New York City’s public schools are bleeding students as a result of the city’s ridiculous pandemic restrictions.
According to the Office of Student Enrollment, the city is projecting that 28,100 fewer students will enroll in public schools in the fall. During the 2020-21 school year, the city lost roughly 43,000 students, and an additional net 21,000 students departed during the 2021-22 school year. And that accounts for over half of the 120,000 net students who had left the city’s public school system over the last five years.
New York is increasingly unliveable for families. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio focused more on punishing charter schools (and, by extension, the parents who wanted their children to attend them) than on improving public schools in the city. And just as in California, COVID-19 has accelerated the decline of public schools in the Big Apple, and it isn’t hard to see why.
In November 2020, after less than two months of in-person learning, de Blasio shut down public schools in the city. This was said to be due to “an abundance of caution” despite the fact that it was clear by then that children were not at serious risk from COVID-19. De Blasio was over a year late to the party, but in the summer of 2021, he declared that students must be able to return to in-person learning by September, which would put the city a full year behind states such as Florida.
On top of that, de Blasio left office without so much as revoking his needless mask mandate for children in public schools.
His successor, Eric Adams, considered the anti-science posturing. While he refused to cave to the zero-COVID zealots who demanded school closures, Adams took two months to end mask mandates for students and, even then, refused to lift them for preschoolers for another month, promising to do so in April. He ended up recanting on that promise, keeping the mandate in place for two more months before removing it in June, and reminding parents that their children’s educations were subject to the whims of mayors who had more of an incentive to impose COVID-19 restrictions than to lift them.
Many parents don’t like that uncertainty, so they decided to remove it themselves. Enrollment in private schools, charter schools, and homeschooling has grown in New York City as public schools have lost students. De Blasio and Adams, through their handling of the coronavirus, have shown these parents that they can’t trust politicians with the education of their children. The education landscape in New York is changing as a result.
