How well do institutional leaders learn from the lessons of the past? If school districts are the institutions in question, the answer is: not well at all.

The nation’s public schools today are undergoing a sustained decline in student enrollment. This phenomenon echoes what happened between 1972 and 1989, when enrollment dropped by more than five million students. School districts responded then by postponing tough budget decisions, largely because school districts have always been built and operated for continuous growth. When enrollment drops dramatically, leaders resist switching gears.

Between fall 2019 and fall 2024, enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools fell nationally by 1.4 million students (2.8 percent). Forty states have experienced declines, and enrollment is projected to keep dropping—by an additional 2.7 million students by 2031 and even further by 2050. Declining enrollment means declining resources. Unfortunately, school district leaders across the country are responding the same way their predecessors did 50 years ago.

As in any organization, the failure of school districts to adjust and adapt to changes in available resources has serious and predictable consequences. Education leaders, elected officials, the media, and the public should not wander blindly into the future as victims of circumstance. Instead, we can learn from the first big enrollment decline and choose to lead the change our predecessors did not.

The First Big Decline

Fluctuations in enrollment happen often, but sustained declines rarely do. The history of mass education is one of growth and expansion. In the United States the 19th-century common school movement and expansive immigration and urbanization during the Industrial Revolution caused rapid and massive increases in school enrollment. When the Census Bureau first counted the public school population in 1840, approximately two million students were attending 50,000 schools. Over the next 50 years, enrollment ballooned to over 14 million, and it doubled to 30 million between 1890 and 1930. Growth slowed in the wake of the Great Depression but then expanded again following the post–World War II baby boom. Between 1950 and 1960 the number of students in U.S. schools increased by 52 percent, from 28 million to 42.7 million.

The school-age population peaked in 1971, at 51.4 million students, but then began a sharp downturn as the birth rate hit an all-time low in 1973 (3.2 million births, compared to 4.35 million in 1960). What followed was the first sustained decline in primary and secondary school enrollment in U.S. history, with schools losing 11 percent of their total enrollment. Elementary and middle grades saw the largest falloffs at 16 percent. Enrollments in high schools, which had grown the previous decade by 38 percent, registered a decline of 13 percent.

This unprecedented shrinkage sparked severe challenges to school districts. Many postponed taking action until they had lost large percentages of their enrollment. And when they finally engaged in comprehensive planning and decided to close schools, they often scrapped their plans at the last minute due to push back from parents and teachers. Almost invariably, administrators in such districts would resort to teacher and staff layoffs within two years.

As enrollments rebounded in the late 1980s through the 1990s, districts and state education systems forgot the lessons of decline and quickly shifted back to the management of growth.

Enrollment statistics, district budgets, and media stories from across the country make clear that 50 years after the first national decline, school districts today have fallen into the same patterns and are making the same mistakes as their predecessors. Having studied the first decline and identified the stages through which any district passes as it struggles with the consequences of fewer students, I have concluded it is not too late for district leaders to learn from those past challenges and adapt to the present reality.

Muddling Through

Why do districts often avoid or delay responding to declining enrollments? Because managing contraction is much more difficult than managing growth. District leaders must confront political conflict, deep-seated professional norms, and internal bureaucratic resistance. While administrators often rely on data (such as birth rates and building capacity) in proposing school closures, community residents typically respond emotionally, wanting above all to save their neighborhood school. Closing schools threatens individual and community interests immediately, whereas the benefits of operating a larger district more efficiently and effectively are not easily articulated and take time to realize. This inherent conflict stands in the way of rational compromise on structural reforms. Then and now, districts can coast for years using “the fine art of muddling through,” to borrow a phrase from the political scientist Charles E. Lindblom.

Between 1968 and 1979, Cleveland lost 63,000 students but postponed all school closings and increased its teaching staff. New York City lost 50,000 students in four years between 1971 and 1975 but closed no schools and increased staffing. Chicago only closed a handful of schools despite losing 96,000 students between 1971 and 1979. Los Angeles also lost 100,000 in eight years but closed no schools.

In smaller districts, the pattern was the same. In the suburbs surrounding Chicago, a district with a peak enrollment of 3,435 in 1969 lost 13 percent of its enrollment in four years (a decrease of 253 students), yet no official record documented the decline in school board minutes, newsletters, or school memoranda during those years. Instead of reducing personnel, the district increased its certificated staff from 168 to 180 people during the decline.

