There's actually some really interesting points on enrollment in this report

 ...but friends, you are not going to glean them from reading the Boston Globe's coverage.

Please enjoy these lovely flowers from Montreal,
which have nothing to do with this post otherwise.

In June, Joshua Goodman, a professor at BU, and Abigail Francis, who is pursuing her doctorate there, released a study looking at Massachusetts school enrollment from pre-pandemic levels to now. Massachusetts is a handy one for this because the state tracks not only public school enrollment but private and homeschool enrollment (not all states do). 

Their research uncovers three main points: 

• "First, five years after the pandemic’s onset, there has been a substantial shift away from public schools and toward non-public options. Relative to pre-pandemic trends, fall 2024 enrollment was down 2% in Massachusetts local public schools." 
  This one is not entirely a surprise--we've seen this with earlier research--but gains the attention from the Globe¹. 
  
  
• Second, "[t]he highest income quintile of districts has lost more public school students than the lower income four quintiles of districts combined, with these lower income districts having largely recovered. White and Asian local public school enrollments have stabilized at levels 3% and 8% below pre-pandemic trends. In contrast, Black and Hispanic enrollments have more than fully recovered."
  Amusingly, the Globe (when it gets to this part) chalks this up to "those who can afford to, leave." That isn't, however, what the research paper itself (based on what we know of what happened) actually says:
  

  High-income communities and White and Asian families were more likely in the early days of the pandemic to switch to private schools in reaction to frustration about school closures and the quality of pandemic-era public schooling. Those dis-enrollments appear to have persisted, as predicted by Bacher-Hicks et al. (2024). Enrollment has largely recovered among middle- and low-income communities, as well as among Black and Hispanic families, who were more likely early in the pandemic to support remote schooling or to switch to home schooling, given health concerns about COVID-19. Those concerns appear to have subsided with the receding threat from the virus itself.

  Again, we have had ongoing solid data that districts that did not go back to classrooms were responding to (quite valid!) health concerns from their communities.
  You may not, however, have had "rich districts are the ones losing kids, not the poorer districts" on your Bingo card. That's a pretty big deal!

• Third, "local public school enrollment losses are almost entirely concentrated in middle grades (5-8), where enrollment is down 8%. The magnitude of middle grade losses accounts for all of the total public school enrollment declines."
  ALL of the declines!
  THIS is FASCINATING (and has, among other things, budgetary implications! And school building implications!)

I very very rarely refer anyone to Education Next², but in this case, the paper's authors wrote up their own results in the July issue, and I will refer to you that. 

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¹The Globe of course has already run a "this raises questions" piece on the national push for vouchers. I don't think it is out of the realm for us to see them run an editorial sometime soon endorsing them, possibly repeating the old "anti-Catholic" canard. Don't be fooled; vouchers are a major failure.
²The Journal of Those Who Already Know What They Think, and Don't Let Pesky Facts Get In the Way of That.