SACRAMENTO

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced today the release of 2018–2019 enrollment data for California’s K–12 public schools. The data breaks down enrollment by ethnicity and grade, along with English Language Acquisition Status, and can be sorted by county, district, or school.

“This data provides a critical snapshot of all students in California, highlighting trends that show areas where students are improving, where they’re struggling and where additional resources are needed,” Thurmond said.

One important category updated for 2018–2019 is school-level data for Free or Reduced Price Meals, which is an effective indicator of student poverty. All data is utilized for state and federal reporting purposes, including determinations for supplemental grant funding through the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). Important findings include:

• Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity (Multi-Year): Overall enrollment is down from 6,235,520 in 2014–15 to 6,186,278 in 2018–19 a decrease of 0.8 percent. Also during that time, the percentage of white students decreased from 24.6 percent to 22.9 percent and the percentage of African American students decreased from 6 percent to 5.4 percent. However, between 2014–15 and 2018–19, the percentage of Hispanic/Latino students increased from 53.6 percent to 54.6 percent.
• English Language Acquisition Status (Multi-Year): Between 2014–15 and 2018–19, the percentage Hispanic/Latino students classified as English Learners decreased from 83.2 percent to 81.3 percent. Overall, between 2015–16 and 2018–19, the percentage of students who are English learners decreased from 22.1 percent to 19.3 percent, while the percentage of students who are Reclassified Fluent English Proficient increased from 16 percent to 18.3 percent during that same time period.
• Enrollment for Charter and Non-Charter Schools (Multi-Year): While overall enrollment non-charter schools is decreasing between 2014–15 and 2018–19, enrollment in charter schools has increased from 9.2 percent to 10.6 percent of the public school population statewide.
• Charter and Non-Charter Subgroup Enrollment (2018–19): Charter schools tend to have a smaller percentage of their enrollment who belong to disadvantaged student subgroups, such as English learners, foster youth, homeless youth, migrant students, students with disabilities, and socio-economically disadvantaged. The difference is most pronounced for the English learner subgroup. In 2018–19, 15.1 percent of charter school students are identified as English learners, while 19.8 percent of non-charter school students are similarly identified.

The data is compiled by the California Department of Education from data submitted by Local Educational Agencies to the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS). The updated enrollment data is available on the CDE’s Data Quest website.

Additional resources:

Downloadable files to support the Data Quest reports

Downloadable files containing school-level data for Free or Reduced-Price Meals