Shifting Demographics in NYC School Enrollment

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we'll dive into some shifting demographics in New York City's public schools ahead of the new school year. Chalkbeat New York, the news organization that covers education, took a look at the data and found that for the first time in eight years. Student enrollment in New York City public schools did not go down year over year. In fact, it went up slightly. This shift is not just in numbers, but also in the composition of the student body. There are more migrant students from Latin America and West Africa, not surprisingly, and more students who are English language learners. More on these demographic shifts and their implications with Michael Elsen-Rooney, a reporter for Chalkbeat New York. Now, the headline for his story, as it's found on Chalkbeat's website, has another demographic shift contained in it. Shifting New York City School of Demographics. There are nearly as many Asian American as Black students. Hey, Michael, welcome back to WNYC.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Hey, Brian. Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: For the first time in eight years, school enrollment did not go down. How many students are enrolled for 2024/'25, if you know that number and how big an increase are we talking about?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: We have the data from this past school year. The final enrollment count for pre-k through twelve schools, not including charters, was about 912,000 students, which is up about 6000 from the previous school year. As you said, it is the first time in a long time that enrollment hasn't gone down. Before the pandemic, there are these long-term trends that had been driving enrollment down at a declining birth rate, more out-migration from the city than in migration.

Then during the pandemic, you saw some really steep enrollment losses. For the first time, that's reversed, and thanks really in large part to this historic number of new students coming into the country and into the system.

Brian Lehrer: I think I remember the peak a number of years ago. I think we talked about it on the show at the time being 1.2 million students in the New York City public schools. Am I remembering that right? Now you're saying we're back up to something in the 900 thousands. That would still be a 20% or so decline from the peak.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Sometimes it's a little inconsistent whether charters get added to that. I'm not sure what the highest was, but it was definitely above a million, maybe around the 1.1 range. You're right, it's looking over that period, a pretty significant decrease.

Brian Lehrer: We've talked on this show, and there's been a lot of reporting generally about families leaving New York City, families with children leaving New York City. A very prime reason being the increasingly unaffordable cost of housing in the city driving families of regular means out. I don't know if you've looked at that at Chalkbeat as a driving factor in the decline, have you?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Certainly that's threaded through all of this, and we've seen some of the steepest declines among the youngest kids in the pre-k grades and the young elementary grades when families are making these decisions about whether to stay or go. There was just some data that came out the other day showing that between 2020 and 2023, the 0-4 age population declined by 18% in New York City-

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: -which is pretty staggering.

Brian Lehrer: I see. Just to be precise, for our listeners, the number you report in your story is 912,000 students in the school year that just ended. That's the one where enrollment went up for the first time in eight years. We don't have the figures for the new school year yet because it hasn't started, but 912,000 in the last school year, up from 906,000 the year before. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I could imagine listeners sitting out there thinking the New York City public schools were overwhelmed when they had over a million students.

Maybe it's a good thing if the numbers are declining a little bit to have the resources to give a quality education to each kid as much as possible. On the other hand, we know that state funding for the city's public schools is based on the number of students. Maybe in that respect, more students is a good thing because more money floats from Albany into the city schools. Does anybody talk about an optimum number?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: That's a good question. It all really depends on what the school system is built for and expecting. Certainly, in some individual cases, a big influx of new students can be challenging, particularly if there are students with specific needs. English language learners that school is not accustomed to serving, and you can have to hire more staff and reconfigure your staffing.

I think it's pretty consistent in the macro sense that the city really wants more students. In fact, that's been a rhetorical point for the chancellor that this is a priority of his to attract families back to the city and the schools. Even I would say at most individual school levels, principals don't want enrollment declines year over year. They lose funding, and sometimes they have to let go of teachers. They have to cut various other offerings.

In most ways, I think the city wants to either maintain or slightly increase. Then if this really does go on and the numbers keep falling significantly, then the city starts to have to look at these bigger questions about consolidating schools or closing schools because the system is equipped for a certain number of kids. If you lose too many, that has repercussions.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners we can take a few phone calls on the shifting demographics of New York City schools and the implications of those shifts. If you work at a school, as a teacher or anything else, you can tell us what some of these changes look like in your experience so far and might look like on the ground in the coming school year. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692.

Even though the numbers are slightly up, long-term projections aren't necessarily in that direction and we'll get into that. You can help our guest, Michael Elsen-Rooney from the Education news site Chalkbeat report that story if you made the decision to unenroll your child from the New York City public school system or call us with anything related, comment, question, story. 212-433-WNYC or you can text 212-433-9692.

