The number of students enrolled in California public schools this year dropped compared to last year, the state reported last week. It was the biggest drop in enrollment in the past four years, Theresa Harrington reports in EdSource. The charter school share of public school students grew slightly in that time.

A spokesman for the California School Boards Association tells Harrington that the difficulty in predicting which schools will be affected “makes budgeting a difficult art, and that’s something that our districts are grappling with — both the larger ones because of the scale they’re operating at, as well as the smaller ones who don’t have access to a demographer and for whom one small change, relatively speaking, can have a big impact on their organization.”

Mike Petrilli looks at the possible impacts of falling birthrates and declining enrollments in “The Baby Bust Goes to School,” which will appear in the Summer 2019 issue of Education Next.

— Education Next