{"id":162442,"date":"2025-08-21T00:33:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T00:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/162442\/"},"modified":"2025-08-21T00:33:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T00:33:12","slug":"the-learning-curve-high-performing-districts-not-spared-from-enrollment-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/162442\/","title":{"rendered":"The Learning Curve: High Performing Districts Not Spared from Enrollment Decline"},"content":{"rendered":"

My stories on enrollment decline<\/a> have gotten a lot of feedback over the past couple months. It seems like everyone has their own theory about what\u2019s actually going on.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last week, I wrote about one of the more popular theories<\/a>: 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n

I dug into the data and found that\u2019s 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\u2019t come close to explaining why there are 27,000 fewer kids in local public schools than there were a decade ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The simple fact is there are just fewer kids than there used to be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the theories are completely understandable. As Sweetwater Union Superintendent Moises Aguirre told me, it\u2019s incredibly hard to absorb the reality that our region may be shrinking.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople generally think there\u2019s always going to be more money, more people, more students. That\u2019s the underlying assumption, so for us to say that assumption is no longer true \u2026 it\u2019s a difficult change in how people see the world,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

Late last week a reader emailed me another interesting theory. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI suspect the loss of SDUSD students are going to other districts who are better performing. It would be interesting to pull that data,\u201d the reader wrote. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Well, I did. Sort of. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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!\u00a0<\/p>\n

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. \u00a0<\/p>\n

The short answer is not really.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I did: <\/strong>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\u2019s correlation function.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That function returns a number between 1 and \u20131. The closer to one of those two numbers, the stronger the correlation.\u00a0 It returned a figure of .07, meaning there is virtually no correlation whatsoever.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I also wanted to be able to visualize the relationship between these factors, so I threw them into a scatter plot<\/a>. As you can see, there\u2019s really not much of anything there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This surprised me. A couple of years ago, I wrote a story examining which high schools San Diego Unified parents most frequently choiced<\/a> 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n

More on both of these threads later, friends.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Miramar Officially Launches its Bachelor\u2019s Degree<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Firefighters watch containment work on the Johnson Fire in a canyon in San Diego\u2019s University Heights neighborhood, April 26, 2025. \/ Photo by Zoe Meyer for Voice of San Diego<\/p>\n

A year and a half after first setting its sights on creating a bachelor\u2019s degree<\/a>, Miramar\u2019s program has officially launched this week. The launch means that all three of the San Diego Community College District\u2019s for-profit schools have an active bachelor\u2019s program.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The public safety management bachelor\u2019s 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst responders often attend a magnitude of training and education from a variety of institutions,\u201d the director of Miramar\u2019s Fire Technology Program wrote in a press release. That\u2019s why the program will allow for students to receive credit for prior training, to give students the \u201cmost direct pathway,\u201d to finishing the degree.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The vast majority of students enrolled in the program\u2019s first cohort already work as first responders, including as lifeguards or as EMT\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another Parent Arrested by ICE <\/strong><\/p>\n

On Friday, I wrote about how a father was arrested by ICE<\/a> while waiting to pick their child up around the corner from Linda Vista Elementary. It was just the latest such<\/a> incident<\/a>, and the first to occur near a San Diego Unified school.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was struck by how frank San Diego Unified\u2019s leaders were during that Friday press conference. Board President Cody Petterson, for example, called the agents \u201cmasked paramilitary forces terrorizing families.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the things I\u2019ve been wrestling with since the trend of arresting parents outside of their children\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Well, it turns out Superintendent Fabiola Bagula has been wrestling with that sense of powerlessness too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI know we have beautiful educators that have actually told me, \u2018I\u2019ll go out and fight them.\u2019 I\u2019m like, \u2018Please do not, because then you will be in trouble as well.\u2019 We don\u2019t want that,\u201d Bagula told me on Friday. \u201cI can\u2019t advise anyone to break the law or put themselves in danger, and then I\u2019m also an educator, and I know I would.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, the man\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What We\u2019re Writing<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The number of students being independently homeschooled has continued to slump from pandemic-era highs, but remains well above pre-pandemic levels<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With San Diego Unified\u2019s 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<\/a> if you\u2019re so inclined. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My stories on enrollment decline have gotten a lot of feedback over the past couple months. It seems…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":162443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-162442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-san-diego","12":"tag-sandiego","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-united-states-of-america","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115063947479909437","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}