Pupil Rolls Drop At Schools (SoCal...guess why?)

WHITTIER - The surge in Southland housing prices has been cited as an important factor in an exodus of families from the Whittier area, causing a steep decline in K-12 enrollment in almost all local school districts.

The loss of students translates into big money, with the South Whittier School District losing more than a half million dollars in revenue during 2005-06 school year 2005-06 because of a 12 percent enrollment drop.

District officials project a loss of at least $1 million for 2006-07, said David Morton, the district's chief business officer.

"Declining enrollment has drastic effects," Morton said. "Average daily attendance makes a huge difference. In addressing it, you can't bring costs down as fast as you're losing revenue."

Whittier City Unified School District lost about 400 students in the past year, prompting Superintendent Carmella Franco to start tracking where families were moving to.

She found that nearly a quarter of those had moved out of state - even out of the country - the top three destinations being Arizona, Texas and Mexico.

"I was very interested to find out where they were going," Franco said. "So I asked my staff to build a record from transcript requests. Nearly 50 percent of California districts are experiencing declining enrollment. Meanwhile, the Inland Empire is growing like crazy. "They're getting the funds that we should be getting," she added.

We lived in Whittier, about thrirty years ago. It was a terrible school district then, I can't imagine that it has gotten any better. Closing some of the schools might be an improvement. There used to be a first grade teacher that had more tenure than anyone in the district and had built up so much sick leave that she would take off the entire second marking period and go on a cruise. The school district could get rid of her, so they transferred her to a different school every two years.

Here's a bit from the "Education Intelligence Agency" report today, about California:

The legislature passed a law in 1996 lowering K-3 class sizes to a maximum of 20. While the article goes further than most by suggesting "the jury's still out" on across-the-board class size reduction, it seems 10 years of data should be sufficient to judge whether the tens of billions of dollars Californians have dropped into the well are making our wishes come true.

In 1998, before 4th-graders had the benefit of smaller classes, California's 4th-graders ranked ahead of only those in Hawaii and Louisiana in reading (NAEP test). The benchmark for math is 1996, where California's 4th-graders finished ahead of those in Mississippi and tied with those in Louisiana.

In 2005, California's 4th-graders beat out Mississippi in reading. Hawaii and Louisiana passed us. The brightest picture is 4th-grade math. California finished ahead of Alabama, Mississippi and New Mexico, and tied with Louisiana and Nevada.

What's worse is that we have had class size reduction for so long, we can now compare the NAEP scores of 8th-graders under the old class sizes with 8th-graders who experienced four years of 20-student classes. They are virtually indistinguishable.

Other studies have shown that class size is negatively correlated with outcomes, although that's probably a "marker" result indicating that class-size reductions are a substitute for real teaching.

Class size has nothing to do with it.

It's all about WHAT is being taught and people capable of teaching. In the Pacific Rim, classes are routinely LARGE and they routinely put us to shame.

In that culture education is cultural. Parents PUSH their kids. Parents DEMAND high standards. Here we don't. We focus on everything that is UNIMPORTANT and happily throw money at the "problem" while blissfully and purposely IGNORING the ROOT problems.

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