Many children did without kindergarten
PHILADELPHIA — On a sweltering July afternoon, Solomon Carson, 6, jumped off the stoop of his family’s tidy row house here, full of what his father, David, called “unspent energy.”
When a stranger asked his name, he answered brightly but added that he couldn’t spell it. “I can help you with that,” his father said, patiently pronouncing each letter, with Solomon repeating after him.
Solomon was supposed to have learned the basics in kindergarten this past year, but his first year of formal education was anything but.
When COVID-19 closed classrooms, his parents chose not to enroll him in city schools that they already had doubts about. They were not working and decided to teach him at home along with his two older brothers. And they signed him up for a virtual charter school that advertised in-person tutoring — and failed to provide it.
Now, as Solomon heads to first grade, Carson is clear-eyed about where his son stands academically. “I really think we can improve,” he said.
Solomon is part of a vast exodus from local public schools.
As the pandemic upended life in the U.S., more than 1 million children who had been expected to enroll in these schools did not show up, either in person or online. The missing students were concentrated in the younger grades, with the steepest drop in kindergarten — more than 340,000 students, according to government data.
Now, the first analysis of enrollment at 70,000 public schools across 33 states offers a detailed portrait of these kindergartners. It shows that just as the pandemic laid bare vast disparities in health care and income, it also hardened inequities in education, setting back some of the most vulnerable students before they spent even one day in a classroom.
The analysis by the New York Times in conjunction with Stanford University shows that in those 33 states, 10,000 local public schools lost at least 20 percent of their kindergartners. In 2019 and in 2018, only 4,000 or so schools experienced such steep drops.
The months of closed classrooms took a toll on nearly all students, and families of all levels of income and education scrambled to help their children make up for the gaps. But the most startling declines were in neighborhoods below and just above the poverty line, where the average household income for a family of four was $35,000 or less. The drop was 28 percent larger in schools in those communities than in the rest of the country.
In the Philadelphia school district, where almost all students are from low-income families, kindergarten enrollment declined by more than a quarter between fall 2019 and fall 2020. The drop was three times the national rate, accounting for 2,700 students.
While kindergarten is optional in many states, educators say there is no great substitute for quality, inperson kindergarten. For many students, it’s their introduction to school. They are taught to cooperate and to identify numbers and letters. They learn early phonics and number sense — the concept of bigger and smaller quantities.
And kindergarten is often where children are first diagnosed with disabilities such as autism spectrum disorder.
Yet in the country’s poorest neighborhoods, tens of thousands of 6-year-olds will begin first grade having missed out on a traditional kindergarten experience.
“We have to be deeply concerned,” said Thomas Dee, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, who worked with the Times on the analysis.
The data covered twothirds of all public schools. It showed that remote schooling was a main factor driving enrollment declines.
Districts that went strictly remote experienced a decline of 42 percent more than those that offered fulltime in-person learning, according to a new research paper by Dee and colleagues, posted Saturday. While some of these schools were losing students before the pandemic, the declines between fall 2019 and fall 2020 were significantly steeper.
“A lot of Black and brown families kept their children home for good reason,” said Kayla Patrick, an analyst at the Education Trust, an advocacy group focused on low-income students and students of color. “They need to know in-person instruction is proven to be better. We want to make sure that schools are rebuilding that trust.”
In Jackson, Miss., after the school district offered only online education in fall 2020, many essential workers had to find someone to watch their kindergartners, remote school or not. They turned to day care.
Single parents, often with jobs at health care centers, fast-food restaurants or the nearby Continental tire plant, turned up at Leaps and Bounds Developmental Academy, which cared for seven children who were kindergarten age.
Only two participated in remote learning, said Christi Jackson Payton, the day care’s director. But because the center focuses on early reading skills, such as phonics, Jackson Payton said, day care may have been a better choice than online kindergarten.
At the very least, she said, “the children that were here received more direct learning.”
For other parents, the issue was trust. Could their local public school deliver a quality online education?
In Philadelphia, some turned to a network of virtual schools, which was set up by the state before the pandemic.
While these programs are not large, the pandemic fueled their growth, despite that they have produced “overwhelmingly negative results” for students in reading and math when compared with brick-andmortar schools, according to a 2019 study. In the states analyzed by the Times, virtual schools added 20,000 kindergarten students. And in Pennsylvania, their kindergarten enrollment tripled, adding 2,000 students.
For Solomon Carson, the virtual charter program proved challenging. His parents registered him in an online school affiliated with a for-profit company, paid for by the state. (David Carson asked the Times not to identify the program because Solomon is still enrolled.)
The program promised to provide tutors to work with students in person, which the Carsons believed would help Solomon in subjects such as phonics and math.
But to their surprise, the program later told them that, because of the pandemic, face-to-face tutoring was unavailable. They were left to manage on their own, with two other children to home-school, as well.
Philadelphia began offering several days per week of in-person learning for the youngest students last March. But by the end of the school year, only 20 percent of the missing kindergarten students had come back in any capacity — online or in person.
A spokesperson for the Philadelphia school district said it was not yet clear whether enrollment numbers would rebound this fall, when the district plans to open classrooms full time.