This new class size law, as some of our listeners know, went into effect last year. Smaller class sizes mandated by the legislature in Albany. Mayor Adams was resisting it for a while but now has promised to comply. You're right that the direction of enrollment could play a role in how the city complies with the law. Can you remind us more specifically of what it dictates and tell us about the effects of enrollment on that?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: The law takes effect over five years, and every year the city has to have a higher percentage of its classes under these caps. The caps vary based on the age of the students. For the youngest kids, it has to be 20 students or below, and then slightly larger for older groups of kids. Right now, the city is at about 40% of its classes under the captain, and that's the requirement for this coming year. We're currently in compliance but things definitely get hairier starting the school year after this one, where 60% of classes have to be under the cap.

There's some hard choices the city has to make about how to do this. There's hiring teachers, which is in some ways the easiest way if schools have and they just don't have enough teachers. When you're at the point where you're running out of space, then it becomes a question of do you either build new space or do you redistribute the enrollment from schools that are over-enrolled to those that are under-enrolled? Both those are more complicated.

Brian Lehrer: Involving [unintelligible 00:09:44] kids to different neighborhoods, I guess.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Theoretically, or at the high school level where it's a choice system potentially capping enrollment at some schools and having smaller incoming classes. In terms of building is really where the demographic projections come into play because the city's school construction authority maps out its plans on how many buildings to build and wherever based on these projections of new students.

As you said, they're projecting pretty big losses in the coming years. They could argue we shouldn't be building as many new schools, but you also have to comply with this law, which probably will require a fair amount of building, and that takes a long time. There's a push and pull there about how much to build and where.

Brian Lehrer: Lou in Brooklyn Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lou.

Lou: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking the call. There's another way we're losing older students who maybe have struggled in high school. Maybe they're struggling because they're first generation and they're really navigating New York City schooling on their own. We have a pretty attractive minimum wage these days. If you're a teenager, if your family's in financial crisis, if you're struggling due to pandemic learning loss, if you're struggling because regents exams always were and currently are very hard to pass and graduate with, young people are choosing the workforce. It's hard to stay in school if you're a struggling student already, and that's a large chunk of our students here.

Brian Lehrer: Michael is an education reporter. You want to talk to Lou about that?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: It's a very good point and one that I come across a lot in reporting on older students. We have seen consistently the highest high school dropout rates among English learners who disproportionately struggle to pass regents exams, who graduate at lower rates. There's just more pulling and pushing them to leave school. As we have a larger population of older English learners, that's certainly a challenge that a lot of schools are confronting.

Brian Lehrer: Lou, what do you think some of the solutions to the scenario that you laid out are because some listeners may think, what do you do? Just make it easier to graduate, lower the standards, don't require the Regents Exams. What do you think?

Lou: Our current structures in New York City high schools are very rigid, and schools are penalized if they take more than four years to graduate a student. We need more creative thinking about how we teach and work with what learning means and how we're teaching. We need more flexibility on the amount of time in which to graduate a student, and we need to offer more realistic, hands-on learning, internship-based learning. Maybe more support for trades.

There are some spaces that are already doing great work in these environments, but they're really outliers within the system of the Department of Education. Those schools struggle to stay open. They fight for internship spaces for young people. They'll be competing with colleges to have teenagers in placement. It's very tricky and hard. Attendance continues to be part of the struggle also, because these same young people who maybe are living in poverty, no matter their background situation, they're also doing things like taking care of sick or elder relatives. They're translating for parents.

There's enormous pressure on some young people in New York City that is all kinds of things other than schools. Schools who are already doing this work are up against a lot of variables that the Department of Ed doesn't like and penalizes schools for, such as attendance and passing rates. We need to be more creative about how we work with young people. As schools, it would be great to have a little more flexibility and, in fact, support for organizing different ways of working with young people and maybe aligning services better using already existing city networking to offer creative internships, teaching and learning spaces, things like that. Thank you so much. Very important topic.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks for laying it out so eloquently. We really appreciate your call. Anything more from you on that Michael? I know that we've reported on the station, I'm sure you've reported it at Chalkbeat that there is a proposal in Albany for doing away with the Regents Exams as a requirement for graduation. That, of course, is just one element of that multifaceted scenario that the caller, Lou, just laid out.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: I think the Regents is a huge piece of this and does set New York apart from many states in terms of how graduation is determined. If school districts have more flexibility, that would certainly maybe enable some more of the creativity that the caller was talking about.