Today, districts of all sizes are following the same pattern.

In New York City, the nation’s largest district is spending $290 million a year to prevent budget cuts at schools that have lost or are projected to lose enrollment, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of Education Department data.

In Austin, Texas, the district has lost 20 percent of its enrollment, more than 17,000 students, over the last 15 years and now faces a deficit amounting to 20 percent of its budget. An analysis for the Austin American-Statesman “found that district leaders spent years delaying difficult decisions as enrollment plummeted—preserving staffing levels, operating dozens of under-enrolled campuses and maintaining programs that became increasingly expensive to sustain.”

By 2025, 24 of the district’s 115 schools enrolled fewer than 300 students, requiring the district to spend $40 million annually to subsidize their continued operation. Even after closing 11 schools last November, the district ended the 2025–26 fiscal year with a year-end deficit of $95 million. After drawing down its reserves to avoid cutting staff, the district projected a $180 million deficit for the 2026–27 school year. The school board approved $205 million in cuts, after adding back over $20 million to the budget through on-the-spot adjustments to ensure a full-time librarian at each school regardless of enrollment. The district claims the remaining $5 million is a “surplus.”

In making the case for proposed budget reductions to the board and the public, Superintendent Matias Segura hardly mentioned enrollment declines and instead blamed the state for not providing sufficient funding to meet district costs. “We’re at a point where there’s very little that we can do to get back to a balanced budget that doesn’t create disruption and ultimately reduce the number of staff in Austin ISD,” Segura said. “And we didn’t get here overnight, and we didn’t get here by accident.”

In California, where enrollment has been declining since 2014, dozens of districts sit on the state’s financial watchlist as they continue spending while enrollment declines. Michael Fine, CEO of the state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, says no district leaders should be surprised. “Districts all over the state are dealing with many of the same issues. From my standpoint as an advocate of best practice, there should be nobody on the list because the two predominant factors are predictable,” Fine said, referring to declining enrollment and less revenue. “Why weren’t they dealing with these a year ago, two years ago, and three years ago?”

Diseconomies of Scale

During periods of growth, districts add new programs, hire additional staff and administrators, and create new layers of organizational authority. These increments become embedded in the system, making it difficult to cut them later. Growth typically brings additional state and federal funding, which acts as a resource buffer administrators use to satisfy various interest groups and “buy” their way out of problems. As this buffer disappears, the level of conflict rises.

In the early years of an enrollment decline, total district expenditures rarely fall in proportion to the drop in the student population because of fixed costs such as facilities maintenance, utilities, debt service, and pension obligations and escalating costs dictated by collective bargaining agreements. Districts incur such expenses regardless of enrollment shrinkage, creating a “budget paradox” in which per-pupil expenditures increase as enrollment drops. Cultural norms in education, state and district policy, and union contracts further limit the willingness and ability of districts to reduce their spending, especially in the short term. While per-pupil expenditures rise, service quality deteriorates following cuts to programming systemwide and eventual school closures. This situation erodes public trust and undermines district legitimacy.

During the first decline, districts often underwent three or more years of falling enrollment before leaders reduced spending or redirected resources. And researchers found that rather than adapting, districts then made incremental cuts, eliminating elective programs such as art, music, and foreign languages and sometimes reducing offerings in core academic subjects. Eventually, revenues decline enough to necessitate deeper cuts, but usually after years of delay and inaction.

Leaders of organizations facing a sustained decline in resources sometimes try to avoid conflict through inaction. They fail to reduce costs—and even increase them. As during the first big decline, the current era has seen a growth in school district personnel.

As enrollments dropped in the 1970s, researchers observed that staffing levels, particularly for administrators and support staff, grew. Academics noted that this accords with research in other fields showing that bureaucratic organizations are prone to “career creep,” in which individuals are promoted into administrative roles at a rate faster than the organization is growing. We see the same disconnect today as districts across the country report losing tens of thousands of students while maintaining and even increasing the number of teachers, administrators, and staff they employ.

