A decade and a half ago, San Diego Unified revealed a new master plan for student success: Vision 2020. The plan aimed to revamp district schools and promised a “quality school in every neighborhood.”
District officials set 12 lofty goals including erasing longstanding achievement gaps and increasing neighborhood participation rates – a measure of how many kids in a school’s attendance area actually attend their neighborhood school.
Vision 2020 ultimately had mixed results.
Even with the pandemic drop-off, test scores have ticked up slightly. The achievement gap between Black and Latino and White and Asian students, however, remained.
Students are also no more likely to stay in their neighborhood school than they were 13 years ago.
In 2011, 58.5 percent of students who lived within the district’s boundaries attended their neighborhood school, according to a study from the University of San Diego. In 2024, 58.9 percent did, according to an analysis by Voice of San Diego.
During that period, the district spent billions to rebuild schools, dialed back programs that once ferried kids out of their local schools and adopted more rigorous graduation requirements (which they later backtracked on). Still, nearly 40,000 students avoid their local public school in favor of district schools in other parts of the city, charter schools or some other form of education. Those trends also still play out on socioeconomic lines.
For some district officials, individual success stories, of which there are some, are more important than the district’s overall numbers. But to other observers, the stalled rates point to something more basic – that Vision 2020 itself was scattered, half-baked and, ultimately, unworkable.
Vision 2020 and School Choice
For decades, San Diego Unified embraced school choice. It allows parents to opt their children out of their neighborhood school and send them to a school in a different part of town.
It was an integral part of San Diego Unified’s court-mandated – and now largely abandoned – efforts to integrate historically segregated schools. But it was far from just a district priority. President George W. Bush’s watershed and much maligned education bill, “No Child Left Behind,” mandated that underperforming schools offer families the opportunity to transfer their kids out of low-performing schools.
The practice was a double-edged sword.
Choice allowed parents to steer their kids toward schools they thought may better educate them, but it actually helped keep San Diego schools segregated.
It also enabled a generations-long exodus of children from schools in lower-income neighborhoods whose schools were more likely to underperform on metrics like test scores.
The “mind drain,” as some on the front lines have referred to it, likely only worsened test scores at the schools kids avoided. Juan “Wicho” Flores is the head counselor at Logan Memorial Educational Campus, the district’s state of the art new combination early childhood center, elementary, middle and high school in his hometown of Logan Heights. He was also one of the kids bussed out of his neighborhood school. In his case, he ended up at Point Loma High.
“There was a big lack of trust and also stigma that at the community schools all these bad things are happening,” Flores said. “So, the thought was you want to get your kids out of the area so they can get educated.”
That was what officials sought to change with Vision 2020’s quality-schools-in-every-neighborhood-pledge. If all neighborhoods had a quality school, the thinking went, parents would not send their kids away from the school down the block. District officials would judge if the plan was a success, in part, by if more kids chose to attend their local school.
That goal was repeatedly included in district meetings.
During a 2016 meeting, district officials reviewed the neighborhood participation rates of clusters in the 2014-15 school year and the specific increases they’d hoped clusters would achieve in the 2015-16 schools year. In 2024, not a single cluster has a higher neighborhood participation rate than the goals set in that presentation.
As part of a 2017 evaluation of then-Superintendent Cind Marten, board wrote that progress had been slow on promoting the district’s neighborhood schools.
“We need to move with more urgency on a comprehensive strategy of letting parents know what their neighborhood schools offer, so that we see the percentage of families enrolling in neighborhood schools increase,” the board wrote.
In a Vision 2020 progress report from 2018, Evans affirmed that “one of our indicators of a quality school is a high neighborhood participation rate.”
The increases they’d hoped for hadn’t happened yet, Evans wrote. But he predicted change was on the way.
“The increase in neighborhood enrollment should happen gradually over the next decade as a new generation of parents become aware of the quality of their neighborhood school,” he wrote.
But remarkably little has changed. Fewer than 60 percent of families sent their child to their neighborhood school in 2011. The same was true last year.
District officials are not bothered by the lack of progress. In conversations, they largely waved away concerns. For them, it seemed more like a communication problem. In an email, Marceline Sciutto, San Diego Unified’s executive director of operations support touted the district’s efforts to pitch neighborhood schools.
“San Diego Unified consistently communicates to families that their neighborhood school is often an excellent option – offering strong academic programs, community connections, and convenient proximity,” she wrote.
Sciutto also said the district’s neighborhood participation rate stands at 62.6 percent, a number about 4 percentage points higher than what Voice found. The district figures, however, come from averaging the rates of each cluster a statistically unsound way to calculate such figures because it is essentially an average of averages. Read more about that below.
A Note on Neighborhood Participation Rates and ‘Averages of Averages’
To come up with San Diego Unified’s overall neighborhood participation rate, Voice performed a relatively simple calculation. A neighborhood participation rate determines how many age-appropriate kids who live in a school’s attendance boundary actually attend their neighborhood school. It can be a powerful figure to help determine a community’s confidence in its local school.
Here’s what we did: We added the number of children attending each neighborhood school in the district and divided it by the number of age-appropriate children in those schools’ attendance areas. We also removed a handful of schools that, for technical reasons, made the analysis messy, like those with shared attendance boundaries.
We came up with a districtwide neighborhood participation rate of 58.9 percent. That’s about four points lower than the 62.6 percent neighborhood participation rate provided by San Diego Unified.
The district number: When asked how the district reached its number, officials said it was an average of the neighborhood participation rates of each of the district’s clusters. This methodology is problematic because it is an “average of averages,” meaning it doesn’t give weight to the differences in attributes of each thing being averaged. This metric can be OK to use to get an idea of things but can also produce wildly distorted figures.
