By: Diane Benjamin
All of the information below came from the Illinois State Board of Education website: https://www.isbe.net/Pages/Annual-Statistical-Report.aspx
During the 1969-1970 school year 2,324,516 students were enrolled in Public Schools.
During the 2018-2019 school year 1,984,519 students were enrolled in Public Schools.
That’s a 14.63% decrease.
Note the increase in bilingual education, see if you can tell when Illinois welcomed illegals.
Non-Public Schools, this information isn’t as readily available and doesn’t cover the same time frame. The large decrease in Public Education was not due to parents sending their students to private schools. Some data is missing, it isn’t essential to seeing the trend.
Enrollment in 1979-1980 was 352,248.
Enrollment in 2018-2019 was 198,643. A 43.6% drop!
No surprise here with the parents leaving undesirable Illinois taxation and government.
Also, people are not having kids at the rates they once did. Either don’t want them, think they are too expensive to raise or put their careers first before family. The only demographic having children at the same or increasing rates are people that don’t care if their kid attends school or not. Wait for another twenty years and these figures will look good.
Wait until next year at this time… Take the current enrollment and cut it in 1/2.
What’s going to cause the number of enrolled students in the state to drop by 50% in the next year?
If we are funding based on attendance, has the funding for education been decreased accordingly? Bet not.
No!
1969 to 1970 was the tail end of the Boomer years, so yes more children were born and thus attended public school. The trend is for parents to have less children, thus fewer children are attending public school because of that fact.
I don’t know why you’re posting with some glee that parents aren’t sending their children to school. You certainly didn’t compare any statistical birth rates during 2018-2019 to the rate of parents sending their children to public school. If you did, the fact that parents ARE sending their children to school at the same rate as the late 60’s and early 70’s would be apparent.
You’re pretty much comparing apples to oranges in your claims about public school attendance. Parents in 2018 or 2019 have 2 to 3 children tops, where as in 1969 they may have had 4 may be 5 children, it stands to reason there would be less children enrolled in public schools. Flawed statistical analysis to say the least.
I’m not done with schools, stay tuned