Brian Lehrer: We continue for another few minutes with Michael Elsen-Rooney from the education news Chalkbeat with the headline being that enrollment in the New York City public schools went up in the last school year for the first time in eight years but the demographics of the student population are shifting. Let's take another call, and then we'll talk about another couple of those demographic shifts that you document. Eric in Mount Vernon, you're on WNYC. Hi, Eric.

Eric: Hi, Brian. Long-time listener. [chuckles] Thank you for taking my call. I just was listening to the radio, and I'm a 20-year veteran teacher in the New York City district. I teach in Marble Hill, which is really part of Manhattan, but it's kind of Bronx. It's an international school. When I'm hearing about over the years, the population of students going down, I'm like, "I don't notice that at all." We're a transfer school, which means that students can come in as late as 16 years old. They have five years to graduate. They don't speak English as their first language when they arrive.

We have a consortium waiver. I just heard you talking about the Regents. Once we got the consortium waiver to not have to take any Regents other than math and English, it really got our graduation rate up. I just heard about this attrition that happens over the four years, and we have students with-- It's called SLIFE, I guess. Limited and Interrupted Formal Education.

We have students who can't even read in their own language at first, so it takes them longer. I do agree we should have longer time. We should have at least some more accomplishable benchmarks. We usually graduate about 45% of our students. In the first year, we are packed with as many as 28, 29, 30 students in each freshman class, and by the end, there's sometimes as few as 12 in each class.

A lot of them are, in fact, working during the school day. They are translating for their parents. They are working on their documentation. We did have the vocational school for Spanish speakers that just lost its funding and has been closed. A lot of things they're saying is absolutely reflected in what we are seeing on the ground. In terms of first-year grants for international students that come to our school from age 16 and up, it is absolutely packed classrooms during that first year.

Brian Lehrer: How do you do it? How do you, as a teacher in that environment, start with somebody who, if I heard you right at the beginning of the call, can't even read in their first language at age 16, never mind in English?

Eric: Correct. That's the challenge, Brian. Every person I talk to that says, 'Where do you work?" I tell them, they're like, "How do you do that?" It's all about differentiation absolutely. Something like seven levels of readings and images and pre-reading activities have to be brought in immediately to be able to access even the students who can't read in their own language, but also engage the students who have already graduated from their secondary schools in their own countries, but who still need to learn English.

It's such a broad range. You get both of those kids in the same classroom in freshman year before they start showing their abilities and getting into specialized classes. That first year is all about emotional connection with the students. Facial expressions are the same throughout the world. As long as you can use humor and smile and give them a lot of access points with music, with images, with things that they connect from their country, so that slowly, with specialized elective classes, to get the lowest readers up to level with those things combined, we maintain almost 50% of our students over the four years.

It's not easy but I can tell you that our students feel like they are absolutely at home. The parents look for our school on purpose because it feels very much like a family.

Brian Lehrer: What a wonderful call, Eric. There you are doing God's work, some people might call it. Good luck continuing there in Marble Hill.

Eric: Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Michael, one thing I'll take away from that call, besides all the details, is that I think it's true for all kinds of teaching. What Eric brought up there, even in the very difficult circumstances of starting with people, in the conditions that he was describing, how do you connect with a student? It's not first by talking about the content of the math or the science or the literature or whatever it is.

First, connect to them as human beings. Smile. Earn their trust. Tim Walz was talking about that in the context of environmental policy in our last segment. First, earn people's trust, then talk about the content. Build relationship. [crosstalk] Oh, that's true. I didn't even think of that. A former teacher. There it is. I don't know. Very moving. Eric's call.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Totally. Amazing work that he's doing. Just two things since I've been reporting on a lot of these students. Just to add too, from what I've heard, is that many of these kids are entering with big obstacles, but they're extremely motivated. They've done these really grueling trips to come here, and school is the priority. They are really motivated to learn English to succeed. The other thing is that in a lot of these cases, English can be the common language so there's a lot of peer support and practice in English when you have kids from lots of different countries.

Brian Lehrer: Michael in Midland Beach, Staten Island, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Micheal Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to share a little bit about what's going on in my school community, which is a small elementary school downtown. We were losing enrollment through the pandemic, especially. Then this last year, we got a major influx of migrant students from Latin America. We went from about 1% of our school population being English as a New Language learners to somewhere around 25% to 30% of our school building, which was a major, major demographic shift for us.

