Enrollment Tracker: 2020–2022
Following Spring 2020 school closures, enrollment fell 2.5% in Fall 2020 — over 1 in 40 students. In Fall 2021, enrollments rebounded in districts that spent 2020-21 mostly in-person. Those that stayed remote longer, saw even more students leave.
Learn more about this chart.
State enrollment changes varied considerably, with smaller declines in 2021–22 than in the first pandemic school year.
Nineteen of 46 states declined by 3% or more and five states saw net gains from 2020 and 2022.
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Where are public schools seeing an enrollment recovery? In districts that returned to in-person more quickly.
- The most remote districts lost 1.2% more students in 2021-22, a two year slide of 4.4% – or 1 in 22 students.
- The most in-person districts rebounded 0.9% in 2021-22, for a net loss of 1 in 93 students.
Enrollment declines also differed by voting history and county masking. Toggle the charts below to see how the divides varied by districts and county characteristics.
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Enrollment declines also fall along partisan lines.
- Districts enrollment declines were relatively similar in 2020–21, regardless of 2020 voting patterns.
- In 2021–22, most districts that voted for Trump rebounded, while enrollment continued to fall in those that voted for Biden.
Enrollment declines differ by grade level, but across each, gaps by in-person instruction remained consistent. Click the tabs to see how enrollment varied by grade levels and instruction.
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Every district across the nation has been disrupted by COVID. The road to recovery for schools will be long, especially for those that were more COVID-cautious. The differences R2L captured in 2020–21 Instruction Offerings that impacted the enrollment numbers above are also reflected in our Mask Requirement data.
Explore our entire site to see how the COVID–19 pandemic affected public schools, and return again for more data coming soon.
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About
The map of school district K-12 enrollments across the 2019-20, 2020-21, and 2021-22 school years displays enrollment changes using a heat map of districts by enrollment changes across the pandemic. Each dot is colored by relative enrollment declines, with blue dots representing larger two year declines and green dots representing smaller declines. Note that Kansas & Rhode Island only provide district PK through grade 12 totals, and thus display changes in PK-12 enrollments.
Data are unavailable for Kentucky, Tennessee, Montana, and Vermont.
Virtual Districts were removed from this map, however, virtual and online schools within districts could not be disaggregated from district totals uniformly, and are thus included in these totals. As such, the enrollment declines published here are the upper bound of total brick and mortar enrollment declines.
The district data displayed are comparable within states and across years, but may differ from the final published enrollment counts for districts. For instance, in states that provided preliminary 45 day enrollment counts, but whose final, 100 day enrollment counts were unavailable, the 45 day counts were used across all years.
Source: Author’s calculations using R2L data and state enrollment data files.About
The table displays 46 states’ student weighted K-12 enrollment declines from 2019-20 to 2020-21, and from 2020-21 to 2021-22 as a percentage of pre-pandemic enrollment (2019-20).
Source: Author’s calculations using R2L data and state enrollment data files.
More Information on Variable Definitions
Presidential Vote
Presidential vote indicates counties’ voting histories in the 2020 election. “Majority Trump Votes” refers to a district that resides in a county, or counties, that cast more votes for Donald Trump than for Joe Biden. “Majority Biden Votes” refers to a district that resides in a county (or counties) that case more votes for Joe Biden than Donald Trump.
Source: Author’s calculations using R2L data and state enrollment data files.
Mask Usage
Mask usage was measured in summer of 2020 and indicates the estimated percentage of people within a county who would say “always” in response to the question “How often do you wear a mask in public when you expect to be within six feet of another person?” These data were collected from an online survey by the global data and survey firm Dynata at the request of The New York Times. Survey responses were collected between July 2 and July 14, 2020.
The three groups of districts include 4,019 in the highest masking group, 3,666 in the middle masking group, and 3,650 in the lowest masking group.
Source: Author’s calculations using state enrollment data files and Mask Wearing Survey Data at the New York Times, 2020 (https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/tree/master/mask-use).
In-Person instruction 2020-21
Measures of districts in-person instructional offerings are based on weekly instructional data for 2020-21. Using Return to Learn Instructional data, this scale was constructed by scoring 1 point for each week a district was fully in person, 0.5 points for each week of hybrid instruction, and 0 points for weeks of remote instruction. These point totals were dividing by the number of weeks covered in the data.
Districts were divided into three groups or tertiles based on this scale. The most in-person districts are the 2600+ districts at the top of this scale. The Average districts were the roughly 2,400+ districts in the middle of the scale. The Most Remote districts are the 2700+ districts at the bottom of the scale. These tertile bins are not precisely equal because of ties.
Source: Author’s calculations using R2L Instructional Offerings data and state enrollment data files.
About
Grade level Enrollments 2019-20 to 2021-22
Grade level data were not available for Alabama, Kansas, and Rhode Island. In the remaining 43 states, Kindergarten enrollments include students listed in grades K-4 and K-5. Elementary enrollments include students in grades 1 to 6. Middle School students include those in grades 7 and 8. High School students include those in grades 9-12. Pre-Kindergarten students are not included in these figures.
Source: Author’s calculations using R2L Instructional Offerings data and state enrollment data files.
