The Learning Curve: High Performing Districts Not Spared from Enrollment Decline

This post has been updated with a correction.

My stories on enrollment decline have gotten a lot of feedback over the past couple months. It seems like everyone has their own theory about what’s actually going on. 

Last week, I wrote about one of the more popular theories: Enrollment is declining because families are pulling their kids out of public schools and opting to send them to private schools, or even to homeschool them.  

I dug into the data and found that’s just not the case. While there are certainly more families homeschooling their kids, or sending them to homeschool-esque independent study charters, that trend doesn’t come close to explaining why there are 27,000 fewer kids in local public schools than there were a decade ago. 

The simple fact is there are just fewer kids than there used to be. 

But the theories are completely understandable. As Sweetwater Union Superintendent Moises Aguirre told me, it’s incredibly hard to absorb the reality that our region may be shrinking. 

“People generally think there’s always going to be more money, more people, more students. That’s the underlying assumption, so for us to say that assumption is no longer true … it’s a difficult change in how people see the world,” he said.    

Late last week a reader emailed me another interesting theory.  

“I suspect the loss of SDUSD students are going to other districts who are better performing. It would be interesting to pull that data,” the reader wrote.  

Well, I did. Sort of.  

Inter-district transfers are a complicated process and getting the data and mapping it out will require some time. Though I did put it on my to-do list, so expect an extremely convoluted flow chart at some point! 

In lieu of a real analysis, I did an extremely rough one. What I wanted to know was if higher performing districts saw a slower rate of enrollment decline than lower-performing ones.  

The short answer is not really. 

Here’s what I did: I pulled the percentage of students meeting standards on math and English test scores and averaged them (down and dirty, remember?). Then I grabbed the percentage change in enrollment over the past decade for each district and ran them through Excel’s correlation function.  

That function returns a number between 1 and –1. The closer to one of those two numbers, the stronger the correlation.  It returned a figure of .07, meaning there is virtually no correlation whatsoever. 

I also wanted to be able to visualize the relationship between these factors, so I threw them into a scatter plot. As you can see, there’s really not much of anything there. 

In fact, enrollment has declined the most at some of the highest performing districts. At Rancho Santa Fe, the district with the highest test scores in San Diego County, the about 27 percent decline in enrollment is more than double the about 12 percent decline countywide. Similarly, some of the lowest performing districts actually saw increases in enrollment over the past decade. 

This surprised me. A couple of years ago, I wrote a story examining which high schools San Diego Unified parents most frequently choiced their kids out of. When I did a similar analysis with that data, there was an extremely tight correlation between the percentage of students meeting standards on state tests and the percentage of families in the neighborhood who chose to send their kids to those schools.  

More on both of these threads later, friends. 

Miramar Officially Launches its Bachelor’s Degree 

A year and a half after first setting its sights on creating a bachelor’s degree, Miramar’s program has officially launched this week. The launch means that all three of the San Diego Community College District’s for-credit schools have an active bachelor’s program. 

The public safety management bachelor’s degree is meant to help people working in public safety fields like firefighting and policing level up their skills and advance into management positions. It also builds on the dozens of existing associate degrees, certifications and training programs the college has long offered in those fields.  

“First responders often attend a magnitude of training and education from a variety of institutions,” the director of Miramar’s Fire Technology Program wrote in a press release. That’s why the program will allow for students to receive credit for prior training, to give students the “most direct pathway,” to finishing the degree. 

The vast majority of students enrolled in the program’s first cohort already work as first responders, including as lifeguards or as EMT’s. 

Another Parent Arrested by ICE

On Friday, I wrote about how a father was arrested by ICE while waiting to pick their child up around the corner from Linda Vista Elementary. It was just the latest such incident, and the first to occur near a San Diego Unified school. 

I was struck by how frank San Diego Unified’s leaders were during that Friday press conference. Board President Cody Petterson, for example, called the agents “masked paramilitary forces terrorizing families.” 

One of the things I’ve been wrestling with since the trend of arresting parents outside of their children’s school kicked off is how powerless educators are. Pretty much all they can do is ask for a warrant, and that only really matters if ICE actually tries to enter a school. They have no control over what happens off-campus, where these arrests have been taking place. 

Well, it turns out Superintendent Fabiola Bagula has been wrestling with that sense of powerlessness too. 

“I know we have beautiful educators that have actually told me, ‘I’ll go out and fight them.’ I’m like, ‘Please do not, because then you will be in trouble as well.’ We don’t want that,” Bagula told me on Friday. “I can’t advise anyone to break the law or put themselves in danger, and then I’m also an educator, and I know I would.” 

On Wednesday morning ICE arrested yet another local parent taking their child to school, this time in Encinitas. In an emotional video of the incident, the man’s child can be heard crying and bystanders demand to see a warrant as agents lead the handcuffed man dressed in a bright orange construction shirt to their car. 

What We’re Writing 

The number of students being independently homeschooled has continued to slump from pandemic-era highs, but remains well above pre-pandemic levels. 

With San Diego Unified’s school year kicking off, the good folks at KPBS invited me on to Roundtable last week to yap about all things education. Give it a listen if you’re so inclined.

Correction: A previous version of this article mistakenly identified the three San Diego Community College District schools that have created bachelor’s degrees as for-profit institutions. They are actually for-credit institutions.

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