

Well, I don't personally identify with either side of the political divide, but it seems like increasing the quality of educational outcomes for our nation's children should be a primary concern with basic bipartisan agreement. Wishful thinking perhaps.

Wishful thinking indeed. School board elections, along with other local elections, are now just gateways for radical idealogs to gain entry level positions in politics. Quality education isn't even on the radar. Not that there is even a baseline agreement on what "quality" means anymore.

This is why I left California. They way things are going, it won't be long until "decolonizing mathematics" becomes part of the standard curriculum. In the meantime, illiteracy is growing and STEM grades are plummeting.

https://www.city-journal.org/california-public-schools-are-f...

I can't read your comment. The hyperbole is too blinding.

"This system works great except when it doesnt"

If public schools, run by the government, don't work great when politicians get involved than that means they are not a good option.

> This system works great except when it doesnt

Is a meaningless tautology.

There are plenty of well run public schools throughout the world. Politicians are involved in all of them by definition. If you have a failing political system your public schools won't do well, but neither will your private schools.

> Is a meaningless tautology.

I was summarizing your post.

> on average their outcomes are worse than the alternatives.

Very much not true.

The worst alternative by far are online charter schools

"CREDO’s 2015 study in coordination with Mathematica Policy Research and the Center on Reinventing Public Education revealed that students of online charter schools had significantly weaker academic performance in math and reading, compared with their counterparts in conventional schools." - https://credo.stanford.edu/our-impact/

"We found that students who switched to virtual charter schools experienced large, negative effects on mathematics and English/language arts achievement that persisted over time and that these effects could not be explained by observed teacher or classroom characteristics" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X2090981...

Those studies seem to point out the differences between virtual and brick-and-mortar charter schools. It's not surprising to me that virtualized classrooms have worse outcomes. We're all very aware now of the limitations of video chat.

That's rather my point, yes? Public schools are not the worst teaching alternative.

They compare online charter schools with in-person conventional schools. Hardly a fair fight. The biggest disaster of all is online conventional schools.

> The biggest disaster of all is online conventional schools

Do you have any evidence that online charter schools are worse than online conventional schools?

Because pre-COVID the evidence from online charter schools that they are, overall, a disaster, as in (quoting https://www.edweek.org/technology/cyber-charters-have-overwh... )

] Statistically speaking, the gains that online charter students saw in math were so limited, it was “literally as though the student did not go to school for the entire year,” said Macke Raymond, the director the Center for Research on Education Outcomes

As far as I know, students in public schools who switched to online during COVID still had a gain in math education.

You'll see from the same source that the student:teacher ratio for online charters was 30:1 "compared to 20:1 for brick-and-mortar charters and 17:1 for traditional public schools. At the high school level, more than one-third of the online charters surveyed reported typical class sizes of 50 or more."

Conventional schools did not fire half of their teachers when switching to online.

For your statement to be true would mean the negative effects were wide-spread, severe, and obvious, and it would mean that doubling the number of teachers per student makes no difference - contra all evidence.

>Do you have any evidence that online charter schools are worse than online conventional schools?

I wrote exactly the opposite. Perhaps your poor reading comprehension makes you a less than ideal candidate for critiquing education?

That was a typo, which I did not catch during proof reading.

"Assume good faith." - my intent is easy to understand from the rest of my comment, and citation.

I'll ask again, where is your evidence that online conventional schools are a bigger disaster than cyber charters?

Remember, jamesgreenleaf in the g'parent at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31419272 said outcomes are worse in public schools than the alternatives. My point is that's simply not true, given how bad cyber charters are.