Mark Powell, a former San Diego County Office of Education board member, wrote an interesting op-ed in the Union-Tribune last week. In it, he pointed out that only about 54 percent of San Diego Unified students met English standards, while around 44 percent met math standards. Those numbers don’t make anyone feel good. What those numbers mean is that tens of thousands of district students are falling – or have fallen – behind, maybe in ways schools will never be able to fix.
Powell thinks he has a solution – breaking San Diego Unified up.
The background: This isn’t the first time school district secession has been broached. In 2009, for example, San Diego Unified board member John de Beck called on the district’s coastal schools to break away. “This is centered around the cluster controlling its own destiny,” de Beck said at the time, seemingly channeling a self-help guru.
Because San Diego itself is a segregated city, splitting along geographic lines would inevitably create segregated districts and likely lead to inequities. But Powell thinks he has the ticket. His proposed solution is to split San Diego Unified into a high school district and a unified elementary and middle school district.
“In a district as large as San Diego Unified, the needs of elementary and middle schools differ dramatically from those of high schools,” Powell writes. “Splitting the district … would allow for more tailored and responsive management without the complexities of size.”
His example: Powell cites Grossmont Union High School District, which only serves high school students and into which nearly a half dozen elementary and middle school districts feed, as an example of how this model “has proven successful in other areas of San Diego County.”
What Powell fails to mention is that San Diego Unified’s high schoolers perform better than those attending Grossmont Union schools. In English, they outperform Grossmont students by about eight percentage points, while in math they outperform them by nearly six percentage points. San Diego Unified students also do better on tests than students in the districts that feed into Grossmont. (One exception is Santee School District.)
This shouldn’t be read as a full-throated defense of San Diego Unified. It is a behemoth whose layers and layers of bureaucracy can complicate even the simplest things. Voice of San Diego hasn’t shied away from holding the district accountable for its myriad failings.
Research has shown large districts are more cost-effective than smaller ones, but cost-effectiveness shouldn’t be the most important consideration when it comes to kids’ education. Some research has also shown that student performance is better at larger districts, but that study defined a large district as one with 10,000 students. San Diego Unified has closer to 100,000.
Ultimately, for a whole lot of reasons, districts may be better off getting bigger than getting smaller.
The Trump Elephant in the Classroom
The reelection of President Donald Trump sent shockwaves through the education world, in no small part because of his pledges to significantly upend many of this country’s educational institutions.
One key change that could come in a new Trump term would be the elimination of the Department of Education. It’s something he has repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail and it could change schools’ funding situation, curriculum and accountability measures, as the Union-Tribune reported.
On the funding: While the U.S. Department of Education only provides a small fraction of school funding, much of what it does provide comes through programs aimed at helping students who come from impoverished backgrounds. Title I funding, for example, which is distributed to schools with high levels of poverty could be put at risk.
But Trump has also pledged to cut federal funding to schools that defy his cultural expectations. He’s explicitly stated he would punish schools that teach kids about things like structural racism or “gender ideology,” as he’s phrased it. These topics are all part of what Trump calls schools’ “left wing indoctrination.”
On accountability: Earlier this year, San Diego Unified was hit with a scathing federal report that castigated what it called the district’s failure to properly handle reports of sexual harassment and assault.
“These failures led to serial perpetration of harassment with insufficient district response, leaving district students vulnerable to the sex discrimination in school,” officials wrote.
That report was produced by the Department of Education, meaning if Trump got his way, the district may not have been held accountable. There’s a lot we don’t know about how things will shake out if Trump eliminates the department, or even if he’ll be able to. Many of the functions could be moved to other departments, for example.
In any case, if our investigations into school sexual misconduct teach us anything, the last thing we need is less accountability.
New Metrics! Hot Off the Presses!
Last week, the California Department of Education released the latest version of its yearly schools dashboard. The dashboard judges school performance on five different metrics: math and English test scores, graduation rates, suspension rates, chronic absenteeism and English learner performance. It presents how well schools and districts are doing on these indicators by using a five-color scale with blue being the best and red being the worst.
How its colors are determined: The metric’s five colors are determined by a mixture of where a school or district stands now and whether it has improved or worsened since last year.
That can produce some baffling results. Take Lincoln High, whose students have long struggled on a variety of fronts. Last year, only 3.42 percent of Lincoln students tested met or exceeded state math standards. This year, 4.82 percent met or exceeded standards.
Despite the slight growth, one would assume because of the school’s extremely low scores it would be in the dashboard’s red category – the lowest of the five-color scale. It’s not. It’s actually in the orange category – a step above red.
What We’re Writing
Good news! Chronic absenteeism in San Diego County inched down from the 2022-23 to 2023-24 school years. Bad news! It’s still very high. I wrote a bit about what that means here. I also created a searchable table so you can see how your child’s school fared.