Here’s an example: the Henry High cluster has 8,772 students. But in the district’s methodology its neighborhood participation rate is given the same weight as the Madison cluster, which has only 2,413 students – fewer than 30 percent the amount of Henry.
Were we to average the overall neighborhood participation rates of these two clusters – which for Henry is 79.7 percent and for Madison is 45.1 percent – you would get 74.8 percent. That figure, however, ignores the fact that the two clusters contain a significantly different number of students.
When you add the residents attending their neighborhood school of each cluster and divide it by the total grade appropriate residents in each cluster, though, you get 63.6 percent – a more accurate view of the neighborhood participation rate of those two clusters.
Richard Barrera, the district’s longest-serving trustee, was on the board when it adopted Vision 2020. He said that he’s more concerned with how individual schools have fared than the district’s cumulative neighborhood participation rate.
“When we just look at the city overall and we’re not focusing on what’s happening in different pockets, it’s hard for me to comment on that,” Barrera said. “It’s very hard to overcome decades of not only messaging, but decisions about investment that are saying ‘your neighborhood school’s not a quality schools,’ especially in high poverty neighborhoods.”
There are some bright spots.
Neighborhood participation rates are higher than they were in 2011 at 56 percent of district schools. Clusters like Hoover and Crawford have also meaningfully increased the number of local students who attend. But those specific examples don’t erase the reality that growth stalled out districtwide.
To rebuild communities’ confidence in their local schools, district officials have often turned to rebuilding schools themselves. The district has funneled billions in bond funds into new school facilities and even entirely new schools, like Logan Memorial.
The $200 million campus is the single most expensive construction project in district history. The results at schools like Logan Memorial are how Barrera thinks district efforts should be judged – just not yet.
Currently, the complex’s three schools have a combined neighborhood participation rate of just 36 percent. But because the schools’ recent rollout created a new cluster, officials have allowed students who live within the schools’ attendance boundaries to choose which high school they matriculate into – the new Logan Memorial, or San Diego High, where they would have previously been sent to. That legacy enrollment period ends in the 2031-2032 school year.
“If five years from now we don’t see an increase in neighborhood participation rates at Logan Memorial, that would be disappointing,” he said.
‘Words on Paper’
For those on the ground, though, the stagnant numbers aren’t so surprising.
Flores, the Logan Memorial counselor, said pandemic-era enrollment decline likely played a role. But he also said the current rates are partly a function of the same bad reputations that have for decades encouraged families like his to send their kids away. New facilities are part of the equation, he said but reputations are really rebuilt by consistently investing in what’s going on inside of classrooms.
Similarly, while charter schools fight for students with consistent outreach, bus bench ads and mailers, public schools haven’t traditionally done the same.
“We do a very poor job of engaging with the communities in recruitment,” Flores said. “There’s been this expectation that ‘your child is in my district, therefore your child is going to go to me, which isn’t really true because of choice.”
That assumption is actually true in some parts of the district. Neighborhood participation rates range from nearly 90 percent in high-income, high performing clusters, to about half that in often low-income, low-performing clusters, creating a sort of map of confidence in local schools.
Another seeming measure of confidence is where kids who don’t attend their neighborhood school go – to another school in San Diego Unified, or to a charter not managed by the district. This, too, often breaks down on socioeconomic lines.
About 14 percent of kids who live within San Diego Unified’s boundaries attend a charter school instead of their neighborhood school. In some southern San Diego neighborhoods, where communities’ confidence in their local schools has historically been low, it’s much higher. Nearly one in three children who live within the Lincoln cluster, for example, attend charter schools.
Allison Ohle has been on multiple sides of the district-run and charter side of the equation.
She currently runs the Diamond Educational Excellence Partnership, a nonprofit which has for years provided literacy support to four district-run elementary schools in the Lincoln cluster. But as the former executive director of KIPP Adelante, the San Diego location of the nationwide charter school network, she worked with students who’d chosen not to attend district-run schools.
She said using neighborhood participation as a measure of school quality doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to her. More traditional metrics, like test score performance, where the district has seen slight improvements, seem more appropriate.
That’s because there are 100 reasons why parents may choice their kids out of their neighborhood school, from curriculum preferences to extracurricular offerings to a school being near a parent’s work, she said. Anecdotally, she often heard parents were drawn to KIPP because of its relatively smaller size or concerns about safety and bullying at district-run schools.
But outside of individual preferences and costly facility improvements, Ohle thinks the only real way to draw families to local schools is exciting programs. That’s why her family chose to send their child to the district’s School of Creative and Performing Arts.
“The stuff that’s going to keep families and get them fired up is if they made real changes in what was happening in the school building day to day,” Ohle said. “And I don’t think they did that during that time. If they did – and I was a parent of school age children then – I didn’t know about it.”
To Godwin Higa, Vision 2020 always seemed destined for failure.
He worked at San Diego Unified schools for nearly 30 years, first as a teacher and then as a principal, and later ran for school board. He spent much of his career at the exact kinds of high-needs schools where district officials hoped to boost local enrollment.
While well-meaning, Higa said the Vision 2020 initiative was a huge logistical challenge for educators. The initiative included twelve elements of quality schools, which left leaders unfocused and juggling district priorities. What made it worse was there was also no real way to measure many of the at times abstract objectives, a fact district officials have admitted.
But what made the transformation district officials envisioned next to impossible, Higa said, was that the raft of new expectations didn’t come with new funding.
“There was no funding attached that would help the schools improve their curriculum or improve their teaching staff,” he said. “They just came and said, ‘We need to keep our students here.’ But all this stuff was pretty much just words on paper.”