For years, some San Diego Unified schools have struggled to convince neighborhood families to enroll their kids. The difficulty getting local students in the door wasn’t helped by the district’s robust choice system, which made it easy for parents to opt their children out and enroll them in a school they felt was more desirable. But even after a pledge to ensure every neighborhood had a quality school and attempts to get kids to stick with their home school, many San Diego Unified high schools are having trouble keeping kids from pursuing other options. And the schools having the most trouble aren’t new to this problem.
Back in 2015, San Diego Unified put out a list that showed how many students chose to attend their neighborhood middle and high school in the 2014 – 2015 school year. One thing that jumped out was that schools in poorer neighborhoods tended to have lower rates of neighborhood enrollment.
Based on data from last school year, not a whole lot has changed.
There’s been some shuffling around, but all of the schools in the top and bottom halves are still where they were back in 2014.
Schools in poorer neighborhoods, like Lincoln and Crawford, still had the fewest number of neighborhood students attending their schools. The only school with lower neighborhood enrollment rates is Logan Memorial Educational Complex, which wasn’t around in 2014. Madison, Clairemont, the Kearny Complex of small schools, San Diego, Hoover and Morse rounded out the other spots in the bottom half.
Schools in wealthier areas like La Jolla and Scripps Ranch still drew the most neighborhood students, though Scripps has now usurped the number one spot. University City, Point Loma, Canyon Hills, Mira Mesa, Henry and Mission Bay occupied the other top spots.
The gulf between the top and the bottom is extreme. At Scripps Ranch, 93 percent of students in the neighborhood attended the school. But at Logan Memorial, which last year only served ninth graders, just 28 percent of the grade-appropriate students attended.
San Diego Unified school board member Richard Barrera, whose subdistrict includes Logan Memorial, thinks part of the school’s low neighborhood participation is simply due to how new it is. The school, which features a preschool, elementary school, middle school and high school, opened its doors just last year. It’s rolling out new grades each year and just welcomed its first tenth grade class.
Many students are still given the option to attend what would have been their old neighborhood school, San Diego High. But Barrera said they’ve seen a huge number of students enrolling in lower grades, which gives them confidence that by the time they matriculate to high school, the school will be at capacity.
The brand-new school, the most expensive in San Diego Unified’s history, replaced what was once the school parents avoided the most. When the high school opened last year, Barrera told me the school must deliver on its promise offering a quality education if it hopes to keep enrollment up.
“If we don’t deliver on the programmatic side then … word will get out in the community as well,” Barrera continued. “And, I think we’ll go back to a situation where people say, ‘well, it’s a beautiful set of buildings, but we don’t think our kids are getting what they need there.’”
For the high schools with the lowest neighborhood attendance rates, parents are enrolling kids in charter schools. At both Lincoln and Logan Memorial, for example, more students attend charters than attend their neighborhood school.
But the decision not to send students to their neighborhood school doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There’s an incredibly strong correlation between the percentage of students at a school meeting state English and math standards and the number of students from the neighborhood who choose to attend a school. The higher the test scores, the more likely students are to attend neighborhood schools, and vice versa.
Barrera thinks that while test scores could play a role in parent’s choices, a school’s reputation is far more important. For schools who have high neighborhood participation rates, Barrera said “I don’t think their reputation is that standardized test scores are high, it’s about the really strong programming and the sense of school community.”
But Barrera is skeptical test scores alone can capture how well a school is doing. He said they reinforce a cycle of the most engaged parents moving their children out, which leads to the lowering of test scores. He also said they generally do a better job of determining demographics and socioeconomic factors like the income of the communities they serve. That last point is true. Test scores are an imperfect measure that closely correlate with the income of a school’s community.
Still, despite the disparities, some schools made strides. San Diego and Hoover increased their neighborhood enrollment rate by about 20 and 17 percent respectively. Scripps Ranch saw theirs shoot up by about 13 percent.