Growing evidence from districts across the country shows that even before the large infusion of federal dollars following the Covid-19 pandemic, districts systematically increased (or maintained) their staffing as enrollment declined. The Adams 12 district in metro Denver provides a striking example. This district lost 4,800 students between 2019 and 2025 but added 251 employees. Although it cut some teachers (less than 1 percent), it added 140 school-based non-teaching positions and almost 100 district administrators—increases of 16 and 31 percent respectively.

Reductions in Force

Why do districts add new staff members when they should be cutting them? One big reason is that school districts face massive resistance from communities and organized interest groups, who oppose layoffs even when they are financially unavoidable. And as in the past, district leaders face constraints on how they reduce staff levels and often must choose between laying people off based on seniority and irrespective of job performance—or keeping everyone to avoid losing some of their best people.

Past patterns confirm that school districts usually increase hiring whenever they can and prefer to lay off teachers and staff as a last resort. Yet, after attempting to reduce costs by cutting programs and eventually closing schools (without cutting employees), they find they must lay off staff. Teacher and staff salaries consume more than 80 percent of a school system’s budget, which means any significant reduction in spending requires a “reduction in force,” or RIF, to borrow jargon from industrial economics.

With the declines that began in the 1970s, educators, administrators, researchers, and eventually policymakers realized that district hiring and staffing rules had far-reaching consequences with significant implications for quality and equity. This era saw the rise of last-in-first-out (LIFO), the seniority-based layoff protocol allowed or mandated by many states and used by almost all school districts when conducting a RIF.

When enrollment declines year after year, districts must eventually begin to reduce staff, but the process of bringing personnel spending in line with resources happens in predictable, often painful stages. In the first stage, districts reduce hiring and eventually freeze it, leading to a more senior and more expensive workforce. In the second stage, districts lay off non-tenured teachers first, often without regard to merit, and only then move to reducing tenured teachers based on seniority.

This pattern will play out increasingly in the years ahead, even in states where teacher evaluation policies require districts to at least consider teacher performance ratings. These requirements still give preference to seniority and do not cover the newest hires (teachers without tenure) who may be laid off at will.

Just as they did 50 years ago, districts today have older, whiter teacher workforces that come with increasing employment costs. The population of younger teachers tends to be more racially and ethnically diverse than that of senior teachers, so seniority-based layoffs disproportionately affect teachers of color and set back diversification. LIFO policies restrict flexibility in staffing and also disproportionately harm low-income, Black, and Hispanic students, who are more likely to attend schools staffed by inexperienced teachers. Teachers union contracts often mandate that in the event of a tie between two individuals being considered for layoff, administrators must use the highest (or lowest) social security number, a coin toss, or some other specified objective technique to determine who must go. Most states permit seniority to be the sole factor in layoff decisions. California and New York require it.

The infusion of federal dollars following the pandemic allowed districts to avoid layoffs and even fueled more hiring, but over the last several years districts across the country started laying off teachers, in some cases for the first time ever. The Clark County, Nevada, district has lost 37,000 students since 2019—15 percent of its enrollment—but this year was the first time it expected to cut teaching positions.

Earlier this year the Poudre Valley School District in Fort Collins, Colorado, met community resistance when it announced it would need to lay off teachers. Enrollment has been declining for years by the thousands, but the school board delayed any action. Eventually, the district faced a financial crisis and launched an effort to close schools but abandoned it at the last minute. It then had little choice but to cut teachers and staff. The school board approved a formal RIF process aimed at reducing what the district projected would be an $8 million deficit, only for the district to announce a month later that it had found a way to avoid layoffs. Then the district used the LIFO approach and indiscriminately fired 110 “probationary teachers,” those with less than three years of experience, who were not protected by state regulations. A few months later, the district warned of another round of layoffs as it announced a plan to close nine schools, nearly 20 percent of the district’s buildings. Absent policy intervention, this pattern will continue in districts across the country.

The Mismanagement of Decline

Much of the research on the nation’s first episode of declining enrollment concludes that delayed and incremental change offers the only politically viable response, based on the assumption that the traditional growth-oriented district model resists meaningful reform because of the competing interests of stakeholders. As the authors of a 1982 literature review put it, “Given the difficulty of achieving consensus for radical retrenchment, the most effective conflict management may be ‘muddling through’ via incremental changes—small adjustments tested against the reactions of those affected.”

