Brooks: America should be in the middle of a schools revolution

“The coronavirus caused by far the biggest disruption in the history of American education,” Meira Levinson and Daniel Markovits wrote in The Atlantic last year. Things have not reverted back to normal as COVID has gradually lost its grip on American life. Today’s teachers and students are living with a set of altered realities, and they may be for the rest of their lives: Shrinking enrollments. In the first full academic year of the pandemic, K-12 public school enrollment fell by 1.1 million students and fell by about an additional 130,000 students the following fall. New Stanford-led research finds that 26% of that decline was caused by students switching to homeschooling and 14% by students leaving for private schools. Another 34% of the decline is hard to track, but some students were probably going truant, doing unregistered home-schooling or simply opting out of kindergarten.