Last week I published a blog that again pointed to the ongoing problem the Grosse Pointe Public School System faces in student enrollment. It had more views than many of my posts and I read some interesting comments that encouraged me to go a layer deeper on the data analysis.
Here’s a slide deck I created to share some of the pertinent views.
Despite a loss of over 1,000 students since 2005, and an expectation that enrollment might stabilize, the future looks equally troubling.
Elementary enrollment is decreasing at a rate four times greater than the secondary level. As those losses work their way toward the secondary level, aggregate enrollment will continue to drop.
Imbalance across the district is also striking, but perhaps unexpectedly. South High School feeder schools enrollment loss is occurring at a rate three times greater than North High School equivalents. If these trajectories hold, and it looks like they will, the once nearly 400 student gap between the high schools will close over the next couple of years.
A couple highlights on that front. If next year’s projections hold true, Defer Elementary, a major South feeder school, will have lost over one-third of its enrollment since 2003. It will have a mere 19 more students that Trombly.
Meanwhile on the north end, Mason Elementary has been the only elementary school to experience an increase in enrollment from 2003 to 2014. Fellow North High School feeder Poupard Elementary is tied with Kerby as having second best enrollment trend in this same time period – even if it is a 2% loss. That is still significant because it is so much less than the district’s overall loss rate.
The only thing I like about this data is that it will challenge the overly simple, and really misinformed, view that school test scores are the major driver in enrollment. The data doesn’t support that conclusion.
I also think the magnitude of the enrollment reductions cannot be attributed to private school enrollment or the half-day kindergarten issue. These trends are very clearly population based. In ensuing posts I hope to cross reference this enrollment data against census data to get an even better view.
The implications for budgeting are significant. District administration will need very tight projections by school and grade level, balanced against class size guidelines, to make the staffing decisions that are required in April. Missteps here can introduce major budget challenges.
2 responses to “Enrollment trends challenge conventional thinking”
“The only thing I like about this data is that it will challenge the overly simple, and really misinformed, view that school test scores are the major driver in enrollment. The data doesn’t support that conclusion.”
Fair enough. The data doesn’t support the conclusion that falling test scores are driving down enrollment, but then, you’re not really regressing test scores against enrollment, either. However, it doesn’t exonerate falling test scores.
Allow me to explain. Families with school-aged children aren’t moving to the area, even as the state’s population has finally stemmed its precipitous decline and started to grow again. There’s many possible reasons for this, but if you have kids, and you’re thinking of moving to a new area one of the first things you’re going to do is look at the public school rankings where you might live. What are these school rankings based on? Well, we’re back to test scores. Admittedly, there are some troubling methods used in some of the rankings, but we have to admit test scores are foundations of the rankings.
Over the tested time period, we’ve seen these rankings fall. They’ve gone down. Also during the time period, we’ve seen enrollment plumet. Again, there’s a lot of possible reasons, and I suspect there’s a confluence of them acting against us. Be that as it may, we still cannot dismiss test scores, through the guise of rankings, from the list of suspects.
I applaud you for this analysis and I look forward to you cross-referencing the data with census data. However, we must address the shortcomings of our schools performance as if it has insulted our mothers. The very future of our community depends on it. I can think of no action too drastic.
As a side note, it’d be interesting to see the increase/decrease of private school enrollment over this time, as well. I am willing to bet that it has increased, because the feeder schools with the worst declines seem to be located in more affluent areas. I do however think the majority of the problem is demographic.
Thanks for reading and for the comments, GP4L.
I agree it is a confluence. I also agree that test scores can and do affect buying/enrollment decisions. But we do know some of the schools that have experienced a growth in enrollment, or a loss at a much smaller rate, have test scores above other schools with higher test scores. Again, that does not explain everything.
On private school enrollment, some time ago (3-4 years?)I dug into some census data that showed private school enrollment and it was conclusive that private school enrollment in the GO area is not growing, but massively shrinking. I’ll see what I can find on that again.
I think this issue is an overall GP community issue and all the cities in particular should study the data and trends and realize that the GP cities may need to look again at our value proposition. Schools are a big part of that, but there is much more to evaluate.
Brendan