Learning Policy Institute Research and Policy Associate Charlie Thompson co-authored this commentary
Across the country, public school enrollments are declining, adding to the list of concerns currently worrying many policymakers and administrators, especially in places where funding levels decline along with pupil count. But, as we describe below, this decline could be a boon or a bane to the future of public education, depending on how policymakers and educators approach it.
The country experienced a historic 3% enrollment drop in 2020, associated with the onset of the pandemic, from roughly 50.8 million to 49.4 million students. This marked the largest single-year drop since World War II. The National Center for Education Statistics currently projects that K–12 public school enrollment will fall by another 5% by 2031, to 46.9 million students, largely as a function of declining birth rates. An unknown is the degree to which families will also continue to leave public education for private schools and homeschooling, which have been increasing since 2020.
If state and federal governments maintain or increase current funding levels, rather than cutting funds to education, these drops could allow for greater per-pupil funding and stronger investments in the critical resources students need to learn. This will require that allocations to districts are thoughtfully managed, and the funds are strategically spent, strengthening the capacity of schools to meet this moment, which demands a wide range of changes to how schools function.
However, as many districts are experiencing funding cuts, the traditional response to declining enrollments has been to double down on the factory model—merging schools into ever-larger, more impersonal institutions. If this continues, families will keep leaving, accelerating enrollment declines and deepening the very crisis districts need to solve.
At the same time, current disruptions hold the opportunity for redesign. As LPI researchers noted in our 2020 report on Restarting and Reinventing School:
It is time to use the huge disruptions caused by this pandemic to reinvent our systems of education. The question is: How can we harness these understandings [from the Science of Learning and Development] as we necessarily redesign school? How can we transform what has not been working for children and for our society into a more equitable and empowering future?
Why the Old School Model No Longer Works
The pandemic underscored what we already knew: that schools need to change. They need to foster deeper relationships and supports, offer learning that connects to the real world and the needs of the shifting economy and society, and build the capacity to meet the needs of children and families as our social safety nets supporting affordable housing, health care, and nutrition collapse.
Since the pandemic, a substantial number of families across the country have abandoned public schools for various forms of pods, homeschooling, and microschools, as well as private education, looking to create environments in which their children can be better known and receive more positive, personalized attention. Families are also looking for schools to offer relevant, engaging learning that is connected to real-world concerns, as well as college and career. And students’ attendance and engagement often depend on the extent to which schools offer wraparound supports ranging from transportation and afterschool care to meals and health care, and how seamlessly they integrate those supports into their programming.
None of these things were envisioned when the factory model schools we have inherited were invented a century ago, and educators have been working hard to evolve those large, impersonal assembly line systems into more supportive environments in recent years. The goal then was to create large, efficient organizations that could place students on a conveyor belt moving from teacher to teacher every year and, in secondary schools, every 45 minutes throughout the school day, to be stamped with standardized lessons. Strong relationships, individualized supports, and equitable outcomes were not part of the plan: Students were expected to fall off the conveyor belt along the way, as part of the system’s selection and sorting function. As Max Weber noted about the bureaucratic form of organization that was imposed, “the bureaucracy develops the more perfectly the more it is dehumanized.”
Since then, we have learned that smaller learning communities and schools (in the range of 300–500 students) are significantly more successful than large schools in supporting student engagement and attendance, sense of belonging and responsibility, opportunities for participation in extracurricular activities, achievement, graduation rates, and postsecondary success. These benefits are even greater when schools are designed to support students with advisory systems, teaching teams, and authentic community-connected curriculum and assessment focused on deeper learning. And the benefits are most pronounced for historically underserved students who are, otherwise, most likely to attend large, impersonal, under-resourced school settings.
Reimagining Education: Using Declining Enrollment to Spur Redesign
The need to rethink the use of school buildings in this time of declining enrollment offers a chance for major redesign. For example, in California’s Anaheim Union High School District, where enrollment has dropped nearly 18% over the past decade, rather than just reassigning students to create a larger school, leaders chose to consolidate a junior high and high school while entirely redesigning the learning experience on the new grades 7–12 campus.
Yet the district met this decline as an opportunity. Superintendent Michael Matsuda noted in a recent commentary:
Redesigning schools in light of declining enrollment is not about scaling down—it’s about scaling up innovation, empowerment, and purpose-driven learning. … (T)he future of education must focus on integrating student voice, mental health, and career readiness into new structures that allow for greater community building and effective caring on the part of adults.
