Businesses, fearing that price increases will drive away customers, often make small cuts in the amount of product in a package. Cereal boxes, candy bars, toilet paper bundles, boxes of plastic bags have been subtly reduced, as has the amount of leather used in car seats.
“Shrinkflation” also happens in K-12 education. Before the pandemic, it was happening in rural districts, which were cutting school weeks from five days to four. Districts hoped for savings on transportation and nonprofessional staff, but these were elusive. Student learning results were negative, not neutral. But shorter weeks were popular with teachers, and districts that adopted them had an advantage in recruitment. So the practice spread to a majority of rural districts in states like Idaho, Colorado, and Oklahoma. But it didn’t happen in big cities, where parents and employers depended on the five-day week and would resist any cutbacks.
Come the pandemic, schooling shrank dramatically in almost every district in America. Children stayed home and saw teachers at best a few hours each day. Health and safety, not a desire for savings, drove these changes.
Now, however, as health and safety concerns recede, all districts, including urban ones, are under pressure to provide fewer days and hours of student-teacher contact than before the pandemic. Cutbacks that could not have been negotiated have become a new baseline. Teachers unions, which had not endorsed four-day weeks before the pandemic, are coming out for it now. Other less-defined initiatives, like unscheduled school closings for teacher mental health days, or de facto job actions when so many teachers take leave that schools can’t operate, are becoming more common.
Nobody seriously claims that this form of shrinkflation is good for student learning. Like the four-day week in rural areas, the urban cutbacks benefit teachers and shift burdens of everything from teaching to student custody to families.
All this is happening incrementally, and every locality seems to be on its own. Though parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, are lashing back about sudden school closures, no national group has organized opposition to this shrinking of public education. The interests of parents, employers, higher education, and cities are all at risk. But nobody is demanding that such changes be temporary or be subjected, like other programs of educational change, to rigorous testing and evaluation before being widely implemented.
As always, privileged parents can find ways to compensate for reductions in what schools provide. For one, they can switch to private schools, whose curricula and student learning standards are driven by the imperative to give people what they pay (a lot) for. This is not so for less advantaged families, the great majority, who are being told these cutbacks won’t hurt students. In reality, the ultimate consequences might not be fully evident for years, when students take the SAT or struggle in college.
Shrinking public education is a lot more consequential than cutting a few grams out of a candy bar or putting cheaper material into the interior of a Chevy. Will America’s political leaders or interest groups just stand by as public education dwindles?
