Last month, a new source of city-wide education data became available to compare information between individual schools and between the public school and public charter sectors, including student demographics, performance, attendance, suspension and expulsion rates, and mid-year mobility for both sectors. The new equity reports for all District funded schools build off school-level information already provided in separate places: the Office of the State Superintendent of Education score cards, DC Public Schools school profiles, and the Public Charter School Board’s performance management framework.
Today, DCFPI takes a look at what these reports show about student mobility, students entering and leaving schools at some point in the school year. The reports show:
- Across both DCPS and the network of public charter schools, schools cumulatively lose 11 percent of their student enrollment mid-year, while they cumulatively gain 9 percent. This means that in the 2012-13 school year, 2 percent of the city’s 80,230 students, or about 1,600 students, exit DC’s public education system.
- On average, DCPS schools see a 3.3 percent net gain in students by May, while charter schools see a 4.5 percent net loss in enrollment.
- High schools across sectors see the largest average net loss of students, a rate of 2.9 percent, while elementary schools see an average 0.5 percent net gain in enrollment during the school year.
- Some schools saw enrollment fall as much as 18 percent, while others saw net gains of as much as 16 percent.
The equity reports give us a sense that students move around the city quite a bit, but they don’t tell us the full story. We don’t know the reasons behind the mobility — why are these students leaving and entering schools mid-year? Some students may be leaving due to life changes their family is experiencing, such as housing instability, or a job opportunity taking their parents out of the District, while others could voluntarily choose another school that better suits their needs. There is the concern that some public charter schools may be “pushing out” challenging students mid-year. These students end up in neighborhood DCPS schools that are required to serve them.
We are also uncertain where students end up going after leaving their school — they may have left to go to a DCPS school, DC charter school, a private school, or outside the city. The 2013 student mobility study produced by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) helped answer part of that question by distinguishing the number of students leaving DC altogether, versus moving from one sector to another. DCFPI looks forward to seeing the next version of that study. Data like this allow us to examine trends of student mobility from one year to the next, and may help inform policy decisions, such as whether or not it makes sense to adjust school funding over the course of the school year based on enrollment.
