ENROLLMENT IN CALIFORNIA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS for the 2025-26 school year declined by 1.2% or 72,000 students from 2024-25 levels, the state Legislative Analyst’s Office reported, but average daily student attendance increased and is close to pre-pandemic levels.
The enrollment data aligns with a decadelong decline. Since the 2016-17 school year, school district enrollment has decreased by 11%, or 608,000 students, and public charter school enrollment has declined by 21%, or 124,000 students.
Statewide attendance, relatively stable before the pandemic, averaged about 95% from 2013 to 2020. The state did not collect data in 2020-21, but attendance in the following school year fell to just 90%. Since then, attendance has steadily increased and stands at 94.5% this year.
The improvement is not linked to a new attendance recovery program introduced in the 2024-25 budget, which allows districts and charter schools to generate additional attendance-based funding by providing instruction outside of the regular school day to students who were absent, if they meet certain requirements. Data released May 1 shows that less than 0.1% of total statewide attendance came through this program.
Even with the attendance increase, the data overall are lower than the estimates used to develop the state budget. Gov. Gavin Newsom assumed an overall statewide attendance increase of 0.58% from last year and a Transitional Kindergarten enrollment of 200,000 students. In fact, TK enrollment was about 196,000.
The Department of Education uses attendance data to allocate state funding for programs, including special education and the Local Control Funding Formula — a tier of funding that districts receive for low-income students, English learners and foster youth. Based on the data, preliminary spending under the Local Control Funding Formula was $2 billion less than the estimated budget, potentially creating more funding for other education and community college priorities.
This story originally appeared in EdSource.
