Roughly 76,000 fewer students enrolled in Texas public schools this academic year — the first non-pandemic decline in nearly four decades — with Hispanic students accounting for the overwhelming majority of the loss, according to a report released Monday.
The policy research group Texas 2036 analyzed the state’s enrollment data and projected that about 100,000 fewer students would attend public schools by the end of the current decade. However, some projections show the number growing by nearly half a million over that time.
Hispanic students accounted for 81% of this school year’s enrollment drop, Texas 2036 found. Students learning English and those from low-income families experienced some of the sharpest declines. Over the past year, federal and state leaders increased anti-immigration rhetoric, in some cases detaining Texas students and prompting fear across communities.
Meanwhile, the rate of Texas families having children has declined in recent years. Districts have lost students to other schooling options, with more families expected to opt out of their public neighborhood campuses as the state launches school vouchers later this year.
Texas educates about 5.5 million public school students, 53% of whom are Hispanic, 24% are white and 13% are Black.
“What stands out in the data is that public school enrollment is falling even as Texas continues to grow,” said Carlo Castillo, a senior research analyst at Texas 2036, in a statement. “In many parts of the state, population gains are no longer translating into public school enrollment growth. That points to a broader structural shift policymakers and district leaders will need to plan for.”
[…]
In recent years, growing immigration helped public schools manage the slump in birth rates, Bob Templeton, who studies Texas’ education demographics, said during the Monday hearing.
Now, districts will serve higher concentrations of students with significant needs, but they will have less funding due to drops in the number of children born and slowing immigration, Templeton said. He estimated that public school enrollment could drop by roughly 500,000 in the next four to five years.
“This is not another blip or a one-off,” Templeton told lawmakers. “This is an inflection point.”
Districts in urban areas, the Panhandle and along the southern border disproportionately experienced the enrollment decline, according to the Texas 2036 report. The 2.1% decline in Hispanic enrollment — or 61,781 students — represents “the single largest year-over-year reversal” among the four major racial and ethnic groups.
Mary Lynn Pruneda, the director of education and workforce policy for Texas 2036, told The Texas Tribune that her group could not determine to what extent increased immigration enforcement contributed to the enrollment loss.
Rep. Gina Hinojosa, an Austin Democrat running for governor, said during a press conference Monday, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it is contributing to it.”
See here for the Texas 2036 report. I don’t think there’s any question that national immigration limits plus fear of ICE rampages has led to fewer students in classrooms. We don’t seem to be able to put a number on that yet. Some of these factors can be altered, so none of this is written in stone yet, but there is another factor to consider, which is that the Lege has vastly degraded the public school experience in recent years.
Kimmie Fink, a Liberty Hill ISD parent, is raising her children Catholic. But that doesn’t mean she wants the Ten Commandments displayed in their public school classrooms.
“The Ten Commandments might match our children’s faith traditions, but we’re very well aware that Texas is an incredibly diverse state, and they can cause harm to children with other faiths—and trample on a parent’s right to guide the moral and religious upbringing of their own children,” Fink told Courier Texas.
She’s referring to Senate Bill 10, a new law the Texas Legislature passed in 2025 requiring a poster of the Ten Commandments that’s at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall be displayed in all public school classrooms.
The mandate has faced legal hurdles since it went into effect in September. Groups of parents and religious leaders have filed lawsuits over the law, alleging it violates the First Amendment, the separation of church and state, and amounts to lawmakers promoting Christianity over other faiths—including in Fink’s own district.
[…]
“My daughter is in fifth grade, and I’ve asked her if she sees these posters in her classroom that I’d like her to let me know,” Fink said. “It’s definitely colored a lot of our conversations. We’ve talked about people in our neighborhood who are Hindu and celebrate Diwali and people in our neighborhood who are Jewish and Muslim, and she has this understanding that not everybody believes the same thing.”
Fink’s daughter loves graphic novels, and was recently reading the graphic novel adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, which was banned in Keller ISD in 2022.