Overall, slightly more students attend their neighborhood high school than they used to. Back in the 2014 – 2015 school year, about 52 percent of students went to their neighborhood high school. By last year, that figure had climbed to about 60 percent.
It’s not a monumental increase, but it is something.
A lot of parents are right now completing the choice application hoping and praying to send their kids to a school outside their district for next fall. I would be interested to see how many choice applications are received and a migration map for where parents/ children are hopeful to attend. To this point it would also be interesting if we could look at taxes, the major funding source for public school, differently and really let the customers choose where they apply their tax dollars creating an open market for schools. Maybe private schools would be able to boost their enrollment if parents were able to apply their unused tax dollars toward tuition or get a partial tax credit if their kids are not enrolled in a public school.
“really let the customers choose where they apply their tax dollars creating an open market for schools” is exactly the solution we need.
Let all parents choose the best education for their kids, not just those parents fortunate enough to be “allowed” by their district to do that.
If the teachers speak Spanish and only half of the students are fluent in English, the people you want to send their kids there are not going to. You are trying to look at the same problem for 10 years and still you cannot grasp it because the answer is inconvenient to your world view. Find solace in the approval of marginalized misanthropes on reddit, because you won’t get it from your neighbors.
Instead of using a “Meeting English Standards” as a vector, how about using a language neutral standard such as math?
They cannot read, write, or add. Their parents are useless and cannot help them, and the teachers at the bad schools they go to do not want to work—they’re busy trying to get remote work 5 days a week. I hope we are building enough subsidized housing because we will be supporting these kids cradle to grave. Subsidized housing, free meals from dependent services, free phones from the county, free healthcare from the county, free clothes from the city.
You sound communist
Why is this article cast so that school choice is a problem to be fixed?
I think it would be interesting to disaggregate this data by race/ethnicity as well as to see college attendance rates tied to this data per school and choice of attendance and have San Diego Unified conduct focus groups with parents/families to further capture family thoughts on school choices. While school choice is temporary fix to inequities in the provision of public education across school in San Diego Unified School district, more needs to be done to ensure all schools are provide a high quality public education for all students so that students and communities feel comfortable sending their children to their neighborhood schools.
I think it would be interesting to disaggregate this data by race/ethnicity as well as to see college attendance rates tied to this data per school and choice of attendance and have San Diego Unified conduct focus groups with parents/families to further capture family thoughts on school choices. While school choice is temporary fix to inequities in the provision of public education across school in San Diego Unified School district, more needs to be done to ensure all schools are provide a high quality public education for all students so that students and communities feel comfortable sending their children to their neighborhood schools.
It’s rare that I agree with SDUSD leadership. But one thing I do agree with is that comparing test scores at a point in time or comparing the number of students performing at grade level across schools with varying socioeconomic demographics is not useful in evaluating the success of a school in educating students.
Unfortunately, SDUSD insists on doing just that when it demands that school sites use % of students at grade level across various demographics as the primary measure of school site effectiveness. I have advocated for years that we should instead be looking at the value add year over year for students. A school in a wealthy area that has 80% of students at grade level may not be a good school. It may be benefiting from the affluence of the parents and have little year over year growth or value add. It may not be challenging its students to achieve a year of growth, even though they remain at or above grade level. Conversely, a school that has only 40% of its students at grade level, could have a very high value add year over year growth. That is a successful school. Students are learning, even though they are disadvantaged by where they started or by how they spend their time away from school. We should be looking at the value add year over year whether a student starts way below grade level or whether they start at or above grade level. That would be truly making sure that EVERY student gets a quality education.
Also, an important piece missing from this article is students that avoid their local SDUSD school by homeschooling or attending private/parochial schools. The implication from the data shown is that parents in wealthier areas are content with their local school, but that’s not my experience. This data must be available, so I’m not sure why SDUSD chooses not to show it.
There is a below average student who was at least bright enough to recognize this pablum of excuses to be “malarkey “.
None of the reasons parents move their kids are spoken aloud in this article.
Lincoln schools 🤮