Their planning team spent a year with a broad group of faculty members creating a plan for smaller learning communities, organized for personalization and support for students. It incorporated work they had already begun to encourage project-based instruction, civic engagement, performance-based assessments, and individualized learning technologies, including AI guided by students themselves. The work is all rooted in a community schools approach offering wraparound supports.
The faculty planning team drew on the Learning Policy Institute’s Redesigning High Schools report, which offers 10 features found to be effective in new model high schools, with research evidence and practice examples highlighting schools that have already redesigned successfully. The planning team chose four research-based “promising practices” to organize their new school around: small learning communities organized around teaching teams, dedicated collaborative planning time for teachers, advisory systems, and “Kid Talk” (bimonthly team meetings used to discuss students’ needs and provide needed supports).
Within the newly merged school of just over 2,000 students, there are six small learning communities organized into houses, each with an assigned teaching team that serves a shared group of students. Students take classes with their house peers, supported by a core teaching team that stays with them for 2 years. Each teaching team has a weekly collaborative period to plan together and coordinate with advisors and special education teachers connected to their house. Now operating in 7th through 9th grades, the school plans to expand this model across all grades in the coming years so every student has a home.
To bolster the project-based learning and performance assessments they had already begun, the school moved to a block schedule, where students could experience 90-minute class periods to support sustained engagement.
To create a redesign grounded in family needs and teacher expertise, district leaders and the planning team worked closely with faculty and families to:
- Design shared experiences that helped staff and parents imagine what school could look like, including a deep dive on the Redesign framework, a site visit to and coaching from a successfully redesigned high school, and effective professional learning.
- Proactively identify and address hurdles to implementing changes necessitated by shifting to a block schedule, streamlining course offerings to prioritize relational depth, and managing scheduling priorities that accounted for physical space constraints.
- Communicate effectively with the school community by collaborating with the union, ensuring transparent and timely updates to staff and families, leveraging existing community school coordinators to connect with families, and engaging students to provide feedback on the redesign vision.
- Empower teacher leadership and creating buy-in by creating formal structures for staff leadership and managing a process for teachers opting in or out of the new school.
- Develop greater coherence by integrating multiple systems into school redesign, including those serving special education students and English learners, and those offering opportunities like dual enrollment and work-based internships.
When school opened this August, students were already reaping the benefits of a more relationship-focused school design. Seventh-grade students began the year in their advisory groups with a “scavenger hunt”—searching key dates and resources in their student planners and getting to know the school and their peers at the same time. Grade 11 students played “getting to know you” bingo, where they learned facts about their fellow students until they filled an entire row, column, or diagonal of squares with new information.
In the first week of school, the teachers from one 7th-grade team put the finishing touches on the house orientation schedule. The core classes (English, history, science, and math) would dedicate time in their first full week of school to jointly build a shared social contract (a set of agreements for members of their house); onboard students to new technology; and explain standards-based grading practices. After divvying up responsibilities and conferring with their teammates from special education about how to accommodate students’ needs, the teachers paused to celebrate. Instead of disconnected experiences in their classes, students would experience a coherent and organized school welcome. “The beauty of a team!” the science teacher marveled. The math teacher jumped in, “and hopefully they are making the connection that we, as their advisors, are their link.”
And staff were amazed with how natural a 90-minute block schedule felt and were grateful for the extended time for instruction. “[The old non-block] class periods feel like a whirlwind now,” one teacher reflected, “I don’t know how we thought this was normal before.” Another explained that they loved having time to handle serious inquiry plus all the organizational and logistical tasks that ultimately support instruction, but that can get in the way of deeper learning in a short period.
From Challenge to Opportunity: What States and Districts Can Do
Districts and states can prepare for such transformation by conducting enrollment trend analyses and using declining enrollment as an opening for deep community conversation, engaging teachers, students, and families as authentic partners in redesign study and planning from the beginning. Districts can apply many proven successful strategies by leveraging smaller learning communities, advisory systems, dual enrollment, hybrid models, and early college access to provide students with personalized learning experiences. They can also lean into teacher leadership by creating collaborative teams and planning opportunities, as well as distributed decision-making. They can draw upon networks of redesigned schools that work with districts to support the process of rethinking and transforming schools in partnership with their communities.
While enrollment declines provide a real challenge, the response can be transformative. Rather than doubling down on the factory model, we have an opportunity to create learning environments where students are known, challenged, and supported. This means strategic resource allocation targeted to support community school structures alongside authentic community-connected curriculum and assessment. This also means partnering with families and the community to co-construct a vision for redesign that is aligned to their goals, hopes, and dreams, drawing families back to public education and strengthening it along the way.