“My youngest was asking questions about it, and I used it as a moment to discuss why we don’t demonize religions,” she said. “Because horrible things happen when you do. It’s not a conversation I really expected to have, and I don’t think it’s a conversation I would be having with my kids if we didn’t live in Texas,” she added. ”But we are going down a really scary path.”
[…]
SB 11 took effect this school year and forced districts to vote on whether to adopt a voluntary designated prayer time during the school day. But the majority of districts across the state chose to reject the policy, much to Paxton’s dismay.
These bills continue to expand on a conservative push to infuse more white Christian nationalism into public schools, as the Texas Board of Education approved Bluebonnet Learning in November 2024, which are learning materials for kindergarten through eighth-grade students that include a Bible-based curriculum.
Board members are also deliberating a social studies standards overhaul that critics say leans too heavily into white, Westernized Christian teachings at the expense of other religions and cultures.
They’re also reviewing a standardized book list that could make the Bible required reading in Texas public schools.
Lawmakers also passed SB 12, which stripped K-12 public schools of all diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and created a “Parental Bill of Rights”—something that had unintended consequences on how school nurses were able to administer care for students.
The bill prevents schools from developing or using policies that reference race, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation; bans DEI as a factor in hiring prohibits teachers from using they/them pronouns; bans clubs based on sexual identity; creates an avenue for parents to file complaints; and requires districts to create policies for disciplining employees who engage in DEI-related tasks.
“It’s infuriating,” Sarah Inatomi, a licensed counselor and mother to a future Plano ISD student, said. “ When we allow people to be who they are, children’s empathy and their understanding on how to navigate a complex world increases. Because it’s not like when you erase these things in school they stop existing elsewhere. These kids are gonna have to go into the workforce and learn how to interact with all kinds of different people, so when you try to stifle a minority population from having a voice and representation in school, it’s just going to cause significant struggles and it’s going to cause kids to not properly be prepared for society. That’s why I want my daughter to go to a diverse public school.”
If Texas continues down this path, Inatomi said she would consider other options for her daughter—including homeschooling or moving to a different state.
I’m pretty sure our current leadership would consider that a feature and not a bug. I feel like even as recently as under Rick Perry, this exodus would have been seen as a problem that needed attention, but that’s mostly because the current wingnut billionaire overlords had not yet made any real progress in rooting out the pro-public school Republicans in the Legislature. We don’t live in that world anymore. We have a chance to make the conditions for public education at least a little better in this election, but it will take a lot more than that to really fix it. I don’t know how much time we have.
The lifelong goal of the GOP killing public education is nearing completion.
From the internet overlord: “In Texas, public schools achieve an impressive high school graduation rate of around 90-93.5%. While statewide private school graduation rates are not tracked as uniformly, national and state averages typically see private schools posting rates above 96%. However, this success metric is highly influenced by the socio-economic and demographic differences of the student populations they serve. Graduation Rates: Public Schools: Texas public high schools boast a graduation rate of over 90%. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) regulates and tracks these outcomes to ensure school accountability. Private Schools: Private schools consistently hit high graduation benchmarks, generally averaging 96.4% or higher. Private institutions often have stricter academic tracking and smaller student-to-teacher ratios that help prevent students from dropping out. ”
“The National Assessment of Educational Progress evaluates public education outcomes by testing students nationwide on math and reading and other subjects in grades four, eight and 12. In what is called the “nation’s report card,” Texas fourth and eighth graders appear to fall short.
Outside of fourth-grade math, the state’s scores suggest student achievement is well below average. Texas ranked 38th in fourth-grade reading, 44th in eighth-grade reading and 34th in eighth-grade math.”
Maybe private schools are providing a better education to their students than public schools, and that’s what is driving the shift…
^^ THIS ^^
Short answer: charter schools.
Austin ISD facing a $180M budget shortfall next year. We lose roughly $1B to recapture. And vouchers haven’t even really had their effect yet. It will get worse.
Sure, CL. They aren’t held accountable, they pay their teaches less, and they can admit (or refuse to admit) whomever they want. But yeah, surely they’re just better at their jobs or better people or something.
The comment editor moved things around on me. To be clear, the comment I was agreeing to above (or below?) was TBender’s.