Last year, a woman sitting next to me asked what a school district was, speaking quietly and in Spanish. The mother of two told me she was thinking about moving her son to a different school, but she didn’t know where to start, she wondered if the school district was the place to start.
She was also torn. She had flipped through the pages of Voice of San Diego’s A Parent’s Guide to San Diego Schools and found data that supported what she suspected: students at the school her son was attending were not doing great on standardized tests. But her son liked his school. He had a lot of friends. She valued that staff did their best to connect with parents who didn’t speak English.
Families across the region have similar decisions to make every year. They want to know their child is attending the best school for their needs.
For seven years now, we’ve published a comprehensive guide to San Diego County’s public schools. We work in partnership with UC San Diego Extended Studies Center for Research and Evaluation to analyze school demographics and state test score data to give parents tools to better understand our local school systems.
Our 2025 A Parent’s Guide to San Diego Schools is now available to download for free. You can get it here.
This year, we are including two new exclusive data points.
First, we set out to measure how schools were impacted by the Covid pandemic and if they have recovered. In partnership with UCSD, we came up with a Covid impact and evidence of recovery metric. This tells you if your child’s school was impacted by the pandemic, which caused learning loss all over the country, and whether that school has made up ground it lost.
Second, we worked with UCSD and the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation to develop a metric that grades the Career and Technical Education programs of high schools across the county. The metric consists of a variety of factors, like how many paths schools offer and whether they include programs in industries that are growing and in high demand.
You can read all the stories in the guide here and the data.