The Real Root of Falling Attendance

United Federation of Teachers chief Michael Mulgrew may be right about the city’s Department of Education having something to hide as it stonewalls the release of attendance figures for this semester.

Three weeks into the school year, the DOE has yet to release any enrollment data or numbers on absentee students. It claims the figures won’t be finalized until Oct. 31 — when it has to provide them to the State Education Department.

Is the DOE, as Mulgrew suggested at a City Council hearing Wednesday, “hiding” the figures to avoid embarrassment?

Mulgrew has his own agenda; he’ll argue that a steep drop in attendance school means nervous parents who want remote learning are keeping their children at home. Remote learning, you see, would mean more teaching jobs (hence more folks paying dues to the UFT) and let some of his jittery members teach from the comfort of their homes — and comfy hammocks.

What he won’t say is that the drop reflects a lot of families who’ve just given up on DOE schools (and thus UFT schools). January attendance data showed a 4 percent enrollment drop citywide (43,000 students), with total enrollment down to 960,000. And a closer look at internal DOE data showed that public-school enrollment had plummeted to 889,404 kids.

We also know that half of the city’s 32 community school districts lost at least 10 percent of their students these past five years.

Families with young children have been fleeing the city and its public schools for some time. Recent figures show kindergarten enrollment falling 18.4 percent in the last five years.

Meanwhile, enrollment at the city’s public charter schools keeps rising: Parents furious at the DOE’s failures (and at the de Blasioera war on excellence in the public schools) continue to move their children there, as well as to Catholic and private schools — and to move the whole family out of the city.

As we’ve said before, it increasingly looks like letting charters boom is the best hope to save public education in this city. But that means getting the Legislature to raise the cap that stops new charters from opening.

The UFT thinks it’s protecting itself by using its vast sway in Albany to preserve the cap. But it can’t stop families from fleeing, so that strategy is just a recipe for devastating public education to slow the union’s own decline.

Tell us again about how you’re all about the children, Mike.