(The Center Square) – Overall enrollment in California’s public TK-12 schools has declined yet again, this time 0.54% from the prior year.
News of the decrease came as State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond celebrated a 39% growth of “dual language immersion” programs since 2019, as well as 17.2% year-over-year enrollment growth in the new non-mandatory “transitional kindergarten” grade that will be made available to all California residents next year.
Notably, Thurmond, who narrowly eked out a victory in 2018 as the teachers’ union-backed candidate against his pro-charter school Democratic opponent, neglected to highlight the sustained growth of California’s publicly-funded charter school system, which grew 2.5% over the prior year.
“While we have more work to do, the dramatic growth in TK is inspiring and shows that providing rigorous and quality programs can be a key ingredient to bringing more families back to our schools,” said Thurmond in a statement. “One of our initiatives in this area is expansion of Dual Language Immersion programs as a strategy to drive future enrollment growth by providing school programs that are in high demand from California’s families.”
In dual language immersion programs, non-English speakers can take academic classes such as math in their native language, while allowing for enrollment of English speakers in these programs to improve linguistic abilities in another language.
Last year, The Center Square reported on the state’s continued funding of “ghost” students — amounting to over $4 billion in the 2022-2023 academic year — based on its optional “hold harmless” funding formula that allows non-charter public schools to receive per-student payments based on the average number of students for the prior three years, instead of current or last year’s attendance, which are also options.
Eighty-five percent of school districts received “hold harmless” funding, highlighting the enrollment decline in non-charter schools across the state.
“These numbers are stunning and portend years of declining enrollment into the future,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of Government Affairs & Education Policy at the California Policy Center and Thurmond’s challenger in the 2022 general election. “If this doesn’t get the legislature’s attention, then they are going to have to deal with closing schools for the next generation of Californians.”
“This looks like a collapse of the system,” continued Christensen.
Christensen’s warning of the system’s collapse is supported by the inversion of the age distribution of students by grade over the past ten years. In the 2014-2015 academic year, there were 511,985 kindergarteners and 496,901 12th graders, with the comparatively higher number of kindergarteners indicating slight population growth.
In the 2024-25 academic year, there are now 365,002 kindergarteners and 488,295 12th graders, indicating rapid demographic decline.
During the current school year, 5.81 million California residents were enrolled in TK-12 schools, with a budget of $119.5 billion, or about $20,568 per student, in state funding.
During 2019-20, 6.16 million TK-12 students were enrolled in schools, with a budget of $103.4 billion, or about $16,786 per student, in state funding.
Using the U.S. Department of Labor’s inflation calculator, $16,786 in June 2019 was worth $20,589 in June 2024, suggesting that despite the large headline increase of nearly 23%, real per-student spending is essentially flat.
California’s rapid aging — the state projects a quarter of residents expected to be 60 or older by 2030 — has led experts to warn of pending fiscal disaster as the state’s workforce participation rate — the number of working age individuals engaged in work or actively seeking work — continues its decline that started in 1989.
At the same time, the overall workforce has shrunk due to aging amid a now-stagnant overall population. California’s population of net taxpayers is also rapidly shrinking, with 40% of Californians so low-income they are enrolled in the taxpayer-funded Medi-Cal public healthcare system, which includes coverage for low-income retirees and illegal immigrants.
Meanwhile, the California Department of Education’s dataset demonstrated the significant growth of the state’s public charter schools since the 2019-20 academic year.
While non-charter public school enrollment has declined by 409,129 since then, charter enrollment grew by 52,349. This suggests that while sustained net outmigration and “accelerated slowdown” in births accounted for seven-eighths of the decline, about one-eighth of the decrease in traditional public school enrollment was offset by public charter enrollment.
Thurmond’s 2018 election as state superintendent was considered a referendum on charter schools. Thurmond secured the backing of the teachers’ union as his Democratic challenger Matthew Tuck ran on a pro-charter platform, earning the backing of parents and every major newspaper in the state. While Tuck ran ahead on election night, Thurmond eked out a narrow victory a week and a half later after the state finished counting millions of uncounted ballots, including provisional ballots and late mail-in ballots.
Seventy percent of public non-charter school teachers are unionized, compared to just 11% of charter teachers. According to federal data, public charter school teachers tend to earn about 20% less than their traditional public school counterparts.
A national Stanford study released in 2023 comparing public charter and traditional public schools with similar student body characteristics found that California charter students demonstrated higher proficiency than traditional public school students in the two tested categories — reading and math — by the equivalent of 11 and 4 days of instruction, respectively, per 180-day academic year.
Hispanic, Black and low-income students gained the most from charter school instruction, with Hispanic students gaining the equivalent of 31 days of reading — more than six weeks — and 16 days of math instruction, with Black students advancing 28 and 16 days respectively, and low-income students advancing 22 and 17 days.
