Private schools are rebounding — but can it last?

The National Assessment of Educational Progress has just reported steep drops in student achievement at the nation’s public schools. How will parents respond to the news? Is the downward trend in private education enrollments about to be reversed?   

Before COVID-19, private school enrollments were headed downhill. Between 1964 and 2019, the percentage of students attending private schools fell from 14 percent to 9 percent of all school-age children, an all-time low.   

Then, in fall 2020, most public schools kept their doors closed. Only 24 percent of public school students attended school in person, as compared to  60 percent of private school children, according to Education Next parental survey (which I helped design). The following May, nearly 80 percent of private schoolers were in class every day, as compared to only half of those at public schools.  

Learning online was not good for students. Parents reported learning losses for 64 percent of children at public schools but only 43 percent of children at private ones. Private schools also had greater success in curbing adverse effects on children’s social relationships, emotional well-being and physical fitness.  

When they opened, private schools were accused of gambling with their students’ health. Tom Carroll, superintendent of the Catholic archdiocese in Boston, recalls he “started getting letters, people saying, ‘Well, are you going to go to the funeral of every single child that you killed by opening all the schools?’” Kathleen Porter-McGee, head of a Catholic school network in New York, remembers, “it was a scary time…the fear was palpable.”  

When COVID spread at school proved minimal and mild, the private school bet paid off. “From the point [when schools announced closures] to roughly the middle of October, the phones kept ringing,” Carroll recalls. “So we gained about 4,400 students,” Our poll indicates a 2 percent gain in private school share between 2019 and 2022. If the survey is on the mark, it means a shift of 1 million students from the public to the private sector.  

Despite these short-term gains, ever-rising costs still impede further growth. In 1979, median school tuition was $554. Since that time prices have escalated at twice the rate of the consumer price index. Today, the average tuition at private schools is more than $12,000 annually. What many middle- and working-class families could once afford is now available to them only at considerable sacrifice.  

Tuition hikes are likely to continue indefinitely. Education is a labor-intensive industry. It takes as much time today for a teacher to instruct a class of 20 as it did a century ago. For as long as that continues, schools must charge higher tuitions to pay salaries that keep pace with rising wages in the rest of the economy.  

Private educators must also worry about competition from charter schools. Like private schools, most charters claim to offer safe, well-disciplined classrooms. But, unlike private schools, charters are tuition-free. “In New York we have to bring our A game, because we’re competing for students against the most well-known and top performing charter networks in the country,” says Porter-Magee.  

Homeschooling is emerging as another challenge. The percentage choosing that option has doubled from 3 percent to 6 percent since the pandemic. Homeschooling is also morphing into hybrid forms, such as neighborhood pods, home-private school combinations and micro-schools where parents teach. 

The 1,200 high-prestige schools that belong to the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) have the fewest worries. Even though tuition for the approximately 1 percent of the school-age population attending these schools averages a hefty $26,866 a year, they will survive if “one percenters” continue to do well. 

Catholic school leaders are more concerned. According to Carol Ann MacGregor, professor at Waterloo University, “Catholic schools educated more than 75 percent of all school children at their peak in the mid-1960s.” But the Catholic share of the private sector dropped to around 50 percent by 1993, and today it is less than 35 percent — an extraordinary loss in market share.  

Catholic schools have a fine academic track record. Most studies of college enrollment rates show that Catholic schools typically outperform nearby public schools. Positive impacts of a Catholic education are especially large for African Americans.  

But as the supply of teaching nuns waned, Catholic education costs have skyrocketed. Also, dioceses were forced to pay out more than $3 billion dollars in lawsuit settlements to victims of clergy abuse. Nor did it help when increasingly prosperous Catholic immigrants abandoned their cramped religious schools in central cities for spacious public schools and playgrounds in the suburbs. 

Christian schools are now the fastest growing segment of the private sector. White Southerners rushed to these institutions when public schools desegregated in the 1960s.

Today, school leaders say they welcome African American students, who constitute 11 percent of their enrollments. According to Jeff Keaton, a leader of the Christian school movement in Virginia, the country is now entering a “second Great Awakening in Christian education.” In Virginia, applications spiked when controversies over critical race theory, the 1619 Project and school gender policy filled the airways during the state’s 2021 gubernatorial campaign.  

Is a Great Awakening for private schools at hand? Perhaps. “Millions of American parents . . . are fed up with being considered nuisances and dismissed by the public school establishment,” says Betsy DeVos, former U.S. secretary of Education. Since the pandemic, more than 20 red and purple states have enacted or expanded school-choice laws of direct benefit to private schools.  

But the new laws are limited in scope. Even if all the new options were fully utilized, private school enrollments would increase by only 3 percent, leaving the share of students in the private sector below its 1964 level. Unless governments offer larger subsidies to every family that wishes to attend private school, major expansion of the private sector is unlikely. 

Paul E. Peterson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education. He is also the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.