The community came together. We did really wonderful things this last year. One of the awesome things that's happened for this coming school year is that we got enough funding for a second ENL teacher, which is English, as a New Language teacher. However, my principal was interviewing, interviewing, interviewing, and we couldn't find a qualified candidate for the position. She actually asked within house to see if any of the teachers in our building wanted to go get the light training. That's actually what I'm going to be doing this year.

I've been a pre-K teacher for the last several years, so I switched positions this year. It was easier to find a new pre-K teacher than it was to find an ENL teacher. It's an interesting thing. I'm going to be going into this school year. I have very little experience in teaching English as a New Language formally. A lot of it is what we do as early childhood teachers anyway. A lot of pictures and practice through literacy, and young children learn language quickly anyway.

It's going to be learning while doing the work. It's interesting. I don't know that I consider myself a highly qualified English as a New Language teacher yet. That's what I'm going to be doing this year as I'm getting the certification.

Brian Lehrer: Sounds like you're excited about it. How do you feel about it?

Micheal: I'm feeling excited about it, but I guess if this is going on in our building and we had somebody who was willing to go get the certification, I don't know how many buildings there are around the city, around the district that are looking for qualified teachers and can't find one to service these children who are coming in speaking languages other than English specifically.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much for your call and inspiring story, Michael. That's part of the article that you reported for Chalkbeat, Michael. The shortage of teachers who are trained to teach English language learners.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: That was a shortage area even before the past couple of years. Obviously, that's even more strained now. The city has done some things to try to recruit more teachers, allowing teachers who have some ENL experience but are currently teaching another subject to switch into ENL without losing their tenure accumulation that they've gotten under their other subject to incentivize more people to come.

The other thing is that ENL teachers are not necessarily bilingual teachers. They're trained in teaching English as a New Language but there is also a lot of demand for bilingual education and teachers who can speak a student's home language and work with them to learn English.

Brian Lehrer: Listener Nuala from Queens texts, "My kids went to our local public school PS 149 with over 1000 students. My granddaughter goes to the same school with 800 plus, meaning it's down by about 20%." Nuala writes, "It is much better. No more speech classes in the hallway." That's the upside of enrollment decline, according to one Queens parent. I think the same listener writes, "As a person who runs an immigration clinic in Queens, the New York City school system has been a wonderful sanctuary for these new neighbors. I ask every family, and they almost always say they are happy with the school. It is the introduction to life in New York City."

Before we run out of time, Michael, I want to touch on these other two demographic points from your article that I mentioned in the intro, but we haven't talked about them yet. Despite New York City's Asian American population, Black and Asian student enrollment are now almost equal. That surprised me. I think that will surprise a lot of people because I don't think the percentages of Black New Yorkers and Asian New Yorkers are about equal yet. I think there's still significantly fewer Asian Americans as a percentage of the New York population. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the enrollment in the schools is nearing equal.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: I think that's right. That citywide they're not as close as they are in the school system yet. Certainly, the trends correspond that the Asian American population has been growing, and the Black population has been shrinking for a long time in New York, and that's reflected in the schools. Back in 2012, the city school system was about 28% Black, 16% Asian American. Now they're less than a percentage point apart.

Brian Lehrer: It does also go to who is leaving New York City. I think there's more press in general about white people leaving New York City, but it's really white people and Black people leaving New York City and more Latino and Asian people coming, correct?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: I believe that's right. Certainly, the Black population decline is pretty well documented.

Brian Lehrer: The other thing was that the poverty rate among students in the system went up last year. Maybe not by a lot, but you never like to see poverty rates going up. It's at a time when presumably the economy has been in recovery since the depths of the pandemic. How do schools measure poverty among students and why are there more in poverty right now?

Michael Elsen-Rooney: The DOE has a couple different ways of measuring. One is just count of how many families are receiving some type of government assistance, and then there's some other metrics that include a broader range of possible indicators. Both have gone up slightly, but meaningfully. There's no one clear explanation. I would imagine that having a large number of new students who are living in homeless shelters would make a dent in that poverty rate.

Brian Lehrer: Michael Elsen-Rooney, reporter for Chalkbeat, New York. Thanks so much.

Michael Elsen-Rooney: Thanks, Brian.

 

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