This is not the lesson we should learn from the first great enrollment decline. Muddling through may postpone conflict, but it can also result in a slow and painful death from malnutrition. A 1979 study of dwindling enrollment among rural districts in Illinois used the term “miasma” to describe what happens when a district loses students and eventually revenue but refuses to make hard decisions. During decisionmaking processes, such as when leaders are considering school closures, miasma results from a systemic inability to resolve deadlocks caused by competing values and entrenched interests. In a state of miasma, school systems cannot gain support for “technical-rational criteria” and objective standards like cost-efficiency, school size, or building age. Instead, they often balance their budgets by making programming cuts at the last minute and without strategic planning—or by beginning a spiral of drawing on reserves and deficit spending.

Such districts hollow themselves out through incremental cuts to extracurriculars, electives, and eventually core academic programs. This incrementalism shifts a district’s focus away from student achievement and toward simply maintaining “system equilibrium” and a “basic educational program.”

Absent an external shock such as an infusion of federal resources or a change to a state’s financing formula, district leaders who rely on muddling through will find that education quality suffers, families leave, resources further dwindle, and conflict rises as the districts slowly starve themselves.

Public Leadership Required

Successful school management in an era of enrollment decline requires accepting tradeoffs. Educators, elected officials, business leaders, and the media must acknowledge that decline is happening and help parents and the public understand that reality and the costs of inaction. Instead of muddling through the next decade, these leaders need to learn from the mistakes of the past to avoid repeating them.

The shift to the management of decline from the management of growth requires an entirely different mindset. Declining enrollment creates a zero-sum dynamic with no slack resources and clear winners and losers. This dramatically intensifies conflict among stakeholders. Growth can mask errors in judgment, but the management of decline requires leaders who can identify challenges before they become crises and diffuse conflict among competing interests. Unlike their predecessors, today’s education leaders and public officials do not have the luxury of simply waiting until enrollment grows again.

In contrast to the 1970s, when districts held an exclusive franchise over publicly funded education, current declines are taking place against the backdrop of the largest expansion of school choice in the nation’s history. Considering how much the traditional school district model depends on predictable and stable enrollment, it is not surprising districts often oppose school choice. But choice is here to stay and will continue to grow.

What’s more, bountiful evidence from the United States and elsewhere indicates the current era of birthrate decline differs from those of the past and will persist. School district leaders and others concerned with universal access to education can no longer rely on an assumption of perpetual population growth everywhere all the time.

Everything about the traditional operating model is oriented toward predictability, stability, and constant growth. Districts are imagined as organic institutions that expand naturally with their communities. Taxpayers, parents, and educators view schools as permanent investments and expect each school to provide the same programming regardless of enrollment. Staffing models and pay scales assume life-long employment and ever-increasing revenue. State laws, district policies, and union contracts encourage incrementalism and raise the cost of change.

Education leaders must have the courage to acknowledge that the traditional model was not designed for retrenchment and must be reinvented for flexibility and adaptation. They must help the public see the need for systemic change and must lead a paradigm shift from reactive, crisis-driven incrementalism to proactive, ongoing long-term planning and restructuring. We need to stop treating the “neighborhood school” as sacred and school buildings as permanent fixtures and instead develop new ways to guarantee all families access to schools that meet their children’s needs. We need to develop staffing models and compensation systems that give preference to performance over longevity and enable flexibility and innovation in where and how teachers teach. Districts must be more open to collaboration with other districts and with other local governments, community partners, and service providers to create new economies of scale and new ways of providing services. States need to develop new systems for funding schools that allow for flexibility in how funds are used, remove incentives for delay, and assist districts that commit to systemic change in managing legacy costs. States need to remove constraints on districts’ innovation and impose accountability on those that falter because they refuse to adapt.

To build school systems that can thrive without constant enrollment growth, we need leaders with the courage to help families, the media, and the public understand the opportunity costs of inaction—leaders who will make the hard choices necessary to prioritize student achievement over system stability and adult comfort. We cannot wait this one out. Unless existing systems meet this challenge by fundamentally changing the traditional operating model, they will wither from starvation or collapse from insolvency or abandonment. The past does not predict the future unless we fail to learn from it.

Parker Baxter is the director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs.