As education reporter at Voice of San Diego, February is always pretty cathartic. That’s because after months of writing, editing, data-crunching and so much more, February is when we finally publish A Parent’s Guide to San Diego Schools.
The sense of relief is always palpable.
The guide is a heavy lift not just because we have a small team and it’s a lot of work. It’s a heavy lift because we’re constantly challenging ourselves and looking for ways to evolve and make the guide more helpful. Oftentimes that means coming up with new windows through which to understand data.
That’s what spurred the introduction of the income vs. test score metric a couple of years ago (you can read about why that metric is important here.) This year, we’re back with not one, but two new exclusive metrics that we developed in partnership with the data gurus at the UC San Diego Extended Studies Center for Research and Evaluation.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s new.
COVID recovery metric
It’s been nearly five years since COVID forced the shutdown of schools across the country and data shows that by and large, student performance still hasn’t recovered. That’s bad news for educators, because federal funding meant to help students recover has come and gone and many districts, like San Diego Unified, are facing down big budget deficits. So, some of the very programs meant to help students catch up may end up on the chopping block.
But we wanted to get a more granular look at whether individual schools have started to make up the ground lost during the pandemic, so we came up with a new metric.
This new metric uses the data we’ve gathered over the past seven years of producing Schools Guides to determine whether schools’ test scores were impacted by the pandemic, and if so, whether there’s evidence that those scores have recovered over the years. Recovery doesn’t mean students at a school are performing better, or even as well, as they were prior to the pandemic, just that there’s been a positive trend in their test scores over the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years.
The upshot: According to the metric, only about 20 percent of county schools’ test scores were not impacted by the upheaval of the COVID pandemic. Of the schools that were impacted, only about 46 percent demonstrated evidence of recovery. That grim stat underscores the fact that the world of education is still existing in the long shadow of the pandemic. Digging deeper: I was inspired by the creation of this metric and took it one step further by calculating how many schools in San Diego County were performing better on both math and English tests than prior to the pandemic. Turns out only 13 percent are of the county’s more than 700 schools are. I also spoke to the leaders of three of those schools to try and get a better idea of what they’re doing right.
Career and technical education metric
For many years, high schools were laser focused on being college prep factories, sometimes to the detriment of students in my view. Simply put, four-year-universities aren’t in the cards for all kids, whether that be because of economic realities or because they just don’t want to go – and there’s absolutely no shame in that.
And while career and technical educational programs at the high school level fell away over the past couple of decades, they’re back in a big way. But the CTE programs of today don’t look exactly the same as they did for your grandparents. Instead of auto shop or metal working, schools are more likely to have programs that focus on biotechnology or graphic design and media arts. Many of these modern programs act more as a supplement for college rather than a substitute.
Pretty much every high school offers some CTE options nowadays and most offer a handful. But figuring out which schools had the most promising array of programs seemed like an intimidating task – that’s why we created a metric to help give parents a better understanding.
There are a whole lot of factors that go into this one. Our data partners at UCSD’s Extended Studies Center for Research and Evaluation took into account everything from estimated future earnings of each program a school offers, the availability of jobs in those fields and even turnover rates to create a composite score. They then added in the number of programs a school offers, because kids should have options.
What we’re left with is a score that gives parents an idea of how well a school’s CTE program may set kids up for the future. The scores run from one on the low end to five on the high end.
The upshot: San Diego County’s high schools performed pretty well on this metric. About 70 percent of schools received a score of three or higher. Meanwhile, only about 11 percent of schools received a score of 1. Download the guide today to see how your community’s high school fared.
What else is in the guide
- One of the most frequent questions we get from parents is how to navigate the messy world of after-school care. After all, each district, and often each school, approaches after-school care differently. Luckily for you, we’ve included a brief breakdown of what parents should be thinking about as they consider after-school care.
- Our Schools Guide is mostly data, and oftentimes that data can be pretty freaky. If a parent looks at their neighborhood school and sees that test scores are low, it’s only natural for them to wonder if they should pull their kid out and send them to the higher performing one across town.
That may be the right answer, but it also may not be. What I always tell parents at workshops is that kids can succeed at pretty much any school as long as they have an active and invested parent. Parent involvement can also help push schools to the best they can be, which can be a win-win for a community. So, for this guide we spoke to a parent volunteer about ways to get involved in your kid’s school.
Speaking of Workshops ...
We’ve got a whole bunch of them coming up! These workshops are opportunities for parents to sit down with me and some of Voice’s other staff to talk through what the guide offers. We also do our best to answer any questions you may have about the guide or anything else education related. Check our events page to see if there’s a workshop coming up near you and be sure to RSVP.
