Enrollment, Fiscal, and Resource Changes in American Public School Districts, 1998 to 2019

Abstract

Total public school enrollment has decreased in recent years and is forecast to continue decreasing for the foreseeable future. Experts and educators are concerned about how enrollment declines will change resources available for students who remain in district public schools. Using data on all public school districts from 1998 to 2019, we estimate how resources change as district enrollments increase and how resources change as enrollments decline. Our preferred empirical approach operationalizes all explanatory variables as spline variables, which allows for different covariates for growing and declining districts. This flexible approach allows for the possibility that school funding systems, and therefore fiscal and resource changes, differ between districts with growing and declining student enrollment. We find generally that districts with declining student enrollment have experienced larger increases in per-pupil funding and resources compared to districts with growing enrollments, as enrollment declines were associated with larger increases in local, federal, and, to a lesser extent, state revenues per pupil. Our descriptive results also suggest there may be heterogeneity across districts with respect to relationships between enrollment and fiscal and resource changes, which should be a subject of future research.